No More Masking

I needed to release a bit of pent up frustration over having led a largely (raggedly) masked life, and wanted to write a song supporting an approach without a mask. It’s an important message for kids; however, the first version of the lyrics was so broadly disinhibited that it ended up being too adult for a kids’ album, plus I was told that other people “in the Tourette’s crowd” might interpret it as an out-group insult instead of an in-group anthem. (If you read the editorial on disinhibition and prosbelmania, you’ll have some notion about why I am hesitant to release it.)

I decided to try out Udio with this song, which  was still in beta at the time (2024-05-19). Unlike Suno, it had inpainting (albeit it wasn’t working great yet), and you could add material to either end of the song. Udio gives you much shorter clips; however, the audio quality is better. Udio did not click with the types of styles that I was trying to set up, and the one that I had used with the earlier Suno version (below) ended up being whittled down to little more than “alternative confrontational rock.” But I like that the Udio version is faithful to the lyrics, so I am using that one on the album.

I used Rotor with the Suno version to make the following lyricized video, which has a background taken from their clip library (which I will eventually replace with my own work).