25 years ago, I joined a band called Fading Maize at Ripon College in Wisconsin. We did what we could with what we had. We recorded 3 albums over the next 3 years and played at as many bars and coffee shops as we could. We built a website with Microsoft Frontpage. Then we went our separate ways, got married, had kids, focused on other things.

Earlier this year I had the idea to approach the lead singer who wrote all of the lyrics and melodies to the stuff we played back then, and wanted to "reimagine" everything in 2026 using AI. That's the project I want to share here!

The site has a before/after player where you can flip between the original dorm-room recording and the 2026 version mid-song without losing your place, so you can hear exactly what changed. The original 2001 website is preserved and browsable at https://www.fadingmaize.com/2001, rough edges intact.

Working on this, the thing that sparked in my own mind is that it was an experiment in a certain way to use AI. The songs, lyrics, and arrangements are the original human work (in this case from 2001-2003). We wrote the lyrics, we created the melodies, we played the parts, it just didn't sound as good as we heard it in our own heads.

The stuff AI creates is awesome, but it means less if it's just the AI cranking everything out from the ground up. In our case, the AI was only there to help us get the results we originally wanted back in 2001 when we were cooking ramen in our dorm rooms and couldn't afford anything fancy

Being fully transparent about our use of AI, sticking tightly to our original lyrics and melodies, but making full use of AI to give us the studio, session players, and production budget we never had seemed like the right balance of concerns.

I'm super proud of how it turned out and the transparency we've used along the way. Happy to discuss the audio pipeline, the site (Next.js), or what it's like to A/B your 20-year-old self!

p.s. Oh and check this out! I remember this day. Our site was getting absolutely hammered! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPJWlnN9tSE&t=43