In my Road to Liberty project, I often use the term Musical Snapshot™. Here, it represents the bridge between the historical echoes of the 18th century and the digital tools of the 21st—a way to capture the spirit of the past using the technology of today.
A Musical Snapshot™ isn't about technical polish; it’s about capturing energetic and emotional sparks. These are songs born from a purely human heart—written from a place of personal perspective and raw emotion—then brought to life through a modern "tech stack" that acts as my virtual band. While the arrangements are powered by sophisticated technology, the soul of each track and its accompanying narration are genuine human experiences and emotions.
For my musical projects, the goal isn't technical perfection. I tolerate minor imperfections that modern production usually tries to erase, because a slight mispronunciation in a vocal or a stray resonance in the music isn’t exactly a mistake—it’s a fingerprint of the very moment of its creation.
To further illustrate this concept, several analogies and personal experiences can help illuminate my perspectives on the unique space these Musical Snapshots™ occupy in today's music landscape.
1. The Raw Photo vs. the Enhanced Masterpiece
Think of a standard studio track as a highly enhanced digital image. It is meticulously color-graded, airbrushed, and sharpened until every pixel is "perfect." It’s stunning, but the heavy processing often creates a "more perfect than reality" view of the subject.
A Musical Snapshot™, by contrast, is like a film photograph taken in natural light. It captures the grain, the slight motion blur, and the genuine expression.
Just as a physical photograph is defined by the unique way light hit the lens in that specific second—imperfections and all—my music and narration are human authored, but the music is defined by the current technical realities of performance creation. Those "flaws" are artifacts of the very birth of each song, and that specific version of a song will never be exactly replicated ever again.
2. The Impressionist Canvas vs. the Photorealistic Render
Consider how we "see" history. A photorealistic tech stack render of a bygone era can often feel cold or "uncanny." It can show you minute detail but may miss the soul.
My Musical Snapshots™ function more like "softened historical realism"— Impressionist paintings where the brushstrokes are visible and details are sometimes obscured.
My friend, film producer Walter Josten, is also a very accomplished painter who captured this aesthetic perfectly when he painted a picture of a beautiful snowy owl. Walter recently produced a documentary that was shown on PBS called SoCal Snowy Owl, about one of these spectacular creatures that took up residence in a California neighborhood. His painting was shown in the film.
I love the contrasting tones, realistic focal point, and flowing brushstrokes he used; to me they are a perfect example of softened realism. This is a style I favor. I also enjoy a variety of other artistic styles that you find in national art galleries. In a painting, it is often the "imperfect" smudge of color or the lack of a hard line that allows the viewer's imagination to fill in the details of the image.
In my musical efforts, I favor a warm, lived-in texture that prioritizes the spirit of the artistic work over the high sheen of polished production. I also love and appreciate listening to that approach as well. I believe there is plenty of space in our musical landscape for both to coexist and complement each other. Together they provide a fuller range of expressions and listening experiences.
I believe we are in the midst of a musical revolution, where exciting new approaches abound, even while many people still favor and enjoy long-held standards of high-quality production.
3. The Studio Session vs. the First Take
Most modern albums are built layer by layer, with dozens of takes edited together to create a "performance" that never actually happened in real-time.
My Musical Snapshots™ are something like a recording of a live performance captured in a single take. When you hear the music and the narration, you are hearing the immediacy of the "band" reacting to the very human story being told. The minor errors remain—a slight hesitation before a beat or the raw edge of a live delivery—because that is where the energy lives. It’s about reflecting the emotion of the performance rather than the high sheen of polished production.
I believe both methodologies can produce soulful and amazing music. I also feel that creators should not use computer generated personas and pretend to be something they are not - authenticity matters.
A Perspective Rooted in Imagery
This philosophy comes from my own life experiences with photography and music. I am a business professional by trade, and a photographer and musician by lifelong avocation. Over the years, I have been a widely published amateur photographer; my images have been featured on book and magazine covers, in articles, across various websites, and are at the heart of my hiking discovery website, Hikepix.com.
To illustrate the specific difference I speak of with Musical Snapshots™, we can compare two photographs. On a recent trip to a stunning, remote location in northern Arizona, I traveled with a group of friends, one of whom is an expert photographer. We took photos of many of the exact same features of the place, but here are two images that illustrate the difference between how the place looked in the moment to the natural eye, and how it looked after being photo-enhanced over the course of many hours.
