When the Machines Learned to Play I was there when the panic started. As the keyboardist for a newly signed band, I bought my first synthesizer in 1979, a new offering from Bob Moog called the Moog Prodigy. Not long after, I added an ARP Axxe to sit alongside my Rhodes 76 stage piano. I recall feeling quite cutting edge. Then came the Sequential Circuits Prophet-5. I first put my hands on one in 1982. After that, things didn’t just evolve…they accelerated. Like, at warp speed. The Korg Poly-800 showed up in ’83. Then, later that same year, the Yamaha DX7. Game-changing doesn’t quite cover it. It was more like the rules themselves had been rewritten. And every one of those instruments, in its time, had detractors. Mostly string and brass players—good ones, seasoned ones—who looked at what was happening and saw the end of their careers coming at them in real time. Then the rhythm section felt it. Along came machines like the Linn LM-1 and the Roland TR-808. Drummers and percussionists raised a hue and cry that reached all the way to the heavens, because now it wasn’t just texture or color being replaced. It was people. Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about much. Some of those fears came true. There were players who never worked the same again. Parts that used to require a room full of musicians were suddenly handled by one guy and a keyboard. Budgets shrank. Sessions disappeared. Entire lanes of the industry thinned out. The ears of the listeners were retrained to hear/expect certain sounds. Sounds created by synths. The shockwave that rolled through the industry wasn’t hysteria. It was reality. And if you were one of the ones caught in that shift, it didn’t feel like innovation. It felt like loss. What most of us didn’t realize at the time was that we weren’t watching the end of music. We were watching the end of a certain kind of musician. The kind whose value lived primarily in their ability to produce a sound that could now be produced another way. And that’s the part that matters today because we’re living through the same moment again. Only this time, it’s not happening in studios. It’s happening on the page. Every so often, a tool comes along that doesn’t just make things easier. It makes entire categories of effort unnecessary. The Yamaha DX7, the Prophet-5—and later systems like the Fairlight CMI and the Synclavier—did exactly that. Artificial intelligence is another tool. It lowers the cost of entry, collapses roles and standardizes competence. And just like before, the first reaction is fear. And some of that fear is justified. Because the middle—the dependable, skilled, replaceable middle—does get squeezed. But that’s not the whole story. Because what those machines couldn’t do then—hear me—and what AI still can’t do now, is give anyone a reason to care. Oh, they can produce sound and they can produce words. But they can’t produce you. Back then, the musicians who survived weren’t the ones who resisted the technology. They were the ones who absorbed it and then gave it something the machines couldn’t replicate. A point of view, a voice…a presence. I was one of them. Listen, nobody volunteers to be the example in a transition like this. Nobody raises their hand and says, “Let my part be the one that disappears.” Which is why these moments always feel personal. Here’s what I learned then, and what I will leave you with now: The machines didn’t take the music. They took away the excuse to be forgettable. We will only see the Terminator’s “Rise of the Machines" coming true if the humans sit still and stop fighting back with pure, creative content. Selah.

My new single drops today. “On and On” is one of my favorite songs I have ever written and recorded. Links below.

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