As someone who can't read music or properly play an instrument to compose, I had a stupid Greg Lake-like Christmas song idea late one night and did it – I created an AI song for Christmas using the controversial AI program Suno.

The use of generative AI in art feels weird and uncomfortable for me. Other people's synthetic compositions are clogging up channels that should be platforming human-created ideas. And yet, out of curiosity, I wanted to try this composition method out for myself so see if the current AI tools could bridge my skills gap.

I used several musical prompts for the song such as 'acoustic Christmas song', 'handclaps', 'sleigh bells', '70s production', 'choir harmonies on the chorus' the title 'Because Jesus Was A Prog Rocker Too' and one other lyric 'a star exploded in the midnight sky'. AI did the rest itself.

Suno generated four ideas for me in around 20 minutes and one stood out immediately. The results were alarming 'real'-sounding, and alarmingly catchy too. You have been warned.

The lyrics have a slightly uncanny style, and sometimes make no sense (but I don't mind that, I've listened to nonsense lyrics my whole life). AI has scraped a billion ideas and come up with something fairly cohesive, and I don't know if I'm proud of it or not. It's certainly entertained me, and I had fun learning how to create a lyric video for it using stock footage, and two small AI generated segments (you'll definitely detect which ones).

After I'd made it I knew it needed some human-led musical embellishment. Ian Sturgess came to my aid, adding more handclaps, sleigh bells, tubular bells and synth arpeggios to build it up. I then decided to call us The Buttered Parsnips; this is my first, and probably only, 'band'.

I don't intend to publish this on any streaming platforms or use this for any personal financial gain. The best use for this is to provide a giggle, some debate and to try and get some cash in the pocket of Crisis for Christmas.

You can like it, you can hate it. I can take the criticisms and brickbats. It's an experiment that's been fun, really, but I'm fully onboard with the argument for AI to be kept to a monitored minimum, responsibly, and for real music and real artists to be supported above all else. I don't intend to do this again – I had one idea, this was it.

Thank you for reading, listening and possibly donating. And a very merry un-AI Christmas to us all 🎄

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