My thanks to Doug Browning for his permission to share his stunning photo here. Both images have their merits, and this perfectly illustrates the differences between in-the-moment authenticity and painstaking enhancement to perfection. By using the "snapshot," I am not disrespecting the beauty of the polished work—I am simply choosing to reflect the immediacy of the experience in my own work.
A Musical Evolution: From Session Players to Tech Stack
My approach to the concept of Musical Snapshots™ is also informed by nearly 40 years as an amateur musician, lyricist, and producer. Early in my career, I was fortunate to meet and record nearly an album's worth of songs with Jim West, who at the time was just beginning his tenure as the guitar player for "Weird Al" Yankovic—a role he has now held for decades.
Working with Jim was a collaborative process. I created the structure and core messaging, played instruments or used technology to build my part of the track, and described the specific guitar "feel" I wanted. Jim would try a few different approaches, I would select the one that resonated best, and we would move on.
It is also worth noting that the career of an iconic artist like Al Yankovic is primarily based on using the music of others as a platform (with proper permissions, of course). While an AI tool synthesizing millions of songs is not an "apples to apples" comparison to a human musician learning their craft, there is a shared thread of learning from what came before to create something new.
I don’t condone piracy, and I also recognize that almost every musician learns by performing the work of artists they admire. Utilizing a tool that can analyze and synthesize a volume of work that would be impossible for a human to process is both liberating and exciting. I see this same evolution in medical science, where AI analyzes the work of thousands of researchers to inform new treatments that benefit mankind in ways never before possible.
I believe we must find a practical way to protect rights, while acknowledging that today's musical tech stack enables us to bring life to new creations in unprecedented ways. In the near future, I believe we will find the right balance to harness this amazing technology appropriately, just as has been done with most every other technological revolution in history.
As a final note on my work with Jim West, here is a photo of my children with Al and Jim from a concert we attended when we were all much younger.
The Enduring Power of Live Performance
Despite these seismic shifts in technology, I believe session musicians remain essential for the creation of highly polished music, for which there is still a strong demand. Though rarely discussed openly, many industry professionals today use AI to prototype ideas that are then refined into human-authored compositions and recorded by studio musicians.
Furthermore, the market for live music performance is as vibrant as ever. My wife and I attend as many concerts as we are able, from local cover bands playing favorites to Paul McCartney and his amazing band breathing new vibrancy into 50-year-old standards.
I believe music created with the latest technology presents a new opportunity for the live music scene: performing songs that otherwise would never be heard in a live environment. I am currently working on an initiative with a top-notch cover band to have them play some of my songs live in a concert setting. This is incredibly exciting—it demonstrates a new way cover bands can learn and perform the most popular technology-assisted music and give it a physical life on stage.
Avoiding the Uncanny Valley in Music
Finally, a word on what many appropriately call "AI slop." When I was first learning the technology for porting my lyrics into a music tech platform, I spent one full day experimenting with completely AI-generated music—lyrics and music both based on simple written prompts.
What I experienced that day was nausea. I hated virtually everything about the process and the result. Fixed meters, endless verses with strange phrasing, and the clinical "plumbing" of minor details felt hollow. I vowed never to participate in that approach again.
This is why all my songs have human-authored lyrics and human-defined structural components (verses, chorus, bridge, solo, etc.). I utilize the powerful rhyming dictionaries, background research sources, and thesauri available today—tools that have been used by songwriters for many decades—but the message is all mine.
I liken the process of using a music tech stack to a wrestling match. I generate multiple versions of each song in different styles, tempos, and using different prompts, and listen for the "take" I want to keep forever. In my current stack, it is impossible to reprocess a take to "fix" it. If there are flaws, I have to decide to live with them, or refine my prompts, restructure the song, and try again. After countless attempts, my goal is to finally capture that one magic take that reflects the immediacy of the experience I am looking for. That’s how I use the tools of today to bring my songs to life and share them with the world.
Ultimately, it is this combination of musical experiences and photography that has led me to consistently use the term Musical Snapshots™ to describe my work. I believe the phrase perfectly describes the music that I produce today. It also broadens my ability to create new material on a multitude of other subjects on a scale that was impossible for world-famous composers of the past.
By embracing the immediacy of the moment, I am able to tell a greater number of compelling stories, one Musical Snapshot™ at a time. I hope that's a good thing ...