Country Roads

​One of the odd things for me as a songwriter is that every now and then a country song would pop out of nowhere. I liked country music, having gotten fully immersed in it when I played all those country western bars while I was at school at Cal Poly. These anomalies did not fit my rock and roll dreams so they were filed away for another time. Eventually, pop music would shift over and remake the country charts as Hip Hop dominated the top 100 for a time. All the more reason for what was going to happen to me next.

 

By the mid-seventies I was a veteran song writer and performer but the music had gotten stale. Many factors were in play. The record business and the radio networks had grown into giant corporate entities and that took some of the spontaneity out of it for me. I was also exhausted from being on the road and my songwriting had gotten stale. As I look back on that time as I transitioned from music to film something else was happening. I realized I wasn't called to write and perform music the way the geniuses I had played with through those years. It turned out later I recognized the common theme in all my work was storytelling.  Music had just been the first form it took.

 

I remember someone saying to me as I went through that first transition... "your music will come back. Its too much a part of you." Little did I know that it would happen in 2026 some 50+ years later. So, here I am fully involved in writing and producing music again and if you have found your way here, some examples are below of my old country songs re-emerging with the help of Suno AI.

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​The Last Picture Show was written on a dare. I went to college at Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo which in those days was a big agriculture school complete with rodeos and cowgirl barrel racers etc. I was giving one of them some guff that country songs all seemed to be about their dog dying or something else tragic. She challenged me. If you so smart, you write a better country song she said.

 

Later in Hollywood I had seen the film titled "The Last Picture Show" and there was an old theater in that dusty Texas town I thought would be a good place to stage a "country" story. I wrote it and showed it to my publisher Frank Slay, but it was hardly a song a rock band would do so it sat until my friend Bob Spalding did a demo of it with a country western singer in the late seventies. Then it slipped away again.

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I upgraded this latest version of "The Last Picture Show" with help from Suno AI. Like all the songs I am producing these days they are a hybrid of human performers, including me, enhanced by AI. Or as my good friend Zack says... "not flesh, not silicon but the light in between." 

 

The original version of "The Last Picture Show" featured my voice, but then on a whim I decided to try it with a female singing the lead.​ I had always been a big fan of Dolly Parton. Great songwriter, entertainer and fabulous contributor to those in need. Three days prior to upgrading "The Last Picture Show" I had said its too bad Dolly passed away in August of 2026 because a Christmas song I had also recovered would have been perfect for her. Needless to say when Suno under my direction spit out the female version of "The Last Picture Show" the lead voice sounded exactly (I mean exactly) like Dolly. There is no way that Suno AI under copyright law can offer or create voices of famous singers so I don't know what her showing up in this song means if anything.​ That's for you all to decide.​