THE SOUL OF SONG | 18 DECEMBER 2025 | LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
As we enter the era of AI-generated music and art, a familiar question keeps surfacing: is there any value left in anything human made? For me, the answer arrived in a surprising way. Not as a defense of human originality, and not as a fear of replacement - but as a recognition that the most meaningful works of art were never purely human-made to begin with.
There is a difference you can feel between a song that is constructed through skill, experience, and analysis, and a song that seems to arrive fully formed - gifted from some divine other world. I’ve written about this before: the distinction between music assembled from technique and music that feels received from somewhere beyond conscious effort.
This was an argument I used to make for myself 2-3 years ago in LA as I began removing priority from my songwriting & production career, suggesting that what we were doing was not necessarily the embodiment of being an artist, but something mechanical, systematic in its analysis and recreation of effective songwriting and production techniques into songs that were ‘good’, and optimized to trigger response. But the moment a machine (AI) began to rise to be able to more efficiently repeat that process, was the moment I realized that what I was doing wasn’t actually art.
So in 2023, I crossed the Atlantic again, this time to Greece, and began working on this album alongside my reading of the Greek myths. And as the project unfolded, through performance, travel, heartbreak, stillness, beauty, I noticed something unmistakable. The pieces that moved people most were not the ones I labored over. They were the melodies that arrived effortlessly: under a mulberry tree in Samothrace, along the cliffs of Nocelle, on a quiet terrace in Tuscany. These moments didn’t feel authored, they felt encountered. If I’m honest, I can’t claim ownership over them. They don’t feel like mine in the way craft does. They feel bestowed - gifts from somewhere else.
So am I cornered? Yes. I’m forced in a very real-world way towards having to believe wholeheartedly in something divine as the soul of song, and to trust that these melodies will move hearts, earning a valuable place on Earth that can’t be replaced. This idea isn’t new. Many composers across history have described themselves not as creators, but as channels. What feels different now is the necessity of that belief. In an age where machines can imitate technique, it is presence, vulnerability, and receptivity that remain irreducible. If music still matters, it’s not because humans can out-produce machines, it’s because true art that touches the soul cannot be generated - only received.
