Ten days ago I signed up for an AI music tool called Suno. On a whim, I uploaded some songs I’d written over the years — lyrics, melodies, composition notes — and let it arrange them into full productions.
What came back stopped me cold. Not because the AI was impressive. Because my stuff was good.
I’ve been writing songs since 1994. I sat down at a piano my sophomore year of high school and taught myself to play by plunking keys until something recognizable came out. I got my first guitar Christmas of 1997, hated picks, grew calluses on my thumb and index finger from strumming bare-handed. I never really learned other people’s music. I wanted to write my own.
For thirty-two years, the gap between what I heard in my head and what I could produce with my hands was wide enough to park every excuse I ever made inside it. I didn’t have the production budget. I didn’t have the studio. I didn’t have the band. The songs stayed in notebooks and rough recordings, and I told myself someday.
Ten days ago, someday showed up. Here’s what it sounds like:
Hearing those arrangements — hearing my melodies orchestrated, my lyrics set against drums and bass and layers I never could have built alone — I realized something I’d been circling for a while. The creative instinct was always right. The ideas were always there. What was missing wasn’t talent or vision. It was the bridge between the idea and the finished product. And that bridge exists now.
I wrote a novel last year on my iPhone. Voice to text, thumbs, and an AI editing partner. Over a hundred thousand words down to sixty thousand after I went through it with a machete. It’s on Amazon. I made it. It’s mine. And I wrote it in a way that would have been impossible five years ago.
I’m writing songs. I’m writing novels. I’m creating things that would have been impossible five years ago with the tools I had then. And I’m doing it from my phone, my living room, and my lunch break.
Years ago, I joined an online community built around Seth Godin’s Tribes. I was trying to develop my thinking, contribute ideas about customer service and business. A woman jumped on one of my posts and tore me apart. Told me I was crazy, that I was enabling people, that I was an idiot. I never logged on again. I let one person’s pushback silence me entirely.
That version of me doesn’t get to make decisions anymore.
The excuses are gone. The tools are here. The only variable left is me.
David Willis 