Listen or subscribe in your favorite player:

In this solo episode, Scott Snibbe explores an unexpected intersection of AI, music, and love. After discovering the generative music platform Suno, he created deeply personalized songs for members of his family—turning their life stories, struggles, and triumphs into hyper-specific “love songs” in the Buddhist sense of wishing others happiness.

As he shares the music and the emotional reactions it evokes, Scott reflects on how art (now amplified by AI) can transform even painful memories into meaning, lift low moods, and open the heart.

The power of music

Scott Snibbe: I’m an artist but I’ve always been a little jealous of musicians (and music in general) because it’s the only medium that can instantly change your mood. The songs that lifted my spirits changed over the years—from my parents’ Doobie Brothers and Donna Summer, to my teenage love of New Order. Ironically, Blue Monday was the track that lifted so many of us up who came of age in the 80s, from a new wave band that made happy music about sad things.

Into my twenties, it was the art-rock of Sonic Youth and Stereolab that fed euphoric altered states of consciousness as I made art late into the night. And still today, when I’m feeling down, putting on a track that feels happy, or reminds me of happy times, can instantly get me out of a funk.

A couple months ago, my wife and daughter asked that our family avoid the holiday excess by giving only handmade gifts for Christmas. What came to mind for me immediately, was music. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a musician. Sure, I’ve played the flute since I was a boy, but I wasn’t sure a halting Telemann Sonata was going to rock my family’s world.

Then I discovered Suno. If you’ve never heard of it, Suno is a generative AI music platform. You prompt it with a style of music and lyrics, and it produces a song. Many musicians (including friends of mine) are quite furious at this platform, because, like other generative AI tools, it sucked up every single recorded song on the internet to train its model—without bothering to ask permission or pay for the collective genius of the world’s musicians.

I’d avoided Suno for these reasons, but recently read that Suno had started making deals with the major labels and compensating artists who opt-in to allow their songs to be used in training their models. I also kept running into musician and producer friends who told me that even they have started using Suno in their work.

I’ll let you be the judge of the results, which I’ll play for you in a moment. 

AI-generated love songs

I guess you you could call these AI-generated songs “love songs,” but with the Buddhist definition of love: wishing others to be happy. So, before I play any of these AI songs, I want to talk a little bit about the emotional effect these AI tunes had on me and my family. These reactions are the main reason I’m talking about AI music today on the podcast, because I found these songs to be even more powerful than my lifetime favorites in lifting my spirits, and the mood of those dear to me—making us feel happy.

Each song took a few hours to make. I started off in ChatGPT, prompting it with a detailed, specific set of quirky truths about the person. For my dad, it was a couple hundred words about growing up in New York City, meeting my mother at Music & Art High School, his drunk, abusive architect dad, hustling a living as a cabinet maker, always yearning to move to California, making Plexiglas sculptures with my mom in the 70’s, their divorce in the 80’s, doing ecstasy at Esalen, joining Osho’s commune in Oregon, sailing through the Panama Canal as a boat captain, and the loving support of his men’s group—a gathering of similarly eclectic guys who have stuck by my dad into his old age as he lives out his late years by the beach.

All of this Suno put to music in the style of his favorite band, The Beach Boys. As a side note, The Beach Boys were the first concert I ever saw, which my dad took me to in 1976 as a five-year-old boy.

It’s often said that editing is easier that writing, and I found that to be true with song lyrics. I’m not going to pretend any of these lyrics match to the quality of a genuine musical artist. But over an hour or two, I did my best to steer an AI toward lines that rang true, then hand-crafted phrases to be more fully authentic and original. I ended up with verses that I thought would delight the person each song was about.

Though they may pale in comparison to a songwriting masterpiece, these songs had a quality different from any song I’d ever heard, because unlike popular songs, they didn’t have to be universal. Many people know that “Layla” is about Eric Clapton’s boiling passion for George Harrison’s wife. But he didn’t call her out by her real name, “Pattie,” and it’s easy for any of us who’ve pined for an unrequited love to imagine Layla through the lens of our own life: the one that got away.

Unlike universal hits, I’d never heard hyper-personalized songs like these ones Suno made, filled with inside jokes and ultra-specific references. Songs that were in many cases, made for a single listener.

I put these ultra-individualized lyrics into Suno, prompting it with the genre, and adjusted that prompt to eventually arrive at a song I thought sounded good. It sometimes took 30 or more revisions to get something that sparked joy. And one tip to making your songs sound the way you wish is to use ChatGPT to advise on how to adjust your prompt to better achieve the sound you are imagining.

