Every creative thought awaits the moment when it leaves the mind and enters reality. It’s a transformative event, often unremarked-upon but never unremarkable. For musicians, that moment of manifestation occurs when the sounds in our heads are transformed into audible, physical sound waves.

I think of that moment as The Spark. Every time I pluck a string on a guitar or blow into my saxophone, a spark enters the world. Not every spark ignites a bonfire; some are just little flickers that quickly fade. But each one has the potential to grow.

The first, most basic spark, is the one that happens when you’re alone. Maybe you’re practicing; maybe you’re writing a song. Every minute spent with an instrument in your hands might generate a hundred new sparks. Our first listener is always ourself, and oddly enough, we’re able to surprise ourselves just as well as any other kind of listener! However much you prepare, you never know exactly what’s going to happen when your thought meets reality. Sometimes a simple scale exercise can become a brand new song.

It’s one thing to make sparks by yourself; when you perform for others, everything changes. The audience provides a rush of oxygen, and each spark becomes brighter and more unpredictable. And the thing about performing is, the spark can spread. The audience may not be creating music of their own, but they are still participating in a shared ritual. Each spark you make spreads through them in countless, often imperceptible ways.

Solo performance is all well and good, but music is meant to be played with others. When a group of musicians plays together, their sparks spread and cascade across the ensemble, glowing and blazing and replicating, guttering out and sparking anew. There are few things I enjoy more than sitting down with other musicians and just playing. Maybe we get a beautiful shower of radiance; maybe we get a wet campfire. The sparks are there, either way.

When you watch a band perform, you’re sharing in their ritual of spark transference. It’s happening in front of you on stage, but you’re a part of it, too, whether or not you’re dancing or singing along.

Today, the word “music” often refers to recorded music, such that we need to specify “live music” when talking about something that is in fact more fundamental. Making a record is the act of freezing a spark, preserving it on wax, or tape, or in computer code. Playing a record means reproducing that same spark on demand. An album is really just a collection of frozen sparks, ready to be thawed.

That may sound dismissive, but I don’t mean it that way. Recorded music is a beautiful, powerful thing. It can spread an artist’s creative spark to a theoretically limitless number of listeners. It allows musicians to earn income from their art in new and, at least theoretically, more sustainable ways. And while the recorded spark may be unchanging, we, as listeners, are not. That’s why my favorite albums hit me differently each time I listen. We’re always in flux, and an open mind exists in a constant state of joyful rediscovery. It’s one of the best things about being alive, and, not for nothing, is also the whole premise of Strong Songs.

“AI Music” is the current catch-all term for software that algorithmically duplicates, deconstructs, and reassembles the musical sparks of others. (In the interest of keeping this essay focused, I’m going to leave aside the pressing legal and ethical questions raised by the methods through which some of these models were trained.) While it’s now possible to get a custom-made pop song by typing a prompt into an AI music generator, whenever I hear that stuff it leaves me wondering what it even is that I’m listening to.

In those moments, I find it helpful to follow the spark. When an AI model grinds up ten thousand pop songs and spits out a convincing soundalike… where were the sparks? As I listen to the sounds the model generates, how far am I from the moment those sparks first ignited? The answer is “pretty damn far.”

That does not render the generator’s creation wholly inert or artistically worthless. Even the most degraded AI song can generate a new spark in its listener, who might then go on to produce more sparks of their own. But it is important to recognize what has taken place: the listener’s connection to that original spark, frozen in the recording studio and preserved in time, has been all but severed.

Following the spark reaffirms my understanding of music as a fundamentally human practice. It’s something that we do together, in the moment, as naturally as we laugh or breathe. It’s tied to the deepest parts of our selves, and it connects us in ways we may never fully understand.

Following the spark also helps me understand how, as music intersects with technology, it can become both more and less at the same time. New technology can help a creative spark spread farther and blaze brighter; the spark can be duplicated and manipulated and remade; it can burn forever. But with each step along that tantalizing technological path, the original spark recedes. At some point, it all but vanishes from sight.

The newest episode of Strong Songs is a mailbag Q&A, accompanied by some sweet new mailbag art by Tom Deja. We’ve been putting custom art on older episodes, but I needed something for mailbags, and I love what Tom came up with.

The episode tackles a bunch of counting questions, as well as a fun one about why Marty Friedman’s solo on Megadeth’s “Tornado of Souls” is so revered among metalheads. I also took the opportunity to bring on a couple of my friends: voice coach Nevada Jones came by the studio to help give advice to a trans singer adjusting to their new, lower voice, and guitar maestro Scott Pemberton chatted with me about a mysterious Sly Stone guitar sound. All that and I finally got to talk about the Bluey theme, which I sense made some parents out there happy.

It was a fun one, so go check it out. And just as a reminder, if you support the show on Patreon, you can get episodes two weeks early, which means you could be listening to next week’s episode right now. It’s a doozy.

That’ll do it for now. As always, you can find me on Instagram and Bluesky, posting infrequently. I’ve also got some fun podcast guest spots coming up, so keep an eye out for me outside of my usual feeds. And if you haven’t bought a ticket for Triple Click’s Portland show on July 11, what are you waiting for??

I’ll leave you with this pic of Appa, caught snoozing on the job. Being a guard dog is hard work.

Take care and keep listening-

~KH
5/9/2025