Is AI killing musical comedy? Ashley Frieze discusses

Comedian Ashley Frieze is usually found playing live at comedy clubs in the UK. He has a sideline in releasing home-recorded music videos where he plays the instruments and sings plenty of vocal harmonies.

Here's an example of one of his creations:

Ashley has just released an album of original comedy songs - Monkey Paw Cowboy - in the style of country music, co-written with an AI tool. We caught up with him to find out more about this project and why he chose to do it.

So what made you try AI as a tool for making music?

I started seeing some funny made up songs online, mainly from Obscurest Vinyl, which sounded AI generated, but were quite messed up and entertaining. I wanted to have a play with the new toys out there to see how hard it was and how much fun it was to play with.

Which tool did you use?

I saw a TikTok video about Udio.com on April 11th, a day after it was released, and when I tried it for the first time, I was stunned by what it could do. I fed it some snippets of songs I'd been writing, and it produced some astonishing results. This inspired me to try different ideas and I was up late into the night writing new verses just to find out its limitations and abilities.

I think the other songs I've been seeing online are made with Suno.com, which has a better workflow, but produces lower quality music.

I was hooked, and my first attempt at a full song made a lot of Trump supporters very angry.

How much of this is AI and how much is you?

I made a rule with this project that I would write all the lyrics. I'd feed the AI genre prompts, occasionally trying to hint at specific singers, but I wouldn't delegate the song writing to AI. If I did that, then what's the point of me even doing it?

Have you used AI tools or similar to help you before?

Sort of. The most common tool I use is RhymeZone, which is useful for brainstorming possible ways out of a rhyming cul-de-sac. I've occasionally gone to Google Gemini or ChatGPT to ask it questions about well-known phrases relating to a subject. This is like having a semantic rhyming dictionary available. This isn't a case of handing creative decisions to the robot, just using it as a way of finding stuff out.

I did, however, do a video on whether ChatGPT could write a better song than me. In this experiment, I let ChatGPT write a song from scratch based on a prompt.

I came to the conclusion that AI could do linguistic party tricks, but didn't really have anything to say. But AI is coming along really quickly, and I've been knocked off my feet by the AI music generators.

Is this a new direction for you?

Absolutely not.

I see this as a period of temporary madness. It helped unblock a bad case of writer's block. It was an obsession that I needed to follow through. Releasing the album was my end-of-level boss. Once I'd done it, I'd completed the game and could go back to some sort of normality.

How does AI function as a writing partner?

It's nuts. It won't do what you expect, but it may sometimes do what you need. It's like flying the Tardis. You end up in a place you didn't ask to go, but there's an adventure to be had there.

I discovered that it would often come up with a better rendition of a lyric than was in my head when I wrote it, so I learned to write the songs incrementally to add on to the direction the song was taking.

With Udio.com you build songs in 30 second segments, which also encourages you to write tightly and get lots of feedback.

However, the AI won't do as it's told. In some cases, it worked out when I wanted a lyric to drop to being spoken, and in other cases, it plainly refused to sing something, or repeat a chorus tune, or any number of things that you could just ask a real musician to do. That it's hard to control and is inconsistent, is part of why it feels like playing a weird computer game where the end result is funny songs.

You wrote a 50 minute album in a week, how did you create so much content?

Speed.

Writing fast means you get into a mental state where everything's a possible idea, and everything can be changed easily without too much thought.

I would ask myself about singers and genres, and what I could do to subvert them. I would look at a phrase and see whether it could be expanded into a song.

When I was running low on inspiration, I delved into my notebooks of rejected songs, and found that I could rewrite them for the AI band, and that they came out way better.

Is it any good?

No.

And yes.

It's a technological marvel. A few of the songs are just me playing with the technology. The album ends on a Taylor Swift parody, which has gags in, but is also the only song I allowed to run the length of a real song, because I wanted to end the album with what felt like a pop banger.

In most cases, I deliberately let the song start late and end early. Comedy songs ought to be short and to the point.

I think there's some strong stuff in there. I still like listening to it. But there may be one or two tracks which sound like "writer plays with new toy".

How does it compare with songs you'd write for yourself?

I wrote a lot of the songs "in character", especially those where the accents are the strongest. I would be delighted if Dolly Parton actually recorded Just Spoilin' Christmas, because it sounds just like I imagine her to be.

However, there are a few tracks which I wrote based on my own pet peeves. Listening to the album with my wife, we were in hysterics because we both realised I'd just bared my soul via some cranky old American dudes. Goddamn Bored (In This Shop), Street Food and Treacherous Steps are songs that I would have written for myself to sing, but they sound way better when delivered by the machine.

The truth is, I'm just an ok musician, and this tool can render my ideas way better than I can.

To what extent does this feel like your work, vs plagiarising existing songs?

There's a genuine question around whether AI is just ripping off existing recordings and remixing them. I don't fully know how it works, but my understanding about Udio is that it moderates the output to avoid plagiarism. I believe it to be ethical. I think it's based on a model of how music works, and is producing stereotypes, rather than direct copies.

Why is the album called Monkey Paw Cowboy?

I had intended to release an album this year. But I must have wished on a monkey's paw, because I would not have expected it to be country music, AI generated, or produced under such weird intense conditions. I don't even like country music!

Which are your favourite songs?

It turns out that I am a sucker for a hearty country pop song. That'd Really Impress Me - the opposite of that Shania Twain song - really lifts my spirits. The Kitty Cat Blues song, based on the reason we had to change our bed sheets on the night I wrote it, makes my wife and kids laugh every time, and Big Fuckin' Train which was written in bed the night before the album was released turned out to be a more epic song than I expected.

Finally, while it missed the Meghan Trainor vibe I originally planned, The Wrong Trash is a song about recycling that has a hell of a dynamic range to it, and sits high up my playlist.

What's next?

I'm giving up AI. I promise. I'm going to go straight. Honestly.

For my 50th birthday this year, I was given a course where I get to learn more about Logic Pro, so that's going to equip me to go back to the home studio and finish some more of my "real songs".

Like most comedians, I'm also keen to refresh the older bits of my stand-up set with things that work well, live. This is another type of writing again. I should probably spend more time on that, than clicking on "generate" on my iPad in bed, late into the night.

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Monkey Paw Cowboy, released under the pseudonym The Incredible Jukebox, is available on all music streaming platforms, including YouTube, Spotify and Amazon

Ashley's real life work can be found via ashleyfrieze.co.uk