If you’ve read any of my posts from this year, you know that I make music. I make music as myself – Chuck Sturgeon Music – and I make music as a virtual country band – Sturgeon Country. What’s the difference? Well, my music is rock oriented and I play all the instruments. The country band is pop country music based on old demos (me singing and playing acoustic guitar) I had laying around, some were 20 years old, that I fed into Suno, the AI music producer. Let me elaborate.
Many folks cringe at the acronym AI. Especially when it is applied to art and music. I have no issues with using AI IF you are using it as a production tool. I DO NOT agree with using AI to write lyrics for you and then create the whole song based on text input. Where is the art creativity in that? My country songs, I’ve released 7 of them, started with me writing the lyrics and producing a demo of me playing my acoustic guitar and singing those lyrics. Since these demo songs leaned more towards a country music feel, I took them and the lyrics, and fed into Suno as if I were giving the demos to a Nashville music producer to produce a song. In effect saving money to get my songs into listenable versions that I could release.
The first time I did this was for a Christmas song – Christmas is Special – that I created for a songwriting contest. I had to create a demo for the contest and I originally considered doing the song as a rock song. But curiosity got the better of me so I fed the demo and lyrics into Suno. I had heard about Suno via YouTube. Mostly people bitching about how evil AI is. So curiosity led me to use Suno with the only prompt, besides lyric and song demo, being “create a Christmas country song based on the provided demo and lyrics”. Here is the music video I created, using AI, for there song.
I was amazed at how good it came out. My wife was astounded as well. I wanted to release it into the world but country music is not my wheelhouse. So, using AI, I created a virtual country band called Sturgeon Country complete with fake band members. I released it via Distrokid and it is available at all the streaming services. I didn’t win the song contest but I found a new avenue for song creation. So I pulled out more 20 year old demos and fed them to Suno and BANG, I’ve got a complete seven song country music album – Sturgeon Country on Soundcloud.
I decided to take things further. I used AI to create music videos for my country songs. Some of them are pretty decent, a few were learning experiences and are pretty obvious as AI generated. But I had fun learning about AI. By the way, it is expensive to create a 3:30 song video. AI has improved recently but when I was creating videos, late 2025 and early 2026, it was not consistent and every time you generate a video clip it costs credits and those disappear quickly when you are trying to get exactly what you want. Here is my latest music video for a song called “Me and Her, You and Him“.
Anyway, the purpose of this post is to promote my country music band – Sturgeon Country. Go watch my music videos. Let me know if AI is evil or not. Rock On! And go subscribe to my YouTube channels – Chuck Sturgeon Music and Sturgeon Country.
Retirement Ain't Easy 