For good reason, Suno won’t let you use specific artist’s names as prompts, so you need to describe your song using parlor-game language that tries to triangulate how it should sound without comparing it to any actual artist.

This is part of my dad’s prompt:

“Warm, melodic pop song built around rich stacked vocal harmonies and bright major-key chords. Acoustic and clean electric guitars, gentle bass, light drums, and occasional organ or piano. Sound feels sunlit and coastal, with a nostalgic but forward-moving tone. Vocals are smooth and expressive, with a clear lead and layered harmonies that swell in the chorus. The song carries optimism, curiosity, and reflection — a life story told with warmth rather than drama. Music should feel breezy and open, like driving toward the ocean with the windows down.”

It’s kind of amazing how unsmooth and unharmonic a prompt needs to be to creates a smooth, harmonic song. Before I play my dad’s song, I’ll read a couple of my favorite bits so it makes more sense. It starts out as a homage to a sensitive, creative New York City boy who met my mom in High School and hung out with her in sixties New York at Warhol’s silver-painted Factory:

City kid with a sketchbook smile
Music & Art, dreaming wild
Met Linda back in another frame,

Silver rooms, late trains, no fixed name

It touches on the most painful part of my dad’s life: the physical abuse from his father, and the pressure to become a modern architect that he finally rejected when he turned down the chance to study at Harvard’s School of Design like grandpa:

His old man spoke of glass and steel
“Grope” and “Corbu,” what’s pure and real
Harvard letters on the table laid,
Paul said no, walked the other way

The references to Grope and Corbu are the nicknames grandpa always used for Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier—modern architects my grandfather knew and studied with. 

It moves on to lines about the ceiling-hung plexiglass sculptures my dad and mom made together:

With Lin, they built things out of light

Plexiglas turning, slicing sky

And these verses reference to the perpetual motion machine I watched my dad work on for years in his workshop:

Late-night talks, wheels in wheels

Almost cracked how forever feels

I’ll play the whole song for you in a minute. But first I wanted to tell you about how my dad reacted when he heard it. I texted him the song on Christmas and didn’t hear back for a while. But a couple hours later, he called to tell me how deeply the song had touched him. He’d been feeling low about his life that day: a sunny Christmas by the beach can feel pretty sad when you’re alone. He was on the way to flee the sunshine and watch a movie with a buddy when he got my message.

My dad’s now in his 80s, sometimes lonely, dealing with a failing body and financial woes like a lot of older people, and he told me that this song really lifted his spirits. He said it made him feel that all the ups and downs of his life, when set to music, added up to a beautiful picture. It made a myth out of a life that sometimes felt chaotic, tragic, or accidental.

The most popular three paragraphs of my book, How to Train a Happy Mind, are about just this: a meditation I call “The Hero’s Journey.” If you’ve read or listened to the book, you may remember this as a meditation you can do when you’re around other people. It asks you to look at loved ones, strangers (even your enemies) and vividly imagine their birth, their death, and where they are right now in their life’s journey. They each have hopes they dearly want to achieve, problems they really wish to evade. When you think about people in this way, even those you don’t like, it opens your heart to them. It puts their life, and your life, into perspective. It makes you realize that we all walk the hero’s journey.

Art turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, and thanks to this new, miraculous (and fairly felonious) tool, we can all now not only imagine our lives as a mythic arc, but feel our lives that way. We can hear our story and the stories of the people we love as legends vividly painted through the power of music. 

Here’s my dad’s song, Wind and Time:

I made a song for my mother too. My mom’s pretty mercurial, and I wasn’t sure how she would react. As you can see from my dad’s song, I didn’t hold back the sensitive parts of life: I learned from writing, that real, specific details are what makes art strong. 

My mom loves the beach, just like my dad, but their disagreements begin there too. She preferred the Massachusetts’ chilly breaks to my dad’s warm western waves. Her song touches on us kids, including my wild, hilarious brother who’s so similar to my mom; me, the creative intellectual; and my autistic sister, who didn’t speak until she was five; the hard work my mom went through after getting divorced to help me pay for college; her lifelong love of music, playing the harp and flute.

