This concludes the release of all the finished albums I have for the story. If back in the day you enjoyed any of these songs, produced during the very early days of Udio in which the song quality wasn’t good enough, you should probably listen to the songs or the whole album again, as I had Claude Code work its magic through the frequencies.

YouTube video’s description:

This is the first of three completed concept albums about a trio of friends living in a nowhere town: William Griffin, a sensitive and increasingly unhinged songwriter; Claire, his blind and illiterate next-door neighbor and perpetual mystery; and Lorenzo, their friend, who is inexplicably a sentient triceratops.

I made roughly eighty songs about them during Udio’s brief, lawless glory days, when a generation could sound like an actual band playing in a room, and you could still use swear words. The project ran through three albums and into the beginnings of a fourth before I ran out of steam, around the same time that changes to Udio’s model made the music feel notoriously worse.

Returning to these songs now is strange. Some of them still make the hair rise on my arms. William, Claire, and Lorenzo feel like forces within me that split apart, took on lives of their own, and built a mythology that contained that strange period of my life.

The earliest seeds of the lyrics date back to 2021. I can play guitar, but I was never going to become all the bands these songs required. The music changes radically from one track to the next, because each song takes whatever form its emotion demands. The characters and their shared emotional history are what hold the albums together.

This first album is the roughest of the three. I had just started producing songs with Udio. I was trying my way through writing song lyrics for the first time, with the additional constraint that I intended to sound like a somewhat-unhinged middle schooler whose best friend was a triceratops and who tended to filter reality in surreal ways through his dinosaur-addled brain. The resulting lyrics are sillier than usual, while retaining the earnestness and honesty that I intended for the whole story. But sometimes the lyrics get too dumb in retrospect even for me, which makes some of these songs a bit hard to listen to.

That said, there are real winners here, at least to me. Claude Code did everything it could to bolster the audio quality of this early-era Udio audio productions, and it has worked beyond my expectations. Thankfully you won’t have to listen to some of the songs in their previous states; some sounded as if they were played through a blanket.

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I don’t know how the notion for this series came to be back in 2021, during one of the wildest creative periods of my life. Suddenly I knew I had William (an unhinged kid who expressed himself through music), Claire (his illiterate, blind, next-door neighbor who remains mostly opaque to him), and Lorenzo, a goddamn triceratops. I didn’t need to reason their existence or why writing about them was so important to me. I just felt it, so I soldiered on.

Now that I’m older and I have come to understand myself better, I do know why I needed to produce these songs, and why listening to them feels like coming home no matter how much I’ve tried to distance myself from this project. This story is my dead youth. An unhinged artist with a raw heart, who loved too much in the wrong ways. A blind, illiterate mystery whom the artist was devoted to and couldn’t afford to lose. An ancient, violent source of chaos who never left William’s side. That’s myself split in three. And I also know why Lorenzo had to die, and why Claire had to disappear, even if I’m the only one who understands.

I want to return to this story and finish it properly. I don’t know if I will. These days I promise too many things to myself. But I want one day in my late forties to return to these songs and new ones and feel the same emotions that these three albums recreate. So at least to me, Odes to My Triceratops didn’t deserve to be forgotten, and with the YouTube releases out, they will outlast me.