Finally

Album · I Know You're Gone

Here's the honest reason this album has AI vocals and AI instruments: I don't have friends. Well, friends who make music on a regular basis. When I say that out loud, laughter usually follows. And then people actually listen to the lyrics. That's the whole point of this project.

All my life, music has been how I escape and express. I could always hear the entire song fully formed in my head: the melody, the arrangement, every layer. But instruments were the bottleneck. I'd start, stop, come back years later, and repeat the cycle again.

AI finally removed that wall. Written By Wei is what happens when a lifetime of unwritten songs finally gets out.

The AI plays the band. The songs are waiting for real ones.

The debut album I Know You're Gone was written and completed in a single day: eight songs about grief, love, and loss, and the slow work of finding your way back to yourself. It is one of the most honest things I have ever created.

Album · Finally

"Finally" is exactly what it sounds like. These are songs I wrote decades ago that never got properly recorded or never had anywhere to go. I kept writing anyway, even when nothing came of it, and it started to burn me out. This album is what happens when that finally stops being true.

The originals were recorded in the '90s with a computer, a gooseneck conference microphone, and a Sound Blaster sound card, in whatever quality that setup could manage. It wasn't good. I added so much reverb trying to cover for it that the whole thing ended up sounding worse than a karaoke bar. I put it on a CD anyway and gave it to the people it was written for. It never went further than that.

Every song on this album has a real story behind it: who it was written for, where I was, what was going on in my life. Paperclip was written for a girl who took me to a Sadie Hawkins dance in high school. We reconnected years later, and I wrote her a song about the little things in life, because that's what she noticed most. I couldn't land on a title, so I asked her, and she told me to do what New Order does and name it after something random in the room. There was a paperclip on the table. Mr. Sandman's Prayer came out of a hospital waiting room. I was there alone, waiting for an employee of mine who was being treated for kidney stones, and I wrote the song on a legal pad while I waited. It's since been reimagined as a full a cappella arrangement.

"Finally" pairs each original recording with a new one, the same song, produced now instead of on a Windows PC in the '90s. Track by track, the old version sits right next to the new one. What's different this time is that these songs finally have somewhere to go.