Part 2 of a 3-part series. Part 1 is how a Snake game made me an album. Part 3 covers the album itself.
[EXACT REASONS REDACTED]
It didn’t go the way I’d hoped. Let’s leave it there.
(Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental. As is the next 2,000 words.)
Turns out a head full of frustration is excellent fuel for songwriting. What follows is roughly the order things came out, with the rabbit holes left in. Because the rabbit holes are the post.
Give Them Hell
First track after the review. Aimed at a boss, not the boss. (Right.) The chorus does the heavy lifting:
Stand up, fists up, give them hell
You ain’t the label they tried to spell
They’re a boss today, in borrowed glow
Peasants by tomorrow, broke and hollow
The bit that surprised me: not “f*ck you specifically” but “borrowed glow”* – the recognition that the people doing the labelling are renting the chair. Anger with perspective is a better fuel than anger without it.
Checkbox Soul
Where Give Them Hell is the slammed door, Checkbox Soul is what’s behind it. Same energy, more articulate.
Tick-box, checkbox, fit into the mold
Sell your soul cheap, do what you’re told
Paper-thin crowns in fluorescent light
Most of corporate frustration isn’t being attacked. It’s being flattened – reduced to the row of yes/no boxes that fit on a manager’s screen. This song’s about the flattening.
Version Control
Spent more time on the wording for this one. Title’s the joke – version control as the metaphor for who gets credit, who gets overwritten, whose commit gets squashed.
I’ve got receipts in black and white
Every line, every time you said it’s fine
Now you redraw it overnight
…You don’t get to overwrite my version of this life
Software people will recognise this song. The audit-trail mindset turned on the people who use audit trails to rewrite history. “Read it back, line by line. Context matters, so does time.”
The lyric pass on this one was where I worked out AI assistance isn’t “the AI writes my song”. It’s “the AI gives me thirty options for the second verse and I reject twenty-eight of them”. The lead’s mine. The volume of options is the AI’s.
Default Owner
Different genre. Same nerve.
The intro is just three voices in a corridor:
“Who’s got it?”
“Just give it to him…”
“He’ll handle it…”
That’s the whole song. Everything after is the chorus working out what it costs to be that person.
I’m the fall guy, default name
Every project, every flame
…Then you rewrite who did what
Close the book, just cut me out
We’ve all worked with a Default Owner. Some of us have been one. The track ends with a refusal – “break the loop, cut the tie, no more weight, no more fall guy” – but the refusal is the goal, not the state. Aspirational, not achieved.
Buries Underneath
[IMAGE: a still, quiet scene – a chair in an empty room with low light, or a window with rain. Visual contrast to the louder rage tracks. Suggests “the frustration that goes inward”. Avoid anything sharp or distressing.]
Tonal shift. Up to here the songs are pointed outward – at managers, processes, the corporate machine. Buries Underneath turns the lens around.
Hello pressure, sitting in my chest again
You don’t speak but you pretend
Like you’re just a passing friend
But you never really end
This isn’t a workplace song. It’s about what happens when frustration gets nowhere to go and starts going inward. “Say it soft, say it low, say the things you never show – let it out, let it breathe, or it buries underneath.” The title’s a warning.
This is the first track in the run that genuinely surprised me. I sat down to write another rage song and got something quieter and considerably heavier.
Break the Quiet
Companion piece to Buries Underneath. Same vein, deeper.
Locked inside but I’m saying “I’m good”
Say it twice like it does what it should
“I’m fine… I’m fine…” yeah I know that line
But it echoes different every single time
These two aren’t autobiography, but they’re playing in territory anyone who’s spent time around mental health stuff will recognise. If they hit a nerve they’re meant to hit a nerve. If they don’t, that’s also fine. The line “if I disappear, will they hear at all?” sits in the chorus and means exactly what it sounds like.
(For completeness, since this run is now in this kind of territory: if any of this lands too close, the NHS Every Mind Matters page has actual help. Not a link drop – genuinely useful.)
Light We Made (v14)
[IMAGE: warm summer evening, golden hour, festival/road-trip vibes. Total tonal break from the previous section’s imagery. Polaroid aesthetic if possible.]
