In Spring 2025 a friend told me about Suno.com. Out of curiosity I checked it out. At first I thought it was a novelty act, fun but not a serious songwriting companion or new tool. But within a month I discovered that one can upload snippets and have Suno generate songs that sound radio ready. So I tried that approach. I was instantly hooked.
I happen to have hundreds of snippets of song ideas sitting in iTunes. Back in 2009-2013 I would set up my iPhone to record and just start playing guitar and making stuff up, bits of song ideas, sometimes with scat-sung fake lyrics, sometimes with a catchy melodic or lyrical phrase, mostly stuff just off the cuff. If an idea seemed to have potential I might record a handful of attempts but they were always experimental and rough sounding. The original idea would always excite me but listening back to the recordings would take my emotions in the other direction.
I always had it in mind to go back through these scratch recordings and flesh out some of the ideas but it was an unattractive process and I found I would have to push myself to roll up my sleeves and get to work. Suno suddenly made these snippets sound attractive, like a song you’d hear on the radio or a streaming service. I soon became adept at bending Suno my will so that it would adhere to my chord progression, melody, melodic rhythms and lyrics. I found great value in hearing my lyrics sung back to me and hearing my songs in a variety of styles. So for almost a year I worked Suno hard and was generally quite happy with the results. However, eventually the ethical issues regarding how the models were trained got to me, and by early May of 2026 I turned my back on Suno and returned to generating backing tracks in Band -In-A-Box, a significantly more laborious process, but one that honors human musicians.
For the record, and for the enjoyment of the music, here are two playlist sof most of the songs that I’d worked on in partnership with Suno. With all of these songs my eventual goal is to first replace Suno’s vocals with my own, and then to replace the backing tracks either with my own, Band-In-A-Box's, or a combination. It will take time to finish all of the replacements so I decided to at least get the AI-generated versions up on my website. They are, after all, interesting in their own right, and a legitimate segment of my ongoing musical adventure and history.
All of these songs are © Paul Fifield All Rights Reserved – Paul Fifield 5/25/26