I had intended to make a live album of songs the Sisters Erie would play. Then I ran into the problem of getting the music tools to make the covers I wanted. Meanwhile, writing original songs was turning out to be a lot of fun.1
The next direction was an album of their own: Beat the Sunrise.
Its 2016 date belongs to the Sisters' fictional history. The actual writing, music generation, artwork, listening, and revision belong to the real project I am making now. Those two histories sit beside one another, but they have different calendars.1 2
A band that had to sound like itself
The music started with a question that was simple to ask and difficult to answer: what would Sisters Erie actually sound like?
John Conroe's The Demon Accords had given me four Irish sisters, descriptions of their performances, and some named songs. I had already expanded their personalities and begun making a website and images. Discovering what Suno could do suggested a much larger possibility: multiple albums for a band that began on the page.1
The tools could produce music. I still had to decide whether the music sounded like these four people.
Aileen, Mary, Gael, and Ryanne have related voices and a shared musical upbringing, but each needs an identity of her own. Ryanne's immediacy is different from Gael's resonance and reserve. Mary's intimacy is different from Aileen's control. A convincing family harmony has to leave those individual musicians audible inside it.3
The instruments need identities as well. Fiddle and bodhrán are central to the band's sound. Acoustic guitar, keyboards, harp, and other appropriate instruments have jobs to do. Calling something powerful should not automatically turn it into a stadium-rock arrangement with a layer of Celtic decoration.3
The live album I put aside
My earlier plan was Wind and Rain: Live at Katie's Pub, placed in the band's 2013 history. I wanted to use songs from their playlist and make a live album that belonged to the band I had been developing.1
The covers were the problem. I had run into what I described in Creating Sisters Erie as “MASSIVE issues.” I could imagine the band playing the material, but getting a tool to produce the particular performance I wanted was another matter.1
I put the live album on hold. The original songs offered somewhere useful to put the effort, and I was enjoying making them. The tools' limitations had changed the project, but they had also helped point it toward a body of music that could be the Sisters' own.1
Half-Myth, Half-Trouble
During the conversations about the band, ChatGPT described the Sisters as Half-Myth, Half-Trouble. It was a throwaway phrase that immediately sounded like the song to introduce them.1
That sort of thing happens throughout this project. A phrase becomes a title because it catches something about the people I have been imagining. Then the title becomes a reason to work out what they would sing, how they would sing it, and what the music needs to do.
For this one, I had an introduction to a family whose mythology and mischief were already tangled together. I did not have to begin with a formal album concept and force every song into it. The band was supplying material.1
Gael Force
Gael's personality had acquired its own shorthand in our conversations: Gael Force 5. Too much personality for too small a package. Having a song about the effort of managing Gael seemed fun.1
The fuller character work gave that energy somewhere to come from. Gael wants contact, sensation, interaction, and a reaction. Her teasing is rooted in affection; a quieter conversation can become unexpectedly intimate. She is more interesting to write than a generic fiery redhead.4
Gael Force grows out of that family dynamic. The title can carry the joke because there is a particular person underneath it.1
A Drunken Ass, and another round
Conroe's performance descriptions include drunken men, drunken women, and a drunken donkey. If the donkey was already in the book, I felt it needed a song.1
A Drunken Ass gave me another part of the band's comic repertoire. The drinking songs also suggested One More Round!: what might Sisters Erie come up with after hearing the Scratch's Another Round?1
Too Much Water in My Whiskey came from a particular moment in Executable. Gael steps up to Declan's table, takes a drink from his glass of water, and holds the glass up to the crowd:6
“Aww, do you know how much Whiskey it would take to drink that much water?”
That gave us the title. I then had the idea to bring various random toasts together into one song, starting the chorus with a rearranged version of “here's mud in your eye.” The band already seemed to know enough toasts to put them to work.6
At that point I began to wonder whether the Sisters ought to look into AA. There was a lot of drinking going on.1
Running Underhill becomes its own song
Running Underhill began with an ambition to make a Celtic alternate-lyrics treatment of Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill. VoicePlay's version interested me because of its variation, range, and use of different voices. Four sisters gave me a way to think about a story through several musical perspectives.5
Working with Apollo—my name for ChatGPT—I developed Maeve's story and the lyrics. Maeve follows a Faerie procession, refuses to leave a captive prince behind, and leads the escape because she can see the road. The original cover ambition eventually gave way to an original Suno composition.5
Choosing among the original versions required listening. Apollo preferred v4. I liked it too, but when I returned to v3, the exchange between Aodh, Maeve, and Cian caught me. After the force of the scene and the hunting horn, much of the instrumentation fell away into voices and drum. That change supplied the punch I had been missing.5
That is part of the actual creative work here: deciding which result tells the story, and being willing to disagree with the tool's recommendation. There were dark Celtic techno experiments and artwork as well. I had come a long way from the song I first thought I was making.5
The full account is in Creating Running Underhill.
Making room for Mary
I wanted the album to have room for something quieter than the family's drinking, teasing, and pursuit through Faerie.
An Empty Space became Mary's goodbye to a love that had not happened. Nothing needed to have gone spectacularly wrong. The relationship simply had not gone where she hoped it might, and that was still something she could need to say goodbye to.1
That felt like Mary: a subject that could reward attention without requiring a grand confrontation. Her quietness had become one of her most interesting qualities during the character work. There is usually something occupying the silence.4
A candle to finish with
The Candle in the Window is Ryanne's coming-home song. In Executable, the protagonist's response to listening to her suggested how strongly she could evoke home. It seemed the right way to finish the album.1
It also makes sense beside the Ryanne I have been developing. She can be irreverent, energetic, and very funny, while still reaching for a connection that matters. She does not have to stop being herself to sing something sincere.4
That gives the developing programme a destination. The family can introduce itself, cause trouble, have another drink, escape from Faerie, and eventually come home.
The work still in front of me
There is a difference between an album in the fictional chronology and a finished real-world album. Beat the Sunrise has its place in the Sisters' history, and these songs give me a programme to work on. They still need the decisions that make the music cohere as an album.1 2
The band has to remain recognizable across the funny songs and the quieter ones. Each sister needs her own voice, the family needs to sound related, and the instruments need to do more than announce that the music is Celtic. A generated version may be interesting without being the version I want to keep.3 5
I started by wondering whether I could make a fictional band audible. Now there is an album's worth of different things I want them to say.