About

About the Project

Not John Alden is not a band. It's a music project.

Decades ago I was a very active musician and songwriter. Life happened, and for a variety of reasons, I stopped making music almost entirely for about twenty years. A few years ago I released four songs I had recorded in the 1990s, but most of my music had never been properly finished or recorded.

Recently I dug into a briefcase full of old cassette tapes I'd been hanging onto since the 1980s. They contained rough recordings of songs and ideas I'd written between roughly 1985 and 1996. Some were recorded on portable cassette recorders, some on a cheap four-track, and some existed only as fragments.

Over the last while I've been working on finishing those songs. Mostly that meant writing lyrics. I've always hated writing lyrics. More than a few of these songs sat for decades with complete arrangements and only a handful of repeated placeholder lines because I liked the melody but never finished the words.

One interesting side note is that all of these songs were written on the same Fender acoustic guitar I learned to play on when I was eleven years old. More than forty years later, that guitar is still here and still part of the process. It somehow finds its way into each of these releases.

I have used AI in these productions.

The reality is that I couldn't afford to produce seventeen songs the traditional way. Hiring professional vocalists, musicians, producers, engineers, and studio time would cost far more than I could justify spending on a personal music project.

The songs themselves, however, aren't AI-generated. They were written long before the internet, DAWs, digital effects, streaming services, or autotune. These are my songs, written decades ago. AI simply gave me a practical way to finally finish and release them.

The alternative wasn't "make them traditionally." The alternative was never releasing them at all.

If a band wants to record one of these songs, fantastic. If someone wants to license one, even better. Hell, if you write me a cheque for $100,000, I'll happily hire musicians, book a studio, and make an album the old-fashioned way - after your cheque clears. Until then, this is the way I can finally bring these songs to life.

As for the name...

When I was younger, I thought having a stage name somehow made me seem more professional. Or cooler. Or something. The name I used from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s was "John Alden."