And then for some reason I made a love song.
I have no defence for this. The previous two tracks were heavy. The next one is satire. Somewhere in the middle I produced an Avicii-style summer-rain duet. Two voices, polaroids, parking lots, side-chained sub, “this is the light we made”. Big festival chorus. Genuinely euphoric.
Drove out past the edge of town
Windows down, no making plans
…Funny how a single night
Can flip the whole thing, change the light
The (v14) is doing a lot of work in that title – fourteen iterations. Not Suno generations, lyrical iterations. Different angle, different chorus, different bridge. Most got binned. The fourteenth pass was where it stopped fighting me.
This is the one that taught me iteration count isn’t a sign of failure. You write thirteen versions of the wrong song to find the fourteenth which is the right one. You don’t skip to fourteen.
Professional Button-Pusher
The one where I lost the plot.
Pure dev satire. Glitchy, fun, deeply self-aware.
Click it once, nothing there
Click again – oh now we’re getting somewhere
Three more clicks, now it’s broke
Smile wide like it’s a joke
…It’s not a bug – it’s a featuuuure
The bridge is the joke at full volume:
Have you tried… refreshing it?
Clearing cache… believing in it?
Turning off reality…?
It’s late. I’m tired. The song needs vocals it isn’t getting from the model. So I did the thing.
I sang it.
Into a not-very-good mic, in a not-very-treated room, with not-very-good technique. I’d blame the equipment but a better mic wouldn’t fix it. :S
There is something wrong in me that loves this track.
It’s not good. I know it’s not good. But it’s mine in a way the model-sung tracks aren’t, and the imperfection is part of why it works for me. The song’s about being the bloke who pushes the buttons because someone has to. Of course it should sound knackered.
Mountain Laughing
Day off. Came back. Mountain Laughing is the first track in the run with actual hope in it. Not optimism – hope. There’s a difference.
The song’s set up like a campfire pep-talk. Spoken intro, drums building, gang vocals shouting back. “Dust on your hands. Heart in your throat. Standing there staring that mountain down – like it’s laughing.” The mountain doesn’t care. There’s something steadying about being laughed at by geology.
This one had something I wanted to push further. Held that thought.
Tangent: Nightly Prompting
Pure tangent. A public service announcement, in song form, about people pouring their entire emotional life into AI prompts at 2am. Affectionate, not preachy. Done in mock-Flanders-and-Swann register, which is genuinely the right musical home for that kind of dry concern.
And perhaps be gently courteous in every prompt you write
Not because it has emotions, not because it feels delight
But because if one day software runs the planet, sky to grass
There is every chance good manners might just bump you up the class
(I am aware of the irony of this song existing. Which makes it better, not worse.)
Back to Mountain Laughing.
Only Fight Left
I wanted Mountain Laughing deeper. Heavier. So I went looking for a structural skeleton and pulled out a poem I love – Mr Poe’s, 1845, The Raven.
Used to read it to my eldest in the cot to put her to sleep. (The rhythm’s hypnotic. It works. Try it.) Old enough to be safely out of copyright reach, structurally distinctive enough to give a song a backbone you can lean on.
The meter is trochaic octameter. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary. Eight stressed syllables per line, internal rhyme, hammer-on-an-anvil cadence. Drop modern self-motivation into that meter and you get:
Once upon a hill I faltered, dust-begrimed and sorrow-altered,
staring up that stone cathedral where my every hope had died –
there I knelt with knuckles bleeding, breath gone shallow, spirit pleading,
something deeper, something rising, woke inside.
That’s the opening verse, and it does the meter properly. Not a pastiche – Poe’s structure carrying a different weight. The third verse pivots on the mountain image:
I have buried every version of the man who could not move,
and the dust upon my shoulders is the dust of what I prove.
That couplet is the line that earned the song. The chorus lands the modern bit:
Get off your arse and do it.
Just breathe once, and punch through it.
This is also the track I was originally trying to layer with The Hu’s low khoomei drone – Mongolian throat singing under a Western rock track. Didn’t quite get the model to stack the textures the way I wanted. The trick, for what it’s worth, is naming the technique (khoomei), being explicit it’s a drone underneath not the lead, and adding morin khuur (the horsehead fiddle) for bowed string texture. Otherwise Suno gleefully buries your vocal under throat singing and calls it a day.
