Tag: music

Life update (09/09/2026)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Escritura, Slice of lifeLeave a comment

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.

Afterword to Odes to My Triceratops

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

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.

I Know Where You Are (Poetry)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

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.

Trying out Suno’s capabilities

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial, MúsicaLeave a comment

In a few days I’ll have finished the entire set of song lyrics that the story Odes to My Triceratops will contain, which means I’ll have plenty of new lyrics to turn into full songs. The online service Suno seems like the best choice these days, although it’s currently in a weird state, as they intend to roll out a fancy new model that will replace all previous ones, but we don’t know when that will come out (other than “in 2026”). We don’t know if the new model will truly beat the previous ones, or if it will be crippled by the music industry’s interference like what happened to Udio.

In any case, I’ve been trying out genres, instruments, and such with some of my old lyrics. The following songs were produced on one of the current free Suno models, not even the most capable one. Suno used to be considered inferior to Udio because its songs sounded more artificial; I suspect that’s no longer the case even in the poorest model now available.

Suno also added a studio capability: you can generate voices, instrument parts, etc. in their own stems. Producing the new songs is going to be a blast.

Songwriting Is for Idiots (Poetry)

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, EscrituraLeave a comment

Lock the door, drop the boots,
Wash the shit off my hands.
The world can fuck off for a while:
I got a bottle and a guitar.

Songwriting’s for idiots, yeah, it is.
I should be fucking sleeping,
But here I am, an asshole with a drink,
Trying to make sense of shit.
Sit on the bed, grab the neck,
Play a few chords, slur some words.
No one here will give a shit
About my stories or my songs.

Start singing some nonsense rhymes
About trash and trucks and loneliness.
Maybe I’ll sing about how drunk I am,
How my fingers fumble on the frets.
Maybe throw in a dead dinosaur
And a girl with milk-white eyes.

Songwriting is for idiots,
But I like to sing.
No one here to hear me,
No one here to judge me.
Just me and my guitar,
And a bottle of gin.

I keep on playing and singing
‘Cause it makes me feel something,
Even if it’s just pain or anger or shame,
Or the ghost of a memory,
Or a face I can’t forget.

I sing about Lorenzo, my best friend,
Who’s dead and buried somewhere far away.
I sing about Claire, the love of my life,
Who left me without a word or a trace.

Songwriting is for idiots
Who dig up what they buried
Just to complain about the smell,
Who play the same four chords
Until this room is the hideout
And we’re all stupid kids again.

Songwriting is for idiots
Who can’t let go,
Who can’t move on,
Who are too scared to live
And too cowardly to die.

I used to be a boy.
Now I lift other people’s shit
Until my hands turn white.
I used to have a dino who listened
And a girl who sang.
Now I have four walls, a bottle,
And a toilet that won’t flush.

I’m just a fool with a guitar
And a bunch of half-assed songs
That no one will ever hear.
But I like to sing, so fuck it.
I like to sing, even if it’s dumb.
I like to sing, even if it hurts.

I wish I could leave William in this room
With the songs and the dead.
Let someone else wear the boots
And walk out that door.
But there’s no one else.
This is all I’ve got.

Released Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 1 on YouTube

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial, MúsicaLeave a comment

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.

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.

Released Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 3 on YouTube

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, Inteligencia artificial, MúsicaLeave a comment

Over the years since I produced these songs, I’ve gotten from time to time notices that people downloaded the first and second album, but I never go around to presenting the third album as a cohesive whole. Now it’s up on YouTube. I doubt that anyone happening to read these words actually cares, but in case you’ve enjoyed any of these songs in the past, the whole album warrants a listen.

YouTube video’s description:

This is the third 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 third album is more cohesive than the second one, and is bolstered by the improved audio quality from Udio’s model generation at the time. But this album lacks the more varied, distinct narrative arc of the previous one. Some of the songs on this album are real bangers, though, and Behind the Door may be my favorite of the series emotion-wise.

William’s story doesn’t end here. I just haven’t gotten around to producing the entirety of the fourth album. Maybe it’s time to pick it up again.

Released Odes to My Triceratops, Vol. 2 on YouTube

On By Jon UreñaIn Arte, MúsicaLeave a comment

Those of you who have stuck around for a while may remember a period in which I somehow ended up producing about eighty songs with an online music generator named Udio. I thought that those albums turned out way too good for them to end up buried on this site and my SSD drive, so now you can listen to the entirety of this little masterpiece of an album, its whole two hours, on YouTube. The songs, originally plain MP3 because Udio didn’t allow WAV downloads back then, have been remastered somewhat, so that’s something.

YouTube video’s description:

This is the second of three completed concept albums about three 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.

I think this second album is the strongest thing that emerged from the project. It is ridiculous, wounded, honest. I am putting it into the world because it seems wrong for it to exist only for me.

Chainsmoker Cat

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Banger opening of the year for this vile, harrowing tale of addiction, poverty, and mental illness featuring cat-girls. Their existence in the setting makes zero sense.

I never thought I would see Fight Club references in an anime opening. Below is the full song with lyrics, which speak directly to my heart.