The Evolution
How my AI music obsession started, where it took me, and why I stepped back.
Messing about
The very first experiments really didn't require much work. Back in 2024 I used an app called Donna to put a friend's outrageously funny WhatsApp message to music, and it actually turned out to be really catchy! I loved it, it made her laugh, and then I forgot about it for a year. Then one day, it was my twin cousins' birthday and I was looking for Donna when I stumbled upon Suno. To test it out, I told ChatGPT what I admired about these 2 cousins and let it come up with some lyrics. They weren't quite right, so I made a lot of changes and then fed them into Suno. I also experimented with feeding Suno my own original poetry from my angst-filled past (those will NEVER see the light of day) and I was absolutely amazed at the result. That's where my obsession started.
The floodgates
After a few experimental tracks I realised I wanted to have a theme. I kept gravitating towards sounds that reminded me of my Southern African heritage so I was heavy on the traditional instruments and almost always prompted for either afrobeats or amapiano vibes. Or a combination of both. But the other theme that I was going for was “positive vibes”. Sunshine Sound was the first one I actually released. I was so excited when I convinced a local lounge to play it on their sound system! Wake and Rise (Kwayedza) went straight onto my morning playlist, because if a song can nudge you into a better day, why not. SING|DANCE|LOVE|GLOWwas my little reminder of the things that lift me when I'm low. I also started spending more and more time perfecting the lyrics. I know perfection is subjective, and indeed the lyrics in my released tracks are not exactly poetic masterpieces, but I always wanted them to be “anthemy”, easy to sing along to, and just fun. And somewhere in there I decided I wanted to share my new found excitement through a YouTube Channel and a Spotify profile.
Friendship, and a bit of home
The positive vibes continued with a couple of tracks that are really about people. Two Stars, One Beam is about one particular person who is very special to me. Shamwari(“friend” in Shona) is about friendship in general, which, full disclosure, I'm not always brilliant at once distance and timezones get involved. Slipping a bit of Zimbabwe into accessible, danceable pop turned out to be one of my favourite parts of the whole thing.
Getting ambitious (and not finishing)
At my most ambitious I started a whole project called Back to School. They were songs that could genuinely teach things to thirteen-year-olds. Genetics. Chemical bonds. Catchy andaccurate, which is far harder than it sounds. And then… I didn't finish it. It's still sitting there, mostly done, and I honestly think that's because of the phase you'll read about next.
The wobble
The more I made, the more one question kept popping up: what was Suno actually trained on, and did the artists behind it agree to any of this? But (perhaps selfishly) I didn't want to stop because I was just having too much fun. But I didn't want to pretend, either. So I put out a track called AI Art Ethics Commitment, basically to say it out loud: I know this is a little bit, let's say, controversial, and I'm not going to act like it isn't. I went down a proper rabbit hole of other tools beyond Suno too, like ai.mogen, but they were either not as user friendly or they just no longer existed when I was doing my research. So I just… stopped.
One year on
I kept wrestling with the thought of taking down the tracks I'd uploaded, and eventually I decided I'd keep them up but use Suno one more time to create a proper bookend. One Year Onwas the track that closed that chapter. And any day now, I will be re-releasing the tracks as an album called “for the record” so that I can still wake up to “Kwayedza” after I hastily deleted all the tracks from Spotify a little while ago. Now, in May 2026 I've already got a new obsession inducing rabbit hole to explore, and I'm okay with that.