October 3rds

10/3/1994            

“Perfect World” finished, a somewhat angry and sarcastic song about the illusion of heaven on earth. But we can live in a place where innocent delusion provides some degree of comfort and happiness, and where hope of a future made of gold will someday be reality.

[10/3/2025: In a recent interview Joan Baez said that she has had to embrace denial to find a modicum of normalcy. That seemed shocking coming from her. I once worked with a lyricist who wrote a piece titled Embrace Denial: “Its hopefulness, it deadens the pain…” I also did an AI-generated version of this in the "early days" of AI music, just a year ago and it has evolved exponentially. These are actually good guitar solos, and who played them? It sounds like Michael Schenker, which is why I included the cover of UFO Phenomenon].

10/3/2016 

You can’t make a whole lifetime (even an artistic practice) out of just-in-time thinking. You have to tap into some kind of larger system. Serendipity works best when what surprised you is something you were already primed to notice, through history. There’s always something worth repeating. 

[Musing on Music: "Discuss just-in-time thinking"] 

10/3/2024

If you’re operating on convenience, that means you don’t really know how to do something. Generating music with AI means you don’t really know how to play anything, and you want to be disabused of the chore of learning it. Once you didn’t need to use a washboard or a ringer, and could use a washing machine, you chucked the old ways. Lots of things go the way of the old ways.

[How lines in prose can pop out as musical and I have been in the routine of capturing these as "seeds"]