Comedian Ashley Frieze had been planning to make and release an album of comedy songs this year, but wasn’t banking on the sudden availability of Udio.com, which was made available on 10th April this year.
One week after discovering what an AI writing partner could do, Ashley released a 24 track album - Monkey Paw Cowboy, under the pseudonym The Incredible Jukebox.
Ashley said: “Once I’d started playing with the tool and seeing what it could do, I think the album was inevitable”.
He’s written the lyrics to all of the songs, which are all in the style of country music.
“I’ve never particularly been into country music, but it’s clear that this is a good genre for comedy songs. The AI model seems to know how to deliver a comedy line in a way that’s tragically and naively earnest.”
Ashley describes this whole project as a writing experiment which became all consuming, keeping him up late into the night over the week of making it, fitting it around other commitments.
“Writing with an AI requires several iterations of redrafts and re-generations, and comes up with surprising results. You can’t really steer it, but you can re-prompt with different lyrics, and re-generate until something that sounds right pops out.”
The result is a mixed bag of songs of different idioms. Some of them clearly reference existing songs, such as the antidote to Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much”, “That’d Really Impress Me”. Some are character pieces, like a Dolly Parton song about Christmas rows, and a Patsy Cline song about feminism. The usually misogynistic Bro-Country is put through the wringer with a song about consent and emasculation.
Other songs are just stand-alone comedy songs that explore a subject.
“I went through my notebooks of things I’d never been able to take beyond just an idea, and realised that I knew how to write them for the AI to sing. It’s an almost out-of-body experience, hearing a better song than I might have written and performed coming out of the AI, yet still recognisably in my voice.”
The album culminates in a disturbing Taylor Swift pop banger, which doesn’t know how it feels about Taylor herself, followed by an example of what happens when the AI goes wrong and starts rambling incoherently.
Monkey Paw Cowboy is available on all streaming platforms including Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music and Amazon.