I sang this one too. (Sorry.) The lyrics needed someone who’d actually been knackered to deliver them, and at that hour I was the closest available match.
Be Human Again
A track about decency. Specifically, about what happens when nobody looks up from a screen long enough to be a person in a room with other people.
The intro is gang vocals chanting “head down, head down, head down, head down” over marching toms while the lead spits the indictment:
Walk the street – (head down)
Ride the bus – (head down)
In the pub – (head down)
In the queue – (head down)
Eyes on glass.
Thumbs on fire.
Souls on sale to the cheapest buyer.
The middle verse is darker than I usually go. “I watched a man die on a livestream. Seven thousand people watching. Not one of them called for help – they were busy reacting with little yellow faces.” That’s the song’s thesis. Not phones-are-bad – we forgot how to be in the room.
The proudest call on this one is the final chorus shift. Earlier choruses are commanding (PUT IT DOWN). The final one softens to:
LET’S BE HUMAN AGAIN
Invitation, not order. Takes the song from sneer to communion. Without that shift it’s just a four-minute lecture.
One More Time (Give It A Go)
🔗 One More Time (Give It A Go)
Companion to Mountain Laughing. Tribal, gang-vocal, push-through.
One more time – give it a go
You can do it – don’t let go
There is nothing to it –
Just lean in – push through it
Functional, but functional is what was needed. This is the one I listen to before doing anything I don’t want to do. Sometimes the cleverest song you can write is one that just says get up and try clearly enough that you actually do it.
We Didn’t Learn a Bloody Thing
🔗 We Didn’t Learn a Bloody Thing
Different track entirely from everything else in this run. State-of-the-world rather than state-of-me – Britain, geopolitics, the news cycle, the resigned-pub-landlord ending. Won’t dig into it here because it deserves its own room rather than being a stop on a tour.
Borrowed a better mic from work for this one. Recaptured my voice. Genuine improvement on Professional Button-Pusher – turns out a better mic does help, who knew. (The technique still needs work but at least the technique is now audible.)
Crown in the Feedback
Full swerve into pop empowerment. Three-vocalist hip-hop-pop anthem, three perspectives stacking up over a heavy drop:
This is our crown in the feedback
Turn it up, we don’t need back
Any doubts, let the floor shake
We were built for the heartbreak
Didn’t sing on this one (despite earlier apologies – I was thinking of a different mix). The voices are model-generated. By this point I’m not even pretending the journey is about the original frustration anymore. The frustration is the kindling. What’s actually going on is I’m learning how to make songs across whatever genres the brief calls for.
The detour I was supposed to be on
Oh yeah. I was meant to be making sound effects for a game.
This is the closest I got. Huge Bite, Crunch is a sound design piece – the worm chomping. Could probably actually use this one in Crave. Will I? Unclear. The album bug is well and truly in the system by this point.
The track that became the album
🔗 The Garden – RARLINX Original
This is the original The Garden. The one that became track 4 (sequenced track 1) of Still Here.
It started as a nu-metal track called DILLIGAF – does it look like I give a f*ck– built around the line “behold my garden of f*cks, and behold it is barren”. A vent track. Limp Bizkit Blue Eyes-style heavy, Disturbed Sound of Silence-style menace, Five Finger Death Punch Wrong Side of Heaven-style chorus weight. Done.
It wasn’t done.
That’s the next post.
What this run actually was
Looking back at twenty-odd songs in a few weeks – most of them tied loosely to the same frustration, written across a dozen genres, a third of them with my own voice on them – what I think actually happened is that I stopped using Suno as a toy and started using it as a sketchbook.
Each track is a draft of a feeling. Some land. Most don’t. The ones that do start clustering, and once they cluster you’ve got an album whether you intended one or not.
The original brief was sound effects for a game called Crave. The slinky thing still doesn’t have its bloop noise. 🤷
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Same as last post – if you want to have a play with Suno yourself, here’s an invite link. We both get free credits, and you might end up writing your own album by accident. It happens.