Introducing the Sunophonic Sessions

I’m excited (and, truthfully, a little nervous) to share a new chapter in the Selkirk Range project: The Sunophonic Sessions.

This collection of songs is built around something I hold sacred—words. Every lyric in this forthcoming collection of songs is my own, written by hand over many months and years. That part of the music—the storytelling, the voice behind the voice—is something I feel strongly about preserving. These are my stories, my images, my turns of phrase.

What’s new is how they’ve been brought to life in musical form.

The arrangements and performances you’ll hear weren’t created in a traditional studio. They were rendered using Suno.ai, a generative music platform that transforms lyrical and stylistic prompts into fully realized musical performances. At first, I was unsure—skeptical, even. I wondered whether it could really feel anything like music made with people in a room.

But what surprised me was just how responsive it is. Suno can infer mood, phrasing, and even expression in ways I didn’t expect. The platform—still early in its evolution—has a remarkable knack for giving voice and shape to a song. Quite frankly, it’s been a thrill to hear these words set to music like this.

Over the past decade, I’d written some two dozen songs that have been sitting in a collection of notebooks and pre-production demo recordings. As I began shaping them with Suno, they seemed to naturally split into two distinct sounds: one leaning into country traditions, the other into more adult-oriented folk-pop. The result is the Sunophonic Sessions, which will be released across a single and two albums:

  • The Ballad of the Titan is available on Bandcamp now and will be released on the other streaming platforms soon. It’s a slightly quirky take on the ill-fated OceanGate submersible, playing on the connection between the words Titan, Titanic, and Atlantic. You can read more about it in my earlier post.
  • Hired Gun, arriving on August 22 has something of a classic country feel, pairing plainspoken storytelling with easygoing melodies. I brought in Colin Noel from Electric Treehouse studio to add final polish to the mixes and mastering of this collection.
  • Duty. Courage. Truth. will follow later this year, exploring an adult contemporary sound with folk-rock at its core. Textured arrangements and reflective themes move across a range of moods, from intimate to anthemic. You can hear a pre-release version now on Bandcamp — and while you’re there, follow Selkirk Range to get updates and be the first to know when the album drops.

Above all, the greatest reward for a songwriter is finding an audience who feels the words and emotions you’ve poured into a song. In that sense, how the music was produced matters far less than whether it connects. Hearing these songs come back polished and expressive has been like hearing them for the first time — a mind-blowing experience for a songwriter working with limited resources. The tools may have changed, yet the intent remains the same: to create songs that are meaningful, and to offer them with the hope they’ll find a home in someone’s heart.

Thanks for listening.

– Gordon (Selkirk Range)


Look out for the first releases from Hired Gun and Duty Courage Truth coming soon.

The Ballad of the Titan

This song started with a simple wordplay: Atlantic, Titanic, Titan. That connection stuck with me, and I wrote the chorus months ago, long before the verses. I was drawn to the interplay of those names, their inherent rhythm, and the tragic resonance between them:

The Atlantic took Titanic-
Which lured the Titan down-
To the bottom of the sea
To the bottom of the sea

As part of my ongoing Sunophonic sessions—an artistic exploration of generative AI in songwriting—I sung the melody into Suno then pasted my lyrics, and wrote a simple prompt: “sea shanty, ballad.” It generated several versions, one of which uncannily matched my vision for the song. This is what makes working with these tools so captivating.

The result is a somber ballad in the tradition of maritime storytelling, akin to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”—a cautionary tale for a modern tragedy.