I’m remaking my old Udio-era songs with the new Suno 6.0, which is terrible for making songs from zero, but amazing at remixing them.
This song, the first album’s closer, is one of my favorites from William’s middle-school era, but the quality of the audio was so bad that it hurt to listen. Now that we’ve gotten the boys in the studio again, the song can finally be listened to in all its magnificence.
Created with the recently-released Suno 6.0.
Since I produced the original version of this song about two years ago, I’ve often found myself singing its lyrics in my head. I don’t think I’ve ever made anything else that better captures the pure joy of being lost in artistic creation with your subconscious.
Suno is terrible at allowing you to create music in an exploratory, coherent manner, but it’s exceptional at covering songs made in the glory days of Udio.
The combination of this song’s retarded lyrics and its hard-rock earnestness will never cease to be funny to me.
Suno will legitimately be useless to create most of the new songs of the fourth album, but I can still spend my subscription redoing songs from the previous albums whose sound quality had suffered. Here’s one of my favorites from the first album: “I’m Cactus,” the tale of young William’s inability to take care properly of his single plant.
I’ve already redone other songs, so soon enough I’ll upload new YouTube videos with the redone versions.
My disappointment of the month: Suno 6.0 has come out, and it’s shit. Not only that: it’s the Udio debacle all over again. The music industry has castrated the leading music generator. I tried generating a segment with four simple lines of lyrics from my Odes to My Triceratops cycle of songs, and they were moderated due to copyright even though there were no true copyright issues. Next batch of lyrics: moderated due to violence. And the music sounds more artificial than it used to two models ago. Suno is done.
The sole alternative is to wait for a local model to sound as good as Udio did during its Wild West days. This may happen. But I doubt it’ll happen for at least a couple of years or so. Which means I have to park my fourth album even though I’ve written all the lyrics.
Cormac McCarthy’s artistic landscape contributed heavily (didn’t start it) to my long-lived obsession with the 70s, or at least the 70s like I prefer to think of them. A time before the internet, before the image-obsessed 80s, after the peak of the damn hippies. An era when a new way of living could have settled, only for the 80s to come and make everything mostly a cocaine-infused joke (I enjoy the 80s, don’t get me wrong, but it did ruin the promise of the seventies). Anyway, due to finding out that McCarthy loved Five Easy Pieces, the 1970 movie, and that it seems to have fed into my favorite books of his, which are The Passenger/Stella Maris, I proceeded to watch other movies related to directors McCarthy had loved. That led me to Terrence Malick, which led me to his exceptional Badlands, which introduced me to Sissy Spacek, and now I’m enamoured with Spacek.
Earlier today I watched Altman’s 3 Women, which I didn’t like much as a movie, but it features another mesmerizing interpretation by Sissy Spacek as a sort of a wild child alongside Shelley Duvall, that weird-faced poor lady who got abused by Kubrick and Nicholson on The Shining. Partly due to my sudden infatuation with Spacek, partly due to the fact that her character in 3 Women was an innocent, wild, lovely flower (possibly autistic?), a moment in the movie when Duvall basically tells Spacek to fuck off made me want to slap the hell out of that woman. I had to ask ChatGPT why would anyone do this to poor innocent Spacek’s character, and ChatGPT told me to calm down and keep watching. The movie had interesting shots, and it made me inhabit the isolated, strange 70s again, so I appreciate it for that, but it was quite the mess of a story, and that score was godawful.
It really pisses me off that, having been born in 1985, I didn’t grow up with a crush on Spacek. I didn’t even know about her until my teens, I think, and the impression of her was heavily distorted by her having acted as Carrie in that adaptation of the Stephen King novel. I can barely stand Stephen King (and only his adaptations; I despise his writing), and I hate even more that the impression most people have gotten out of Sissy Spacek is her being covered in pig blood and telekinetically massacring everyone.
Spacek was the most gorgeous, unique creature in the 70s as far as I’m concerned, and the sole actress I can imagine playing Alicia Western. And there’s an additional connection to Alicia Western that leads me to believe that McCarthy would have agreed on the casting. Spacek pushed for the production of and to star in a movie adaptation of a play named ‘Night, Mother. It’s about a mother and her suicidal daughter, with the mother spending the night trying to talk the daughter out of suicide. McCarthy praised that play. About twenty years later, McCarthy wrote The Sunset Limited, about a man trying to stop another man from killing himself. It also takes place in basically one place, and only the two characters are present. And McCarthy’s final book was Stella Maris, featuring two characters in a room: a therapist and Alicia Western, with the first one trying to prevent (unknowingly) the second’s suicide.
Time destroys the present tense of everything. An online music service allows you to generate beautiful songs that sound backed by a real band, only for the music industry to make the model disappear. Magnificent people exist at their best for a short period and then fade away. Reality is too heavy and painful and soaked in melancholy for it to be carried on one’s shoulders all the time. No wonder people drown themselves in their jobs and their families and their sports teams.
My first memory is of being four years old, lying in a hospital bed when my parents brought me a gift: a toy triceratops. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world.
