Sometimes I feel like an LLM writing my own prompts.
And sometimes I feel like an LLM without a prompt at all.
It’s seems to be an effective hack to tell Claude about my ideas for a song… and then tell it to think about what it knows about me and write the kind of lyrics that if I heard them would sound like they’d been written just for me, telling me what I most need to hear.
Before I figured this out, Claude kept trying to write lyrics that sounded like they’d been written BY me… Ironically, the lyrics it writes FOR me sound much more like what I would choose to write myself if I were actually any good at writing lyrics.
In some ways, the thing that’s surprised me most about working with Claude and Suno to create music is that it hasn’t interfered at all with my continuing to write fiction of my own at the same time.
When I work on the book I’m writing with my son, it uses up my mental energy for writing, and I end up putting my own book on pause for a while. But for the last half year, I’ve been producing large quantities of music while continuing to write fiction at the same pace as before.
It’s always been true that some stories are easier to write than others — some I can dash off in an afternoon and others I’ll agonize over for months.
But it’s next level dizzying how songs made with Claude/Suno vary between almost instantaneous and taking days to work out.