Lynn Cole is a songwriter and experimental artist who recently announced the release of “Safe Room,” her most recent album and a pivotal part of the ambitious “Holographic Girlfriends” project. Utilizing state-of-the-art AI technology for the performances, “Safe Room” combines deeply personal lyrics with blues and country music, exhibiting Cole’s most profound and innovative work to date.
In this interview we talked about her journey that led to the creation of “Safe Room” and how AI assisted in her process.
1. Your album “Safe Room” is described as a key component of the “Holographic Girlfriends” project. Could you elaborate on the concept behind this project and how “Safe Room” fits into it?
Lynn Cole. Oh yeah, no problem. So Holographic Girlfriends is this imaginary superband I just totally made up. The original idea was to do a lot with 3d animation, and make experimental videos around it. At the beginning of the project, and really the end of the last album (No Way Out) that was the plan. And I did make a couple of them. There’s this great video I did for Instrumental #39, where I used archival dance footage from the early 1930s to make something really fun.
I did some 3d animation for the Empty video. Empty’s an interesting song. It’s only half written, and everything’s a bridge, but I felt like the emotional impact of it made it interesting enough to warrant that. And another for Not The Breakroom, where I took Instagram footage from an Asian makeup video and repurposed it to make something really special.
But it’s also sort of the design philosophy that went into writing and building the last two albums. One of weird experimentation and pushing the emotional limits of the technology through experimentation. How many ways can I hit this amazing new machine with a hammer? Well, it turns out, quite a few different ways.
2. You mentioned your love for country music and your desire to explore the depth of female characters within the genre. How did this passion influence the creation of “Safe Room,” both lyrically and musically?
Lynn Cole. I was raised on the stuff. As an adult, it’s the one category of music that I’ve found the most relatable. The most… human, if you will. Full of little fun emotional roller coasters to ride and explore, and that’s what I like about it. I feel like, for the most part, it’s also accessible, unpretentious, and straightforward.
At the moment, I’m really enjoying listening to work by Luke Combs and Morgan Whallen. But overall, I find that I’m concerned about how much of modern country is there to sell you on a lifestyle and worldview that just doesn’t make sense to a lot of people.
Why is pop country so concerned with selling the idea of getting married and settling down, wasting away in a small town that’s rarely named, and never leaving your zip code for the rest of your life? That’s terrifying. It’s also relatively new, as far as genre conventions go.
And if you look at country music holistically as sort of an extended universe… you can see the very real consequences of thinking that way. Depression, alcoholism, abuse both physical and emotional, and so on. Which makes sense, as a way to explain things that have always been part of country music. But you lose entire tropes, and large pieces of country history when you do it.
So much, if not all of the “Safe Room” album runs intentionally counter to this narrative. Sometimes, as a conspicuous critique. Sometimes as an exercise in absurdity, where I take a bad but common idea, and run all the way into a wall with it, head first, fuckit. And if I can get some delightfully dysfunctional romance out of it? All the better.
What I’m really trying to do is produce a thoughtful female oriented narrative within the album. Often subverting gender expectations for the category. These are songs that, if sung in a male voice, would hit very differently. And I think that’s interesting. The dissonance there is intentional.
3. Integrating AI technology into music production is a bold move. Could you share more about your experience using AI tools like Suno AI and other tools in the creation of “Safe Room”? What challenges did you face, and what opportunities did it present for your artistic expression?
Lynn Cole. Interesting question.
I think the first and biggest challenge in doing something like this, with the tools I used to make is that the AI I used to produce it is… not designed for that. I did a lot of things with Suno, that really broke the use case. Forced the machine to get creative. I learned all kinds of things about how it’s put together, and what they used to build it with.
Suno is what people in the industry call, a “singergen.” That’s an AI tool that creates a song with a human-sounding voice, or thereabouts. And it does that well. But it’s mostly designed for simpler songs and more predictable compositions. What I wanted to do with “Safe Room” was build out something bigger, bolder, and less predictable. I wanted to be my first “serious” album. And I think I accomplished that.
I discovered I could do things with Suno that break the way it’s designed. Give it lyrics that are hard to calculate. Mess with the composition and timing. And really produces some amazing sounds. After six months and 380 completed songs, I feel like it was enough to get my appetite for music creation wet.
But for the next one, I think I want more.
I think I want to use more sophisticated tools to do cooler stuff, which means I have to work on my actual musicianship a little harder. I think the perfect world for the next album is sort of morphing into a process like the one Fake Drake uses… but without the copyright infringement, of course.
One interesting thing about the space is that it’s not just one art form or one set of tools. AI for music is all over the place, and there are a lot of different kinds of tools that are available today to do different things. And I think that’s what I like about it.
Once you get the rules of AI down, you can take them anywhere. They never change. Different models and tools do different things and have different use cases that you can obliterate if you so choose, but the core concepts are always… mostly the same.
I want to explore that more.
4. “Safe Room” is described as offering unique soundscapes that blend technical innovation with personal storytelling. Can you discuss how you balanced experimentation with maintaining the emotional authenticity of your music during the production process?
