If You Wanna Make a Song

A Human Framework for AI Songwriting Collaboration

The stage is dim, a stool at the center, and a man with a guitar, tuning strings slowly, deliberately. Around him, a restless chorus fidgets, unsure what they are meant to be. One asks if he starts with lyrics or music. Another wonders what their role is in the play. The man keeps tuning, then finally looks up.

“Everything you need to know about catching and making songs is right here in the body of this instrument,” he says, lifting the guitar into the light. “The lessons are there… if you’re paying attention.”

And then he sings:

You gotta have a holeIn your heart,Stick out your neck so long,Give everybody the keysTo your head,If you wanna make a song…

That simple refrain carries a whole framework for song-making. Not rules, but reminders of what makes music human:

1. You gotta have a hole in your heart — vulnerability and openness.

2. Stick out your neck so long — risk and courage.

3. Give everybody the keys to your head — radical openness of mind and imagination.

4. Tune when the tension’s too much or too little — balance, listening, and recalibration.

5. Sometimes it’s just electric, sometimes it’s not — showing up with authenticity, resonating with what you’ve got.

6. Strap on some confidence — self-respect and courage to persist.

7. Build a bridge, but never string people along — connection and honesty.

8. Strike the right chords together — relationship and collaboration.

9. Songs are out there in the uni-verse… waiting for someone open enough, vulnerable enough, in tune enough to listen — receptivity and humility.

This “Human Framework for Song-Making” emerged from the guitar itself. But lately it’s been colliding with another teacher in my life: artificial intelligence.

Old controversies, new echoes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ0BOEOtD2U

In a recent TED talk, the presenter opened with a trick: playing what he claimed was David Bowie’s chorus from Starman, lifted from a forgotten 1930s blues recording. The raspy guitar, the old voice, the rawness of it felt so real you wanted to believe it. Then he admitted it was all fake — generated 100% by AI.

He used the moment to raise an old, recurring question: What is real music? Because this isn’t the first time musicians have faced such suspicion. When the phonograph first appeared in the 1800s, John Philip Sousa railed against it, calling it a substitute for “human skill, intelligence and soul.” He believed mechanical recording would reduce music to mathematics. Decades later, when synthesizers entered the scene, people said they weren’t real instruments. The same cry went up against sampling in hip-hop. Every new tool has been accused of hollowing out the art.

And yet — each of those “controversial” technologies is now ordinary, even indispensable. Who today would say a recorded song isn’t real music?

So now we face AI. A tool that can parody Conway Twitty singing 50 Cent, or turn grocery lists into Red Hot Chili Peppers verses. A tool that can take a violin melody you hum and swell it into a cinematic score. A tool that unsettles because it can sound so human, and yet there’s no human life behind it.

The TED speaker named his guardrails for using AI: don’t deceive, be intentional, and consider how it affects musicians. That’s wise, but for me, the deeper framework still comes from the guitar’s wisdom.

The paradoxes of AI and the Human Framework for Song-Making

Each principle of If You Wanna Make a Song now contains a paradox: AI can hollow out its meaning, or AI can help deepen it.

1. Hole in your heart

• Undermined if… AI fabricates pain with no lived experience.

• Supported if… AI helps us articulate our own ache with new images or sounds.

2. Stick out your neck

• Undermined if… AI encourages safe imitation.

• Supported if… AI pushes us to risk trying things we couldn’t otherwise.

3. Give everybody the keys to your head

• Undermined if… the “keys” are handed to a machine with no inner world.

• Supported if… AI helps unlock more of our own thinking, so we can share it with others.

4. Tune when tension’s off

• Undermined if… AI smooths every imperfection into sterile uniformity.

• Supported if… AI helps us notice imbalance and return to resonance.

5. Sometimes it’s electric, sometimes it’s not

• Undermined if… AI promises constant sparkle and shortcuts presence.

• Supported if… AI offers sparks that rekindle our authentic engagement.

6. Strap on some confidence

• Undermined if… AI overwhelms us with comparison and doubt.

• Supported if… AI becomes a safe practice partner, growing our courage.

7. Build a bridge, don’t string people along

• Undermined if… AI floods the world with shallow content, corroding trust.

• Supported if… AI builds bridges — across languages, styles, or access barriers.

8. Strike the right chords together

• Undermined if… AI creates surface harmonies with no real resonance.

• Supported if… AI expands collaboration across cultures and genres.

9. Songs in the uni-verse

• Undermined if… AI tempts us to believe songs can be manufactured on demand.

• Supported if… AI acts as a net to catch fragments, while we remain the listeners and shapers.

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My experiments at the table

I’ve been living these paradoxes in my own work. AI has become another instrument in the circle — one that sometimes startles me, sometimes unsettles me, but always challenges me to stay human. Some projects so far:

• Stone Campbell Revue’s Wash My Feet — a “historical fiction” of AI-assisted lo-fi field recordings of early 20th-century spirituals, drawn from my own catalogue.

• Scout’s Honor’s Get a Stick and Wind Upon the Branches — fictionalized female singer-songwriter interpretations of my work, exploring how gender changes resonance.

• Scott Simpson’s Lost for Words and SenseWin — AI turning voice and noise prompts into early jazz-pop and experimental prog-rock instrumentals.

• Scott Simpson’s Where the Growth Begins — Americana/bluegrass songs shaped from my unrhymed poems, without standard lyric conventions.

• Stone Campbell Revue’s Deconstructin’ — 12 AI-assisted country songs built from my 2012 theology articles.

• Folk Union’s Project 2025 Blues — protest Americana songs created from the “Project 2025” document.

• Scott Simpson’s Man on the Mountain — a modern country album re-imagined with AI from older catalogue songs.

• Scott Simpson’s People as Tall as Mountains — blues-rock songs reworked through AI from earlier blues pieces.

• Scott Simpson’s Topo Landscapes Vol. I–VII — AI genre explorations of my 2001 Topo: Acoustic Landscapes instrumentals.

• Scott Simpson’s 1987 — a YouTube-only “1980s style” album reframing songs I wrote in the ’80s as a Gen X love story.

Each of these projects has forced me back to the guitar’s lessons. Am I keeping the hole in my heart? Am I still risking the neck? Am I giving listeners the real keys to my head, not just shiny simulations?

Still the same song

From the phonograph to the synthesizer, every new tool has made us nervous that we were losing music’s humanity. AI is only the latest to wear that mask. And like those earlier tools, it can diminish us if we let it. But if we keep the guitar’s framework — hole, neck, keys, resonance, tuning, confidence, bridges, chords, receptivity — then AI can become one more partner in the long, human song.

Because if you wanna make a song — even with AI at the table — you still have to give it life from your own heart.

Music has never only been about sound. It has always been about the life inside it.