Entry Log 018

THE SONGS NEVER STOPPED

Sometimes the words we write to survive yesterday become the songs that help us embrace tomorrow

Written by Captain Scott Woldian

There are boxes in most people's lives. Not necessarily physical ones. Boxes containing things we once did. Things we loved. Versions of ourselves we thought we'd left behind. Sometimes we close them deliberately. Sometimes life closes them for us. And sometimes, nearly thirty years later, something comes along that unexpectedly gives us the key.

For Stu, one of those boxes contains songs. A lot of songs. And recently, he's started opening it again.

BEFORE ANY OF THIS

Long before Terra Nueva, immersive technology, touring, logistics, venues, businesses and all the other things that eventually filled Stu's life, there were words. He started writing poems and lyrics when he was about fifteen. Not because there was a business plan attached to them. Not because anybody was waiting to publish them. He just wrote words to help him get through the day and express himself, because actually speaking them was a challenge at that time. Then, in 1984, he joined a band called December Rose.

Suddenly those words had somewhere to go. Some of his lyrics became songs. Ideas became arrangements. Words on paper became something he could actually hear, created together with his bandmates. Stu played guitar. Bandmates collaborated. They argued over things. Changed things. Played things differently. And somewhere in that wonderfully messy process that happens when musicians occupy the same room together, the songs became real. That's an important distinction. Some of the words were Stu's. The music became theirs. That's collaboration. And for a young songwriter, it was probably the first time he discovered what it felt like to hear something that had previously existed only inside his head coming back at him through speakers.

THEN LIFE GOT LOUDER

Stu stopped performing as a guitarist on stage in 1991. But he didn't stop writing. Then came 1996. By then he'd managed to open the Night Owl in Cheltenham, and another opportunity to make music appeared. This time the band was Little Big Man. And this time Stu wasn't standing there with a guitar. He was the singer and frontman. Once again, words he'd written found other musicians. New collaborations happened. New songs appeared. For a couple of years, that part of his life was alive again. But there was a problem. Life was getting rather busy. Running the club. Working on diverse architectural projects around the UK. Music touring. Motorsport logistics.

Travelling. Work. More travelling. More work.

Trying to maintain a band alongside all of that eventually became impossible. By around 1998, that chapter had effectively closed. It was also the year his son, Callum, was born. Priorities changed. Life moved on. But the writing didn't.

THE DECADE THAT FOLLOWED

Some periods of our lives are remembered by what we achieved. Others by what we lost. For Stu, much of the following decade became the latter. Businesses disappeared. Family circumstances changed. His Nan & Gramps died. His relationship with his son was torn apart when his mother took him away, and to this day he has not had any contact with him. And in 2010, Stu lost his mum. There were other things happening too, of course. There always are. Careers continued. Work continued. Life continued. But underneath it was grief, loneliness, anger, confusion and loss.

And through all of it...Stu wrote. Words. Lyrics. Poems. Thoughts. Sometimes about what had happened. Sometimes about people. Sometimes about love. Sometimes about anger. Sometimes about whatever was rattling around inside his head at three o'clock in the morning. There wasn't necessarily a plan to turn them into anything. Writing them was the point. It became somewhere to put things. And over the years, through loneliness, illness, depressions, relationships, extraordinary experiences, and everything between them, the collection kept growing.

BUT THERE WAS NO BAND

That's the important part of this story. Stu never stopped being creative. He simply stopped having the mechanism he'd once had for turning those words into music. There were no band rehearsals. No guitarist on the other side of the room trying a chord sequence. No drummer changing the feel. No bass player suggesting something completely different. And Stu wasn't playing instruments himself anymore. So the words remained just words. Some for years. Some for decades. Until something changed.