Lynn Cole. One thing I did as part of the process for this one, was essentially, tricking the machine into giving me more emotional performances. You can do that with Suno by changing the read, or little tricks like adding a block of nonsense to it, in order to generate a particular kind of hallucination, and then writing over that section of the song with what you were really trying to do. If you can keep it within the context window (this varies depending on the version of Suno you’re using, but it’s usually about a minute), you can carry these hallucinations through the entire piece. I did one I haven’t published yet, where I coaxed the machine into yodeling! There’s another one (Silly Love Song) where I made it scat (not easy).
I think the core of emotional acuity in writing songs for AI comes from the same place it’s always come from in songwriting. Do your best to write sincere authentic lyrics. An internet troll commented on one of my posts the other day, “Three months is an awfully long time to sit with a stupid machine like that,” and yeah it is.
Though, that’s only a problem if you’re intentionally misunderstanding how my process works. Songwriting takes time. The way I use AI in songwriting is to organize my thoughts and arrange my notes. The rest of it is still a manual process. Much as I would like to blame AI and give myself an out for some of my cringier musical moments over the last year… it’s all me.
And you can tell. While I do intentionally go overboard exploring country and pop music cliches every so often… there isn’t a neon light (the most insidiously annoying of all AI songwriting cliches) in the whole album.
But all kidding aside, the first rule of AI automation in creative fields is this: While you can automate any part of the process you want with an AI, you should never automate what you love doing.
Why bother making anything if you don’t fucking love it? All art should be tactile. I don’t believe there’s a solution there for totally separating the artist from the art. And I think people can tell when you’ve tried to. It’s this visceral reaction that people have. It’s hard to explain. You just know.
Anyway, what I love doing is songwriting.
5. How would you say your friends and colleagues in the music industry have reacted to your AI music projects so far?
Lynn Cole. I think musicians and producers are more open-minded about this stuff than illustrators and concept artists. So far, the reaction has been a mix of fascination, and cautious skepticism around what this is going to do to jobs in the music industry. And I think that’s healthy. We need to be having a serious adult conversation about creative AI in music.
We also have to deal with the very real reality of music labels being the way they are and have always been, along with the fact that AI companies oversell the hell out of this stuff, which is bad for everybody involved.
My hope is that we start that conversation by being honest about the problems it solves, what the business model and use cases are, how to avoid obvious marketplace pitfalls, and what it all means to artists as artists going forward. I can’t stress enough how bad of an idea overselling this technology is right now, given who’s listening.
The thing you have to remember about my work is that I have been an experimental artist for 30 years. I have a non-trivial amount of technical skill in a dozen other disciplines, and I am deeply immersed in the space.
In terms of creative AI, I am fairly well known. And I’ve done things with some of these models that even the people who created them were surprised by. I’m not even trying to be arrogant, or ego-maniacal when I say this. These are facts. I am not a typical user, and never have been.
And if, after reading that, you want to listen to my album, and leave me some nasty comments, that’s fine. You can do that. But I think the existence of artists like me (and there are a few of us) really shows the possibilities of what this actually means to everyone going forward.
I have so much work to do here. My next album is going to be very different. There are things that have never been done with this kind of tech that I would like to prove out as I go. As usual, I plan to document the whole thing and continue to be transparent about what I’m doing and how. The journey is half the fun of it. Keeping it all to myself would just be… selfish?
6. With “Safe Room” now available on major streaming platforms, what do you hope listeners will take away from the album?
Lynn Cole. If I’m being a thousand percent honest, I want more than people just buying the thing. Please buy it, and tip generously. But what I really want to do is capture the hearts and minds of living room producers, garage bands, and anyone who’s ever dreamed of making music, but might not know how or where to start. Are you a high schooler with grand visions of your first world tour? You’re not wrong, you’re not crazy, you can do it. Now stop talking, and start here. Experience this with me!
7. What advice would you like to give to artists who want to leverage the power of AI to create their own music?
Lynn Cole. AI isn’t magic. It’s science. When it comes to music, it’s a kind of instrument, and you need to think of it that way. Yes, there’s a low barrier to entry, but that doesn’t make it any less valuable.
There is no silver bullet that works for everybody, so my best advice there is to go, get out there, start breaking stuff, and play with it until you’re comfortable.
Find the sweet spot, where it fits in within your process, and learn. Do the work, trust yourself, put in the time… and post everything, good, bad, or indifferent. And at me like crazy when you do.
8. Thanks Lynn for your time. Where can readers go to listen to “Safe Room”?
Lynn Cole. “Safe Room” is on all the distributors right now. But if you want the one with seven additional weirdly experimental tracks, the extended album is available on Bandcamp at https://holographicgf.bandcamp.com/album/safe-room
For more information on me, check out my website at https://lynncole.art/pages/find-me
And, if you want to watch my brain tick away in real time, feel free to check out my twitter. If nothing else it’s interesting, and just for fun I have a nervous breakdown at least twice a month (I’m a little high strung)
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