TheDavidDuffy

Rust And Chrome

Night-drive music about the unglamorous part. Made for two kids in the back seat, in their dad's voice.

Where it came from

RUST AND CHROME started as a favour. A seven-year-old who loved cars and loved a certain kind of heavy, engine-shaped music, and a dad who couldn't find any of it that he actually wanted his son singing along to. So he made his own. Same weight, same 808s, same night-drive atmosphere. Different words.

The result became an album about the parts nobody puts on a poster: the first car that cost less than its own insurance, the ninth month of something that only looks like an overnight success from outside, the empty car park at six in the morning where the actual work happens.

Rust is the battered one you start in. Chrome is the one on the bedroom wall. The argument of the album is that the rust years are the ones that made you.

Vocals are gravelled and close-mic'd; the beats are heavy and fast. The choruses are built to be shouted, badly, by children in the back of a car. That was always the way it was meant to be.

The honest bit

The vocals are based on my actual singing voice, but I don't have the money for a recording studio, band, producer, and all the other back-end expertise that goes into making professional music sound great. So I used Suno.

Now, I know all the die-hard anti-AI activists will be screaming that Suno is the devil, it takes jobs from real people, and AI will never be as good as the real thing. Well, I partially agree. AI will never be as good as the real thing. But on the other hand, I can't afford the real thing, so using it is not taking anyone's job. Not using it would have taken the spark of joy away from my kids' eyes as they listened to an album that their dad made for them.

If it makes them feel any better though, I did write a book for my kids. Zero AI involvement. I believe it was published the year before LLMs became publicly available.