This was by far the hardest song to produce through Suno. So many things went wrong. I originally intended for this song to run very long, maybe about ten minutes, with the singer struggling to get the words out at times, and at other times letting them out in a raw, pained manner. In some instances, the singer’s voice should sound choked.

Ironically, the vocal delivery was the easiest thing to achieve. The problem is that Suno generally refuses to produce songs longer than about six minutes, or six minutes and a half. The reason is obvious: the generation model they have tends to degrade the song towards the end if the generation runs too long. This doesn’t happen often, and can be bypassed by remixing previous attempts, but I struggled for hours to figure out how to produce a ten minute song in a way that Suno wouldn’t discard most of the tail end of the lyrics, while still producing the instrumentals needed to capture the emotions involved.

First I picked up a song generation that had a long-enough beginning that sounded good. That ran to about a third of the song. Then I cut the remaining two thirds, and went through the absurdly-painstaking process of extending the song in the Suno editor to produce the remaining parts so that the vocal delivery convinced me. The song became long enough without the Suno model screwing it up. It soon became clear that the extension model is very hard to wrangle so that the music aligns seamlessly enough. So I discarded that direct approach and instead decided to remix whatever satisfying mix I produced in Studio.

Well, remixing the Studio production didn’t work either, because Suno just refused to produce the tail end of the lyrics due to artificial constraints about song length. I was about to tear my hair out; I feared that one of the most important songs in the album couldn’t be made. Then I figured out that the lyrics allowed splitting the song along temporally-distinct blocks, and each block has its own emotional payoff, so it worked out fine. The final album will have You Stay Eighteen, Pt. 1 and You Stay Eighteen, Pt. 2. Both are in the video above. The split also allowed the second part to contain poignant instrumentals that the original song wouldn’t have allowed due to length issues, so it all worked out fine.

My sole concern now for the rest of the album is that at least one of the lyrics will be rejected due to moderation. Not sure how I will handle that.