ENTER THE MACHINE

Artificial intelligence originally entered Stu's world for completely different reasons. Immersive technology. Entertainment. Experiments around the Triple Live Experience. Digital environments. Terra Nueva. It certainly wasn't because a sixty-year-old former guitarist was looking for somebody to finish songs he'd started thirty years earlier. But curiosity has a habit of opening unexpected doors. Stu began experimenting. What happens if you take words you've written and start using these tools to explore the music you can hear around them?

Not: “Computer, write me a song.”

Something much more personal. This lyric needs space here. That line shouldn't be sung like that. The emotion is wrong. Try again. Wrong voice. Wrong tempo. Wrong emphasis. Again. Again. Again. Until eventually...there it was.

Not necessarily the song a band would have created. Not necessarily the definitive version. Certainly not a finished studio master. But something Stu hadn't been able to hear for a very long time.

His words coming back as music.

AND HERE COMES THE ARGUMENT

Because, inevitably, AI and music is controversial. It should be. There are serious questions about copyright, consent, ownership, employment and what happens when technology is used to imitate or replace human creativity. Stu understands why musicians are worried. He doesn't want technology replacing songwriters. He doesn't want it replacing bands. And if he had four musicians sitting in a rehearsal room with him, bouncing ideas around and creating something together, he'd recognise that as something completely different.

Human collaboration has a magic of its own. This isn't pretending otherwise. But that isn't Stu's situation. He doesn't have a band. He doesn't play regularly anymore. His life doesn't provide the time to spend months assembling musicians, organising rehearsals and rebuilding the creative environment he had when he was eighteen. What he does have is a lifetime of words. And now he has another tool. So he's using it.

IT ISN'T ONE BUTTON

This is probably the misconception that irritates him most. That somebody types a sentence, presses a button and announces:

“Look! I made music.” That isn't how Stu approaches it.

He can spend days working on one song. Not engineering it. Not pretending to be a producer. Not claiming technical abilities he doesn't possess. He's working on interpretation. How should these words feel? Where should the voice break? Which line carries the emotion? What influences belong in the music? What doesn't sound like him? What does? Try it. Reject it. Change it. Again. Again. Again. Until the performance begins expressing what the words meant when he wrote them. The production may not yet be where a professional producer or studio could ultimately take it. Stu knows that. That's not really the point. For the first time in decades, he can hear the songs.

WORDS ON A PAGE

And perhaps that's the part of this AI conversation we don't talk about enough. Not everybody using these tools is trying to replace somebody. Sometimes technology gives somebody an ability they'd lost. Or perhaps never had. A painter who can't hold a brush. A filmmaker who doesn't have a film crew. A composer who doesn't have an orchestra. A songwriter who no longer has a band. That doesn't resolve the enormous debate around AI and creativity. It isn't supposed to. But it does make the debate more complicated. And perhaps a little more human.

THE SONGS NEVER STOPPED

It's easy to look at Stu's life and think music disappeared somewhere along the way. It didn't. Performing disappeared. Bands disappeared. The collaborations stopped. Careers changed. Life intervened. People came and went. There was success. There was loss. There was illness. There was survival. But somewhere through all of it, a fifteen-year-old kid kept doing exactly what he'd always done. He wrote things down. And now, nearly thirty years after his last real songwriting collaboration with a band, some of those words are beginning to make noise again. Are they perfect? No. Are they going to change the history of recorded music? Almost certainly not. Does Stu care? Not particularly. Because this was never really about becoming a recording artist again. It's about expression. It's about taking something that lived silently on a page and finally being able to hear it. It's about sitting there and thinking: That's what I meant. And sometimes that's enough.

There will be more songs. There will certainly be more words. Some will probably be terrible. Hopefully there will be some bloody good ones too. But after all these years, Stu has discovered something rather wonderful. He never actually stopped being a songwriter. He just spent a few decades without a band. And now he's found another way to hear the music.

Click HERE or search for Terra Nueva - A Brand New World on your favourite music platform

Captain Scott Woldian
Storyteller. Explorer. Occasional Jester.
Terra Nueva