Now that Love is out, I thought I’d say a little more about how the record was made.

The album is part of an ongoing experiment I’ve been calling the Sunophonic Sessions: using generative music tools as part of the process of realizing songs I’ve written.

There are plenty of different ways people are now using generative AI to make music. My own process on this album was quite specific.

For many of the tracks, the starting point was an existing home demo.

Usually that meant me performing the song with an acoustic guitar and other instruments: the lyrics, melody, chord structure, rhythm, phrasing and basic musical idea already there, captured in recordings and more polished home demos.

I then used those recordings as the source material for developing fuller performances.

In some cases, the resulting versions stay remarkably close to the original demo. In others, the arrangement moved in a substantially different direction.

The process involved a lot of fine tuning and very selective choices about which versions best fit the overall sound and vision for the album.

I would generate performances, listen carefully, reject them, try something different, return to an earlier direction, adjust the approach, and continue until I found something that felt right.

The closest analogy I can think of is a term like “musical direction”.

As the songwriter, I knew the song and had a reasonably clear sense of what I wanted it to become. The work was in recognizing which performance captured that and which did not, both individually and together as a collection.

Not every performance was successful. Not every detail in the finished versions is exactly what I would have done if I had complete control over every note. But that is not unlike working with musicians either. Performance always involves interpretation.

What matters most to me is whether the resulting recording brings the song to life in a way that I feel is true to my intent as the songwriter. And, let me be clear: I wrote all these songs on the album. Every lyric on every song. And most of the musical phrasing, with a few exceptions where I felt Suno offered a more exciting or more musically interesting interpretation of a song that I might otherwise have abandoned.

And that has been the most surprising part of this experiment.

My primary interest has always been songwriting rather than proving that I personally played every instrument or sang every note on a finished recording.

Would it be wonderful to take 18 songs into a great studio with exceptional singers, session players, producers and engineers? Absolutely.

It would also cost many thousands, and probably tens of thousands, of dollars.

Independent musicians have always worked within the resources available to them. Home recording, drum machines, digital audio workstations, virtual instruments and inexpensive production software all changed what could be done outside a professional studio.

Generative tools represent another change in that history.

It is now possible for a songwriter to take a home demo and use these tools to explore performances and arrangements that previously might have remained inaccessible.

Over the next little while, I’m going to make that process more transparent by sharing some of the original demos behind Love alongside the finished recordings.

Then you can hear the difference for yourself.

Love is now available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

Love arrives today!

Available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

There are 18 songs on the record, and while each of them can certainly be heard on its own, this is one album where I’d encourage listeners to resist the shuffle button—at least the first time through because the sequence matters.

Love is organized into three volumes, loosely following a three-act dramatic structure.

Act I, starting with “What You Know” begins with attraction, discovery, desire and intimacy. Gradually, however, familiarity gives way to uncertainty, strain and finally separation.

Act II, “Love (The Turn)” takes place in the aftermath: loss, disorientation, hitting bottom, rebounding, looking backward, and beginning to come to terms with what has happened.

Act III “Love (The Return)” turns outward again. It is about recovery, hesitation, renewal and the delightful feeling of opening up to love again.

The album isn’t intended as a definitive statement or story about love. As a concept album, it is more about what love does over time: how it begins, how it changes, what happens when it fails, what remains afterward, and how those experiences become part of whatever comes next.

Today, streaming has made the individual song the dominant unit of listening. We hear tracks in playlists, on shuffle, out of sequence, often separated entirely from the albums they came from.

And that’s fine. The songs on Love can live that way too.

But the record wasn’t really made that way.

The ordering of the songs became part of the composition. A song can mean something slightly different depending on what precedes it and what follows it. The three acts have their own internal movement, and the album as a whole is meant to trace a journey.

So when Love arrives, I’d encourage you to try listening to it that way.

Put on Act I and let it run.

Then Act II.

Then Act III.

Or, if you have the time, begin with the overture and stay with the story all the way through.

Available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

I didn’t set out to write a concept album called Love.

In a way, I discovered it hiding among songs I had already written and set aside.

Most of the 18 songs on the album were written over the past ten or twelve years. Some existed as finished songs. Some were home demos I had almost forgotten about. A few had already been released in earlier forms. Others were unfinished pieces that were interesting but mostly abandoned.

At some point, as I started listening back through all of that material, I began to notice connections.

Songs written years apart seemed to occupy different moments in the same emotional journey. One captured the intoxication of falling in love. Another belonged much later, at the point where familiarity had begun to turn into strain. Others seemed to live in the aftermath of a relationship: grief, resentment, rebound, reflection, acceptance.

And then there were songs that seemed to belong to the other side of that experience—the gradual reopening to the possibility of love.

The creative challenge became one of curation.

Which songs belonged in this particular story? Which didn’t? Where should one act end and another begin? What happens if one song is placed immediately after another? Could an older song take on a different meaning simply because of where it appeared in the sequence?

That process became one of the most enjoyable parts of making the album.

Songs I had thought of as separate works began to feel like scenes. Lyrics written years apart started answering one another. Material that had once felt incomplete suddenly had somewhere to go.

Eventually, I started seeing the project less as a conventional album and more as something akin to a Broadway musical.

There is no script behind it, no fixed cast of characters, and no stage production notes. The songs suggest encounters, departures, confrontations, reversals, private reflections and resolutions. When I was working on it, I liked to imagine lighting and staging, and how they might be performed by different actors.

That was when the three-act structure really started to make sense.

The first act moves through attraction, intimacy and eventual fracture. The second occupies the uncertain territory after the collapse. The third begins the movement toward renewal and the possibility of loving again.

It is not meant to tell one literal story, and I’m not especially interested in telling listeners exactly who is speaking to whom.

I’d rather leave some of that open to my listeners.

So, I guess sometimes you set out to write an album. Sometimes, apparently, you find one. Love comes out September 24.

The instant grat track and opening song “What You Know” is now available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.

On September 24, I’ll be releasing my fifth album, Love.

This one is a little different.

Love is an 18-song concept album organized into three volumes, loosely following a three-act structure. It’s a series of vignettes organized around a classic story arc, beginning with attraction, discovery and falling in love; moving through tension, separation and the difficult period that follows; and eventually arriving at recovery, renewal and the possibility of falling in love again.

The first song I’m sharing from the album is “What You Know,” released September 3.

It’s an adaptation of a song I released previously, but in the context of Love it takes on a different role. I think of it almost as an overture: an opening into the emotional world of the album as it unfolds across the three acts.

One of the unusual things about Love is that all of these songs were written at different times over a period of several years. Some are songs I’ve already released but revisited and rearranged, but many were finished home demos in my archive. A few others were incomplete sketches of songs that I finished for the album.

The concept album idea emerged late last year, when I began revisiting a bunch of my old material and realized that there was a thematic line running through them that could serve as a collection.

The real challenge of making this record has been deciding what songs to include, giving it a consistent feel musically, and deciding how the songs should be ordered so that they formed a dramatic arc.

Over the next few weeks, leading up to the album release, I’ll write a little more about that process—how the songs came together, how the three-act structure emerged, and why I eventually began to imagine Love as something almost like the score to an imaginary musical.

For now, “What You Know” is the instant grat track. Available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.