It also touches on her faith in Christian Science, relying on prayer to heal our family’s illnesses, and caring for my sister when she was struck by a car while attending art school in Boston:

Held Kim steady when things shook
Paid Scott’s way with what she took
Christian Science, spine of steel
Heal it by believing real

I’m about to play her song, but before that I want to share her reaction. I truly had no idea whether my mother would love her song or stop talking to me for making it. But the phone rang a day or two after Christmas and she told me that it had deeply moved her. She said she had no idea how I made it, but that it transformed so many of the painful, sorrowful moments of her life into something beautiful: even her breakups and her New York apartment burning down.

My family accuses me of over-exaggerating, but I got it from my mother, and my mom’s reaction to this song is probably the hugest exaggeration I’ve ever heard. She said that her song was the greatest thing that I had ever done in my life.

Here’s the song I made for my mom. It’s called “She Stays” and it’s in the style of her favorite music: sixties French pop.

I ended up making a whole AI-generated album, one for everyone in our family: cousins, brothers-and-sisters-in-law, aunts and uncles. After I finished it, I even decided to make one more song: for my long-dead grandpa. That song, “Blueprint Blues,” touches on his physical abuse of my dad and uncle, his depressed wife’s suicide, his alcoholism, the neglect he felt raised by a nanny instead of his wealthy parents, the collapse of his architecture career when his own brother turned him in to the FBI in the 1950s for being a communist, and his early, courageous activism in unions and civil rights.

Since my grandpa’s dead, and his kids don’t want to hear anything about him, I guess I made this song more or less just for me, to honor the full arc of his life too. I’ll play it for you now, recorded in his favorite style, ’60s bebop jazz.

I’m not going to play all the songs here. But I do want to talk more about what this album ended up doing to my mind. I listened to each these songs, and variations on them, for hours as I made them. It took a couple weeks to complete the whole project. Once I finished the album, I started listening to the playlist on walks, in the car, while making dinner. What I found was that each song brought me such a deep, warm feeling of love for the person it was about. I found that when I was in a bit of a low mood, putting on this album lifted me out of it in a way that was very different from simply listening to my old favorites. Because these songs are about my own life, and the people I’m closest to.

Many aspects of AI are terrifying: is it going to take away our jobs, our relationships, our creativity, our thinking, intelligence, and friendships? Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ve always been an early adopter of new technologies, curious to explore their potential for good. And I feel like I have discovered at least one positive way to use generative AI: to make ultra-specific loving, true art about the people I care for.

I’ve always been an early adopter of new technologies, curious to explore their potential for good.

Now, I also want to say that not everyone loved, or even liked, their songs. My brother’s song was patterned after the goth rock he loves. After a few days of silence, his sole reaction to my gift was a link to an online article about “AI Slop.”

Despite the risks of thousands more swipes like his, I wanted to share my experience making these songs: and, if you feel like it, invite you to try making one yourself. Because I find that they ended up working, at least for me, like analytical meditations. Each one embraces the totality of someone with whom I have had a fairly complicated relationship; each transforms their life’s bumpy arc into reverent joy. 

We’re encouraged in meditations on love, compassion, and equanimity to think of friends, enemies, and strangers in their fullness: accepting their faults like a loving parent; celebrating their joys and triumphs like a best friend; feeling their pain and conflicts as if they were our own.

If you end up making songs of your own, I’m curious whether they will have the same effect on you. If you do, I invite you to share them with us on social media, where we can be found as @trainahappymind. If you feel like it, tag them with #songsforahappymind. If you like, visit our Train a Happy Mind Community at trainahappymind.org to privately share your songs there too. I’d love to see how you celebrate your loved ones. I can also offer specific tips on how to use AI to create this new kind of art. Despite the exponential ease of creating a song with AI, it still takes work: creative effort, time, taste, and technical expertise.

As we go out on this episode, I’m going to leave you with one last song.

Genre: new wave.

Title: “Train a Happy Mind.”

Subject: an interactive artist turned meditation teacher.

Thanks for joining me to talk about AI, music, and love. We wish you a wonderful day.

Discover more ways to train a happy mind

💌 Sign up for our newsletter for bite-sized Buddhist wisdom and updates on events.

☺️ Join our Train A Happy Mind community for weekly lectures, meditations, classes, and discussions.

📖 Check out the How to Train a Happy Mind book with a Forward by the Dalai Lama.

📲 Keep in touch by following us our social channels!

Please consider supporting our nonprofit mission, we rely entirely on the generosity of our donors to keep our podcast and videos ad free. To contribute, click here! We accept cash, credit, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, and your donations are tax deductible in the us.

Credits