Part 3 of a 3-part series. Part 1: how a Snake game made me an album. Part 2: what frustration sounds like. This is where the album actually arrives.
Listen to the whole thing here: 🔗 Still Here – full playlist on Suno
The album description, written after the fact when I was trying to work out what the seven tracks I’d accidentally made were actually about:
Six tracks. One man. The performance, the unravelling, the burning, the morning after, and the hand reached back for whoever’s still in the dark. It was always a Tuesday.
(Yes, six tracks in the description, seven in the tracklist. I’ll fix that. Probably.)
I made the songs in this order: The Garden, I’m Fine, In Plain Sight, After it all, Tuesday, Here I Am, Nowhere In Particular. That’s tracks 4, 3, 2, 5, 6, 1, 7 in the running order. The intro was the second-to-last one written. The opener as you hear it (Here I Am) only made sense as track one after the rest of the album existed to make it ironic.
I didn’t plan that. I worked it out at track six.
The brief that started it
Post 2 ended with a track called The Garden – RARLINX Original. That was the seed. Working title DILIGAF – does it look like I give a fck. Heavy nu-metal, three-minute vent track. Barren garden of fcks. Done.
I asked the band for another song. Same Suno style prompt and the same lyrical sensibility. “Same band, same world, different angle.”
Six hours later I had seven tracks.
The Garden (track 1 created, track 4 sequenced)
The first cut was just a vibe – garden as metaphor, DILIGAF as the punchline, big riffs. Functional. Not enough.
The pivot came when I described the actual story instead of the vibe: rage at the start, exhaustion in the middle, liberation at the end. Once I had three acts the song wrote itself. The f*ck-count verse became the breaking point. The chorus became the cold quiet on the other side. DILIGAF ended up at the end as a full stop instead of an opener.
Here we go again, same old song and dance
You open up your mouth and I assume the stance
Anyone who’s ever sat through that meeting knows exactly what “the stance” is. Specific enough to mean it, vague enough to share it.
The end of the song surprised me. I went in thinking it’d land on rage. It actually lands on this:
I gave my last fuck a Viking funeral
Bought a drink, didn’t even wave, my give-a-damn’s busted
…This isn’t defeat, this is what the other side of done feels like
…Welcome to the garden
That’s not anger. That’s exhausted liberation. The song’s actually about the moment after you stop fighting – and once I clocked that, the whole rest of the album fell into place. Every other track on Still Here is, in some way, written from inside that garden. The one that’s barren. The one that’s freeing.
🔗 The Garden – Still Here (album cut) – basically the same song as the original with a few words tightened for flow.
I’m Fine (working title: Fine)
Two voices in the same head, in arguing.
The first voice is composed, cheerful, deflecting. “Oh. You’re back. Yeah. Come in. I’ll put the kettle on.” Spoken, calm, almost welcoming.
The second voice cuts in:
V1: Perfectly composed
V2: Completely coming apart
V1: Got it all together
V2: At the seams
V1: Totally in control
V2: Of absolutely nothing
The bridge is the two voices fighting in real time – “are we okay? / yes / are we sure? / absolutely / because last time – / that was different / was it?” And the chorus is the line that holds the whole thing together:
I’m not crazy
I just live here
Rent’s paid up til the end of the year
Started as just Fine. The I’m matters. Denial in the title. You don’t say Fine unsolicited – you say I’m fine because someone asked.
In Plain Sight (working title: Oh.)
The moment you accidentally tell the truth in the middle of saying nothing.
I was just talking.
Describing my week.
Normal conversation.
And somewhere in the middle of a sentence
I heard myself.
Really heard myself.
…oh.
The track is patient. Clean guitar, slow, room to breathe. It needs you to lean in. The line that does the heaviest lifting:
When did tired become the whole answer?
When did tired stop being a symptom
and become a personality?
That’s the question the rest of the album spends its time answering.
A note on the band
Quick detour. Three tracks in I went back through the Suno style prompts. The Garden, I’m Fine, and In Plain Sight share the exact same style prompt. Word for word:
Nu-metal, alternative metal, heavy distorted guitar riffs, down-tuned bass groove, orchestral strings, aggressive rap verses with melodic sung choruses, mid-tempo escalating to explosive full-band breakdown, spoken word sections over near-silence, cinematic bridge with string swell, raw defiant energy resolving to cold liberation, male vocals shifting between low menacing delivery and powerful melodic chorus, late 90s early 2000s heavy rock production
Identical. Not laziness – cohesion. Once a song lands, you don’t reinvent the band for the next track. You hand them new lyrics and let the same instruments do their thing. Variation comes from the lyric and the performance, not the production. That’s what gives an album its skin.
The three “stillness” tracks (After it all, Tuesday, Nowhere In Particular) drift the prompt slightly to let the air in. But they’re still recognisably the same band. Just exhaling.
If you’re using Suno to make a record: pin the prompt. Let the lyrics do the work.
After it all
This is the track where the album told me what it was about.
Nothing.
Just –
nothing.
For the first time
in a long time
nothing.
…good morning.
Single acoustic guitar. No rush. The first proper exhale on the album.
The bridge is what made me realise the songs were talking to each other. It explicitly callbacks three earlier tracks:
I burned the garden down.
I laughed in the spiral.
I heard myself finally.
I came up for air.
Garden = The Garden. Spiral = I’m Fine (“top of the spiral, looking down”). Heard myself = In Plain Sight. By writing track four I’d accidentally written a track that referenced the previous three. That wasn’t a plan, that was the songs working out their own arc and me catching up.
