Welcome...

How I ended up writing pop songs in my study at midnight

I'm Gareth. I work in data and systems for a corporate during the day. Most evenings, once my daughter is asleep, I have an hour or two before I should also be asleep. That window is what this whole project lives inside.

For years I tried to be a proper producer. I "bought" soft synths I never quite mastered, thankfully there's presets! I attempted Cubase more than once. I made a handful of basic tracks and remixes in my twenties and learned the thing nobody really tells you when you start: for some people production comes naturally, and for the rest of us it genuinely is the ten thousand hours, and ten thousand hours is not something a day job and a family negotiate well with. So it sat dormant for a long time.

Then I had a sabbatical in the summer of 2025. Some travel, some time, some hobbies that had been waiting their turn. That's when I started properly playing with AI music tools - Suno being the main one - and realised something had shifted. I could actually get a track out of my head and into the world without the production wall stopping me.

Which led to a much more interesting question.

If the production isn't the bottleneck anymore, what is the song? What makes a pop hit catchy? What makes you want to play it again? Is it pure artistry, or is there a science underneath it?

The more I read and the more I broke songs down, the clearer it got that - for pop especially - there's a formula. Not in a reductive way. In the way that a sonnet has a formula, or a good joke has a structure. There are principles. Stress-beat locking. Melodic math. Hook stacking. Trojan Horse architecture, where the song sounds like one thing and means something else. You can be genuinely analytical about lyric writing in a way I hadn't realised before, and once you see it you can't un-see it.

That's where the obsession started. (I keep wanting to call it a passion. It's an obsession.)

It probably helps that I've always loved melody. I grew up on things like Tubular Bells and Robert Miles' Children, then trance, then a regrettable but joyful happy hardcore phase, then what I think of as the golden era of pop between roughly 2008 and 2013. Eventually I widened out and accepted that I'll like almost anything if the hook is good enough. I can defend Aqua's Barbie Girl on craft grounds and I will, given the chance.

A lot of what's been released the last few years just doesn't do much for me. So part of what this is, honestly, is me trying to make the music I want to hear. I do genuinely enjoy listening back to my own tracks. Some of them I've replayed roughly as often as my daughter has replayed Golden, which if you had an 8 year old in the house in 2025 you will understand is a very high number.

The way it works in practice: I use Claude as the main thinking partner - somewhere between an assistant and a mentor - to help develop concepts, interrogate lyrics, and pressure-test choruses. I've built up what's basically a personal bible of lyric-writing principles, partly from research, partly from breaking down hits, partly from getting things wrong and noticing why. Then Suno turns the finished lyrics into actual audio. The ideas, the angles, the emotional architecture, what the song is actually about - that's the part that's mine and that's the part I find genuinely fun.

Nearly fifty tracks in now. UK electropop, dark pop, festival EDM, ballads, party anthems, one country-pop song that's quiet autobiographical! Some are released. A lot aren't. They'll go up on YouTube first and the streaming platforms when I get round to it.

This site is the front door for all of it. The released songs, the unreleased ones, and the notes on how they got made. Including the ones that didn't work, which I want to write about properly because the failures are usually more instructive than the wins.

If you're a songwriter curious about AI tools, welcome. If you're an AI person curious about songwriting, also welcome. If you just heard a song and wondered what was going on underneath it, that's mostly what the Notes section will be for.

And if you're a fellow songwriter - I'd genuinely value the feedback. What's working, what's complete rubbish, what I'm fooling myself about. I'm figuring this out as I go.

More soon.

Gareth