I'm not a musician.
And yet… here I am.
I’m not a musician.
I’m not a singer.
I never thought of myself as someone who makes music.
And yet… here I am.
What I’ve realized recently is that I do have a way of connecting human experience, emotion, and metaphor in a way that makes something land. Sometimes it lands as a lyric. Sometimes it lands as a feeling I didn’t know how to say any other way.
That surprised me.
This space exists because I’m trying to stop explaining that away.
I’ve spent most of my life being pretty good at avoiding feelings. When they show up, especially in front of other people, I joke about it. I downplay it. I push it down. I cover it with food, work, productivity, or humor. That strategy has worked just well enough to keep me from changing it.
But it also means a lot of things never get processed, they just get buried.
Writing helps with that. Music helps even more. Not because it’s impressive or polished, but because it bypasses the part of my brain that wants to stay in control. It forces honesty. Or at least it makes dishonesty harder.
That’s the real reason this exists.
I’m calling this Not Real Music because that’s the criticism I hear in my own head before anyone else gets a chance to say it.
It’s not real music.
You didn’t earn this.
You don’t know what you’re doing.
You’re using a cheater’s tool.
Maybe all of that is true.
But here’s the part I keep coming back to: the feeling is real.
The metaphor is real.
The reaction is real.
The moment where something clicks. That’s real.
AI didn’t give me taste.
It didn’t give me intent.
It didn’t give me meaning.
It just removed friction.
And if a tool makes it easier for someone who feels deeply to actually make something instead of staying stuck in their own head, I don’t see that as cheating…
I see that as catharsis.
Something is always lost when technology moves forward. I get the sadness in that. I feel it too. But nostalgia isn’t a strategy, and purity tests don’t create anything. They just keep people quiet.
I’m done staying quiet about this part of me.
What will show up here will be messy on purpose.
Songs. Lyrics. Notes about where they came from. The metaphor underneath the melody. And the story behind the story.
Some of it will be good. Some of it won’t. All of it will be honest attempts to stop outsourcing my inner life to avoidance.
This isn’t a statement. It’s a practice.
I’m writing this mostly to myself so I can’t pretend it didn’t matter.
If anyone else happens to feel something in the process, that’s real too.
If you’re here for the ride, I wrote a companion piece that digs much deeper into the above revelation and my process for extracting max value from this exercise.