What Does It Mean?

There are different ways that you can go about getting something to have an “aboutness”. Randomness can be a good starting point where you're just playing around with words and they don't necessarily mean anything. But as you move them around they start to suggest meaning. As I’ve been experimenting with AI in songwriting, I either start with a fragment of an idea, a paragraph from an essay, or lines that I've collected over the years. Essentially it's a matter of accretion, where things combine over time and form the shape of the final result. In the universe, it’s stars and planets, and with songwriting, it’s words, sounds, and sometimes images. An image can complete the work in ways that it wouldn't have otherwise. If I choose one image over another it will affect the lyrics and the music accordingly. I think it's probably best to start with an idea, but even then you can add the idea later. Then that's what it's about. This was the case with a recent piece I did based on a song I wrote in 1995. I used two verses from it, then combined it with a photograph by William Eggleston and a couple of stills from Reservoir Dogs. The AI-generated version was an edgy Blues, which suggested the Eggleston. The second styling was as if Steve Buscemi was singing it, so that's where the sound of someone's voice added to the meaning as well. And it was a random element coming from AI.