AI

I know we’re all supposed to hate AI, but this image is not really how it works. For my concept album cover for The Tower, I asked for an image of a crumbling university tower, and I selected the one I liked the most. Possible enhancements it suggested (that I agreed to) included a greater amount of ivy, ravens, and a mysterious figure staring at it from the outside. For my one song, “In the Halls of Academia,” I asked for a song lyric about precarious academic employment in the style of Rush’s Neil Peart. What it came up with almost perfectly matched the music of an earlier, unrelated song that I wanted to re-use anyhow. I’m probably not going to use AI for something like this again, but it is not obvious to me that it can’t or shouldn’t be used at all.

Burt Bacharach

I’m a bit late acknowledging Burt Bacharach’s passing last week. However, one of my earliest memories, along with watching the Apollo 11 moon landing on TV, was hearing B. J. Thomas’s recording of Bacharach and Hal David’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” on the radio. I did eventually see the movie for which it was written: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Unfortunately, I somehow eventually became a musicologist. Happiness did not step up to greet me.