In one chapter of ‘Remembered For A While’, an anthology of essays and reflections on the life, music and inner world of the musician Nick Drake, there are lyrics and even a prospective tracklist for what would have been his fourth studio album. Of course, his life was tragically cut short, and that album was never finished.
The songs that were recorded for the album are beautiful and stand on their own merits as the final great works of one of Britain’s most under-appreciated musicians (at least in his own time). They also hint at the musical journey on which he was continuing right up to the end of his life. The eerie falsettos of ‘Black Eyed Dog’ and ‘Hanging on a Star’, the country inflections of ‘Rider on the Wheel’ and the punchy 8th note syncopations of ‘Voices’ and ‘Tow the Line’ all feel like fairly fresh additions to Drake’s musical language. Even more importantly, what elements from his earlier writing style was he letting go? The florid instrumentation and Romantic chromaticism of the first album, the harmonic minor tonality and even some of the more showy elements of his guitar playing were whittled down into a restrained and angular modal style. So many things had changed, and were continuing to change, in his short musical career. Where would he have gone next?
We’re all on a journey – as thinkers, listeners, writers and, for some, artists. These personal journeys are non-linear and sometimes bewildering to ourselves and others. They are influenced by the environment and the people around you, as well as internal cycles of catharsis, reflection, renewal and everything in between. There are so many variables.
One day, it stands to reason that there will be a computer that can factor them all in and predict your next move. There are already plenty of examples of machines purportedly being able to predict voting behaviour, purchasing decisions and life outcomes. Surely it could predict what art an artist will create?
For Nick Drake’s fourth album, there are several lyrics for songs that were never recorded. With enticing titles such as ‘Long Way to Town’ and ‘Paid Brain’, their bleak lyrics stand as mysterious remnants of a creative process, like an unfinished symphony or notes left for the rest of a novel. If these songs had been finished and recorded, maybe they would have been his best songs. Maybe they’d have been mediocre. We do not know.
What if we fed these lyrics, along with all of his previous work, into a future AI music generator? On this theoretical advanced computer, we could also include variables such as a bias towards the style of his later work, the emotional state he was in and a small amount of the music that he would have heard on the radio, and been influenced by, around that time.
With the songs this music generator outputted and the eerie simulacrum of his voice, a musically minded tech accelerationist might make a bit of money claiming to have completed Nick Drake’s final album. (I’m sure the estates of some late musicians might even give their blessing to such creations if there’s some cash involved.)
Maybe the songs would be great. They might even bring a tear to the eye. It might sound like something he could have feasibly written. It’d definitely sound like what some people think he would have written.
But there is a 0% chance it would be what he would have written. Even the best trained algorithm on a computer guzzling the entire world’s energy supply could not predict that. Even if it guessed 100% correctly what Nick Drake might have happened to write, putting all the right notes in the right order (the chances of which are near 0% anyway) the fact remains that Nick Drake didn’t write the song, and never will. There are infinite permutations of what human beings and computers think a Nick Drake song might sound like, but there are a fixed number of actual songs by that artist which were uniquely sculpted by him. As an authentic expression of “Nick Drake”- the concept, the person, or whatever else- the AI generated settings of his lyrics will only ever have 0% value. There is no ‘would’ when it comes to art.
One might think the moral of this blog post is, ‘try and create something that the AI couldn’t predict you’d create.’ But you don’t even need to try and do that. Until you’ve created the art, that act of creation is not something you would do. We have trajectories, journeys, stories. Strengths, that others see as weaknesses. Limitations that others see as strengths. Fallow phases. Time where we despise the work we’ve done previously and want to break away from it. Times where we reconcile with it. Sad times. Happy times. AI may be able to create something resembling emotion, but nothing it does is borne out of the experience of actually being in this world. It will never have anything resembling a thought or emotion itself, and it is the infiniteness of the permutations it offers that will make its art so valueless in the long run.