After this track I knew I had something cohesive on my hands.
Tuesday
Some shifts happen on a Tuesday. The whole album lives on this idea – the album description literally ends “It was always a Tuesday.”
It’s always a Tuesday.
Never anything dramatic.
No thunder.
No signs.
Just a Tuesday.
And something shifts.
Two voices, harmonising darker underneath each other. Slow burning, hypnotic groove, longest track on the album. Earns the length.
The thing I didn’t realise about this song until I went back through the lyrics: it’s the one track on the album that breaks the fourth wall. The bridge is direct address to whoever’s listening:
Hey.
You.
Yeah.
I know what time it is.
I know why you’re still awake.
I know the arithmetic.
I’ve done it.
Came up short every time.
…Short isn’t zero.
Tired isn’t done.
Quiet isn’t empty.
And Tuesday always becomes Wednesday.
Always.
That’s the “hand reached back for whoever’s still in the dark” bit of the album description. Lives right here. Tuesday is the rescue line in the middle of the record.
Here I Am
By track six I’d worked out the album was about masks, cracks, and what’s underneath. So Here I Am is the loudest possible mask. Written sixth, sequenced first.
Up at six
Shoes shined
Everything exactly
Where I left it
…Coffee while it’s hot
Emails before eight
Ahead of it
On top of it
Completely across it
Absolutely
Nailing
This
Confident. Almost cocky. Big riff energy, swagger, momentum. Hits from zero. The version of yourself you put on when you walk into the room.
The trick: the chorus appears three times. Same words every time. But by the third chorus the cracks in the verses have shifted what those words mean. The bridge gives the game away:
There was a moment
Just a moment
Standing in the kitchen
At half eleven
For no particular reason
Where something –
Anyway.
Fine.
Back to it.
That’s the album’s whole thesis in eight lines. The mask doesn’t break. It just briefly stops working, and the wearer immediately puts it back on.
It works as track 1 because it’s a lie. You don’t know it’s a lie until you’ve heard the rest. And the trick to writing it: I couldn’t have written this song first. I had to know what the album was actually about, then go back and write the door it walks through.
Nowhere In Particular
Closer.
Left at half eleven
No particular reason
Indicated right out of habit
Nowhere to be
Passed a fox doing something suspicious
Near a roundabout
Didn’t judge him
He didn’t judge me
Mutual respect
Between creatures
Going nowhere fast
Clean dry guitar, deadpan delivery. Indie rock more than nu-metal. Not the explosive resolution you’d expect after six tracks of weight – just a drive with no destination.
The whole album is people not seeing each other (heads down, performing, masks on). The closer is one man and a fox, both committed to their own thing, mutual respect. That’s the resolution. Not triumph. Not breakdown. Both creatures going nowhere fast and somehow that’s enough.
The pre-chorus 2 has a callback to the album title:
I don’t know what I’m driving toward
Don’t know what I left behind
…But my hands are on the wheel
And the engine’s doing its thing
And somewhere between
Here and wherever
I remembered something
I’m still here
And the outro lands the deadpan:
Ended up in Dorset.
Don’t know how.
Turned around.
Tank’s nearly empty.
Worth it.
That’ll do.
🔗 Nowhere In Particular – Still Here
What it’s actually about
None of this is autobiography. The Garden started life pointed at a specific situation (work, mostly, won’t pretend otherwise after three posts of context), but the rest is character work playing on aspects everyone bumps into. Imposter syndrome. Performing fine when you’re not. Hearing yourself say something out loud and noticing it was true. The slow shift. The morning after. The drive with no destination.
Not at the levels in the songs, hopefully. But the kernel of the feeling – yeah, we’ve all had that.
What I didn’t notice while writing it, only afterwards, was that the songs were talking to each other. After it all references three previous tracks. Tuesday is the one with the direct address (“I know why you’re still awake”). Here I Am is the same trick as I’m Fine at a different volume. Nowhere In Particular contains the album title in its pre-chorus. The whole record is more cohesive than I’d given it credit for at the time.
I don’t want to oversell that – I didn’t sit down with a concept document. But songs that come out of the same place at the same time tend to share blood whether or not you intended them to. Worth knowing if you’re using Suno or any other tool to make a record. Don’t try to make them disagree. Let the threads form.
On the AI side
This is AI-assisted. Suno for the audio, Claude for lyric work and structure. Not “the AI wrote my album”. More like – I’d push, it’d push back, I’d reject most of what came out, keep the bits that landed.
The honest split: AI takes the lead on mechanical stuff (meter, where a verse is dragging, rhymes that don’t quite scan). I take the lead on whether anything means anything. When that split works the songs are better than I’d write alone. When it doesn’t I get a draft that’s too tidy and has to be roughed up again.
Worked example: The Garden started as a generic DILLIGAF concept. I described the actual story in one sentence with too many F-bombs. The AI restructured it into three acts. I rejected the first full draft for being too clean. We landed on the version where the f*ck-count verse is the inventory and the actual climax is the Viking funeral and the welcome to the garden.
Push, push back. Reject. Keep the bits that landed.
Verdict
Asked for my own review of the finished album, all I had to say was “it’s fine”. Deadpan. Not many re-rolls, minimal mark-up, everything sat where it should.
Which is exactly the right review for an album called Still Here. 🤷
🔗 Listen to Still Here on Suno
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If you’ve made it through all three posts and you fancy having a go yourself, here’s a Suno invite link. We both get free credits, and your accidental album might be better than mine. (Probably.)