I came up with the original story for Odes to My Triceratops during one of my wildest periods of creation, back in spring and summer of 2021. I don’t know how they came to be, but I suddenly had a young songwriter, a blind and illiterate girl, and their friend, who was inexplicably a sentient triceratops. It could have ended as a gag. I didn’t understand then why this tight-knit, strange trio of friends seemed to matter so much to me to the extent that the moment I had those elements, I knew I had to tell their story. For my first try, I didn’t give them the effort they deserved. That first batch of lyrics turned out to be mostly throwaways; they served mostly as compost for the versions that ended up as the actual Odes to My Triceratops songs.
The third of four albums ends with William apparently killing himself. I wrote and produced five songs afterwards, but that happened at the same time as the Udio debacle, when the music industry pretty much forced Udio to block downloads, rendering it useless, so I didn’t continue with the fourth album’s contents. Although I play the guitar, I’m not a musician. I know what I want to hear, but I can’t access a band, so the AI service that allowed me to play around with generated music was a godsend. I wouldn’t have been able to create these songs otherwise.
The videos below are the three complete albums I produced, containing all the lyrics of the first three parts of the story.
Creating these songs was a huge endeavour that took away from other responsibilities. I was also dealing with a stressful job that I ultimately had to quit for health reasons. But I couldn’t get some of these songs out of my mind. Moments from them would bubble up randomly, and I found myself singing internally to their lyrics. More importantly, though, I felt a responsibility to William, Claire, and Lorenzo to finish their story properly.
This story isn’t a joke to me. It has taken me years to fully understand psychologically why it felt so important to process this story to the end. I was a high-functioning autistic kid dealing with co-morbid Pure O OCD, who spent his childhood wandering alone, lost in daydreams, writing and drawing. I was in absolute communion with the mysterious, blind, illiterate female presence inside me who showed me such beautiful dreams. But some of the writings and drawings from that era also contained stuff that a child shouldn’t know: mayhem, violence, troublesome sexual imagery. I didn’t even question it at the time, but some of the things that came naturally to me would have made A Clockwork Orange blush. It would take time for me to understand that people don’t have to deal regularly with intense intrusive imagery of the violent and sexual variety, including impulses like pushing hot food to my eyes, shoving knives into my eyes (I don’t know what’s with OCD and eyes), licking random disgusting shit from the gutters, and plenty more stuff I don’t want to say. It’s not like I could keep them caged at all times; in moments when I was too exhausted to control them, I ended up dropping objects (a coffee on a customer, a valuable hard drive) right after had intrusive thoughts of doing so. I’ve never gotten a driver’s license because I don’t want to deal with intrusive thoughts of veering into oncoming traffic or accelerating towards a wall. I’ve never held babies because I’d have to deal with intrusive thoughts of dropping them on their heads. I knew I had a monster inside me: a dark, primordial force of chaos that couldn’t be tamed, and that would remind me of its inescapable presence whenever it pleased.
When I was seven, my mother wanted to free up my room to have a do-over child, so they put me as an unwanted guest in my disabled older brother’s room. The connection with my subconscious was lost. I no longer had silence nor space of my own. I couldn’t even sleep properly until I was 18 due to the noise. Looking back, my childhood was killed at the moment I was taken away forcefully from my proper environment and discarded as a child with his own needs. I’ve spent my adult years searching for what was lost, resuming the conversation with the generative force in my dark room that showed me such awe-inspiring, wild, magnificent dreams. Although I’m now familiar with her again, the trauma made her feral, strange. None of us are the same as we used to be when we wandered around lost in daydreams.
Odes to My Triceratops is the story of my youth. My unhinged generative, dreamlike period. My love for the blind, illiterate girl who showed me there was beauty in this world. My troublesome friendship with a reckless, violent, sexual monster. My war against the monster during my teenage years, when, lost in dissociative states, I felt I was a thin layer of conscious mind under siege by monstrous ancient instincts I didn’t want to identify with nor could understand. My yearning for the missing love of my life, the sole real person in the world. My suicide attempt. The integration of the monster. Finding the girl only to find out she had changed. Devoting myself to that mysterious presence in the dark room deep down.
Somehow, Odes to My Triceratops became my personal mythology that encompasses all the forces I contain. No wonder I’ve returned to it at least in my mind since its conception in 2021, and why I remain haunted by many of its songs.
Now, the five-year cycle of song lyrics is complete. Suno, the currently-leading online service for music generation, will release its new model, supposedly better than all previous ones and made in concert with the music industry, whenever it arrives. I intend to render all my remaining lyrics of the fourth album into proper songs, then release the fourth and final album on YouTube. Barely anyone has listened to them, but it doesn’t really matter. I know who I’m doing this for, and I don’t need to look up.
Driving through a desert town,
I pass a roadside bar.
Board out front: “Open mic night.”
I pull over, grab my guitar.
Handful of locals at the tables.
Young couple at the counter.
Stage in the corner, a list the host holds.
I give my name when asked.
Wooden stool under one light,
Microphone in front of me.
I made these songs for you,
So you can sing along
From deep down somewhere
In a dark room.
A burning heart inside your throat.
