Hallelujah

I heard there was a secret chord,

That David played and it pleased the Lord.

But you don’t really care for music do ya’?

Even from a young age, pining has always come very naturally to me. It was after a blissful three-weeks of “going together” in third grade, that April Fitts informed me our relationship had ended. That’s when the pining started.

I’d ride my Huffy past her house at least three times a day. I realize now that technically I was stalking, but if you’re in third grade and doing it on a Huffy I contend that it’s pining.

There are many things in life that you can pine over. However, for me, it has always been lost or unfulfilled love that inspires my best work.

Writing and pining go together like peas and carrots. By seventh grade I was keeping a journal with all of my pining tucked neatly inside of it.

There were Heathers and Theresas in there.

Michelles and Jennifers.

Sad poems. Tales of heartache. Lovesick confessions.

Maybe there’s a God above,

But all I’ve ever learned of love,

Was how to shoot at somebody who outdrew ya’.

Around the time I was 15 I started writing songs. I soon realized that songwriting offered the best platform for my particular brand of pining. It wasn’t long before I was putting melodies to my songs and that’s when I knew I needed a guitar.

There was a pawn shop near the little league fields where I had played baseball. I had fifty bucks and a ten-speed bike, so after riding up to the store I ended up walking home with my first guitar. It wasn’t a Fender or a Gibson, but it looked like Bruce Springsteen’s telecaster and it was all mine.

I didn’t know how to play a single note so after a few weeks of cluelessly banging away on it, my dad said that I either needed to learn how to play the damn thing or keep it in the garage.

I got my mom to pop for a couple of lessons. The music store was up by Godfather’s Pizza and since I no longer owned a bike, she had to drop me off.

I remember the guy asking me what I wanted to learn to play.

I told him guitar.

“No duh, kid. Is there a song you want to learn?”

I said, “I want to play my own songs, but I don’t really know how they go yet.”

He gave me a printout with all the major chords. It had little pictures of where to put your fingers and which strings to put them on.

“Learn D, A, and G.” I remember him telling me. “You can get a lot of mileage out of those three chords.”

Wiser words have never been said. In a couple of weeks, I had them down.

I played D-A-G.

I played G-A-D.

I played A-G-D.

They all sounded different, and they all turned into songs.

“Happy Home” was the first song I wrote, but it was quickly followed by “Midnight Hearted” and an early attempt at a conceptual piece called “Matty and the Moon Dogs Play Guitar”.

I knew from the beginning that I was a lousy guitar player and an average singer at best, but the songwriting came to me very naturally. It was pining to a beat, and I would soon need a new journal to contain all of the songs I was writing.

It’s something I’ve done my whole life.

They just kind of fall from the sky and though they definitely fell more frequently when I was younger, less experienced in the ways of love and at the height of my pining—they still occasionally trickle in.

Well, there was a time when you let me know

What's really going on below

But now you never show that to me, do you?

I’ve always felt kinda special for having the ability to write songs. It’s not something that I’d brag about, but rather just one of those things that I keep pinned up on my own personal bulletin board.

A few days ago, my friend Rob Schwartz posted a video of a guy demonstrating how with just a few AI programs he had created a fictional singer/songwriter with actual songs.

It was insane.

All he needed was a few prompts, a basic grasp of musical genres and the right AI tools. With literally the click of a button he got real songs in just seconds.

And they weren’t bad.

The lyrics weren’t Bob Dylan level, but they were decent enough to blend in with most of the crap you hear on the radio today.

And to be completely honest, they were just as good if not better than half of the songs I’ve written over the last 40 years. Though there are many gems in my catalog, there are certainly lots of B-sides as well.

The video disheartened me.

It’s just another example of AI showing me how un-special I am. Another case of how easily something that I take so much pride in being able to do can now be done by a machine at a legitimately reasonable level of proficiency.

And no one had to pawn their 10-speed bike to get them.

About a year ago I injured my left hand fairly seriously. I won’t go into the details, but my middle finger is about an inch shorter now.

As soon as I did it, playing guitar was the first thing I thought about. I feared that I’d never hear my songs again. After all, no one else knows how to play them.

Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath has two missing fingertips and Django Reinhardt only had two functioning fingers. Jerry Garcia was also missing a finger, but it was on his strumming hand so not really an issue.

It’s taken a lot of practice over the last year and I’ve had to learn how to make chords in different places, but I can still play my songs and that’s all that matters.

Lately, I’ve been learning how to play Jeff Buckley’s version of “Hallelujah”.

Musically it’s not that hard, but there are six verses so it’s a lot of lyrics. When you learn how to play a song you really get to know those lyrics and they’re beautiful. Leonard Cohen originally wrote the song. It’s a masterclass in pining.

It gives me hope.

Hope that AI won’t be able to create something like that.

Surely AI can’t pine better than a real human is what I’m hanging on to.

I don’t want AI to be able to write a song like Hallelujah.

It’s not that I’m anti-technology.

It’s not that I fear progress.

When most people talk about AI they talk about job loss. And that’s definitely a concern. But this is different. I just fear that one day we’ll get to a point where there’s nothing we can do that AI can’t.

Being able to pull those songs out of the sky made me feel special. I suffered for those songs.

But now, all you really need is an algorithm.

I’d give it the finger, but…

And it's not a cry, that you hear at night

It's not somebody, who's seen the light

It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.

Thanks for reading. I'll see you again real soon.