In the fall of 2000, I was living in San Francisco, and working on the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s project to extend service to SFO, San Francisco’s International Airport. The project was approaching its conclusion, and I was nearing one of those “life inflection points”. Our band, Simple Charlie, was playing steady gigs around town, had done a few recording sessions, and had built a healthy following.
Still, I wasn’t doing great personally. I was stretched thin from life and feeling burned out. I was spending a lot of time alone, writing music and spending hours recording into a simple MiniDisc setup in our little apartment. I recorded a bunch of solo tracks, just me and my guitar, over the course of August and September that year.
In October, I took 10 of those songs, assembled them into an album, and made about 300 CD-R’s that I shared with friends, family, and strangers who asked for one while I was busking in Union Square. I named it “Tunes From the Pomegranate”, a reference to my time in San Francisco coming to an end, like Persephone in Hades, and these seeds I had eaten would bring me back.
Somehow, I still have a copy of the original disc. The cover sleeve is lost to the ages, but this has survived in my keepsake chest for a long time.
One month later, at the end of October, I left San Francisco for a new job in New York. I had only a handful of the CDs left.
Now, I will be the first to admit that listening to that album now brings up some interesting feelings. Some of it is pride, some of it is cringe. Like I said, I was pretty burned out. And some of those songs were written, practiced a few times, and then recorded. Almost all the songs are the first take. There was no tracking, no producer, no mixing or mastering. It was naked in the truest sense. And it shows.
I wish I could take some pride in those shortcomings, like I overcame a lack of fancy studio equipment and music industry connections. But that was not my early takeaway from it when I looked back a few years later. To me, it was an example of my “hesitancies”: to ask for help, to plan well, to take time and polish.
Years passed…
When I listen to it now, I can remember exactly what I was thinking and doing back then. And I’ve come to realize that that is the lesson I take away from it. I’ve never been someone who journals my experiences and feelings. I’ve been writing these songs since I picked up a guitar in 1995. They are my journals, my time capsules, my memorials to the person I was when I wrote them and played them. Yes, parts of it are still somewhat cringe-y, but frankly so were parts of me back then. It’s a moment that was captured.
Which brings me to today. If you’ve been following me, you know that I’ve been exploring and blogging about the uses of AI, in particular related to work and education. Over the past few weeks, my brother Bill has introduced me to Suno.com, an AI music generator. It’s been an exciting few weeks.
Working with AI for business purposes has been a pretty simple proposition: it’s like a coworker, a collaborator, who I can consult with on challenges, leverage for best practices, and use as a foil for thinking.
Using it for creative purposes has been a very different experience, Suno in particular. It’s like having the world’s greatest cover band, able to play in any genre, in the studio with me.
With that in mind, I started remixing Tunes From the Pomegranate on Suno. I started with the original recordings of the songs, and then used Suno’s tools to make new versions. Over the course of the process, I generated about 300 versions/tracks from the original 10 songs being remixed in different styles.
And so… I present to you “Tunes From the Pomegranate (2025)”.
If you would rather play the tunes here, I have worked up a simple player for Suno:
[suno_jukebox ids=“3224f681-a45f-4f2e-8a17-56feddcd7775|Sweetness,f71d1877-a02d-4a26-ac17-865dba57a868|Harcut,c325dd03-fcb5-4f2f-94f2-d926b72f00db|Wedding Song,f59edbf9-1b9a-4bee-b21f-4dadc08ec999|Have Love Will Come,5467aef3-787d-42d2-9bf2-c926fc5bd920|All Rise,6225098a-19df-4517-b228-f6f9ff1dd34e|Loo,5a854d28-384d-43c8-b8d3-10e2bdad13a2|2Far4U,b694de31-44d8-42c3-902d-a8523c667dc3|Jenny,6cd1f00d-77a4-4f97-b3a3-3785893697f3|Symphony,d134f8c1-9f51-4437-af4c-4d91290c858c|Counting on the Sun” title=“Tunes From The Pomegranate”]
I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it.