Bold and brave like a triceratops.
The last chord rings.
Warm light on my face,
My hands still on the strings.
People talk, glasses clink.
I don’t know what they think,
And I don’t look up.
Up the mountain in that old garage,
Gasoline smell, rust and decay,
Where the valley ran to the edge of sight,
Two people heard me play.
Some say we’re here for a reason,
And yours is clear to see:
A bird like you was born to sing.
THE END
The cornfields ran out.
The land turned to dry scrub and stones.
I pull off the road, get out.
Cacti stand over me in the dark.
I open the guitar case.
The wood’s scarred, the strings rusted.
I don’t touch it. Don’t play.
Let the guitar breathe.
Engine’s ticking as it cools.
Dirt’s cold, pebbles dig into my back.
Moon’s a sliver of bone.
The sky a dome of stars.
Myriad points of light,
Cold eyes in the dark.
Some junkie.
That’s what I am.
I reach for the nightmares
That used to be my friends.
Red hair in the dirt,
Your corpse, your bones.
I put you there.
They won’t come.
Rope tied to my chest.
Nothing on the other end.
I dig my fingers in,
Hold on to stones.
Our houses. The space between.
That day I saw you first.
We walked around together.
Bought you cupcakes at the bakery.
I would help you be happy.
I would help you be brave.
I would help you enjoy everything
You were afraid to touch.
I wanted to eat you
So you couldn’t leave.
Mowed lawns, blooming flowers,
Spinning sprinklers, hoops over garages.
Shiny cars that start on the first try.
I saw you in every window I passed.
Guitar on my back.
I slept in the car.
Ate cheap at diners.
Walked the streets, alleys, parks.
Families with strollers, kids on bikes.
They shot me looks as they went by.
I’m a rat, a plague carrier.
Vermin that should be removed.
I’d been asking strangers for days.
I’m looking for a blind girl with red hair.
Name’s Claire, last name Javernick.
There couldn’t be more than one.
You used to live next door.
We’d sit on your front porch and talk.
You’d ask me how the flowers looked.
Said you’d rather be dead than blind.
I didn’t deserve to see you again.
I had no right to ask you anything.
I should have left you alone
And let you live your life.
Sun was going down behind the houses.
Kids played on the park swings.
I had leaned over a fountain to wash my face
When I heard you sing.
Red hair spread over the green.
A woman lying on a blanket.
A child climbed over her,
Tugging at her clothes, laughing.
Fiery-red hair in the fading light.
Milky-white eyes.
Older, fuller, stronger.
A cane beside her on the grass.
Making up the words as she sang
About squirrels and butterflies.
You survived long enough
To become a woman I don’t know.
A man hurried over, put himself between.
He asked me what I was doing.
“Hey. Back off.”
She sat up, turned to the sound.
“Who is it?”
“Don’t know. Some junkie.”
I turned around and ran.
My phone keeps buzzing on the passenger seat,
Eager to yell at me for failing to show up.
The men at work, they never knew who I was,
Or that I won’t be coming back.
I woke up in some dark room
Full of trash, bottles, cigarette butts.
Dunno how I got there, whose bed it was.
Didn’t see a clock, couldn’t tell the time.
My head throbbed, my stomach burned.
Had to piss like a racehorse.
What did I swallow? Who did I fuck?
Who the hell was I?
My hands are trembling on the wheel,
My breath fogging the cold glass.
This rusting, sputtering wreck of a car
Always takes three turns to start.
A voicemail from my mother.
She got sober enough to recall
That “the Javernick girl” had called
Two or three years ago
To find out if I was alive.
Now I know where you are,
Or where you were the last time
You gave my mother your name.
I grabbed the guitar and ran
With nothing but the clothes on my back,
That stink of sweat and smoke and sex.
Left everything else behind.
Driving through the endless night.
The road’s empty, the sky black.
No stars, no moon, no signs.
Nothing but the white line.
A phantom smell of old gasoline
From the yard up the mountains.
On the porch next door to mine,
Your face, your fire hair, your milk eyes.
Locked in my room for a year,
Then vanished like a ghost.
You wanted to know if I was alive,
And I was already gone.
The sun comes up like a sore.
My skin’s clammy, my tongue thick.
I roll the window down,
Stick my head out into the wind.
Pull over at a gas station, fill the tank.
Beard’s a mess. Eyes bloodshot.
I need to wash, need to eat,
Need to sleep, but can’t stop.
Buy coffee, aspirin, cigarettes.
Clerk looks at me like I’m a threat.
My teeth hurt, my jaw clenches.
Bugs crawl under my skin.
I put a knife in Lorenzo’s neck.
Buried his body in the woods.
I told you he must have gone,
And you knew it was a lie.
Driving through flatlands, cornfields,
Under a sky too big to grasp.
No mountains, no trees, no landmarks.
Just road and road and endless road.
Car’s making a weird noise.
Smoke’s coming from the hood.
Heat rises, burns my face.
I don’t know how to fix this.
No one around.
No help in sight.
Just me and you,
And this guitar.
I used to be dead.
Now I know where you are.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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