I talk about Suno AI in these blogs fairly often, but I want to dedicate a full post to it because it deserves a real explanation, not just a passing mention.
Suno is a music production platform that takes a text prompt describing musical style, vocal delivery, instrumentation, and mood, and generates a produced song from it. Combined with my own lyrics, it means I can go from a finished lyric to a produced, listenable track in a fraction of the time traditional production would take. For an independent artist without a label budget, this is genuinely transformative.
What I want to be completely clear about is this: Suno does not write my songs.
The emotional heart, the specific imagery, and the turns of phrase that make a song feel like me all come directly from my own writing process, often developed in collaboration with Claude. Suno simply gives that content a musical home. It takes the lyrics and the production prompt I craft, creating the sonic world around them.
The prompts matter enormously. Specificity is everything in this process. You have to describe the exact instruments, the tempo, the vocal style, the energy, and the decade influences. Get it right, and the result is something I am genuinely proud to share with the world. Get it wrong, and you iterate. There is always iteration.
This technology has been pivotal in helping me keep my 2026 creative promises. At the beginning of this year, I set two massive goals for myself: publish a daily blog post and release at least one new piece of music every single month.
Maintaining a daily writing schedule while consistently outputting full musical tracks would be nearly impossible under traditional production constraints. Working with Suno as a production partner allows me to stay true to both of these commitments without sacrificing quality or creative vision. It bridges the gap between my ideas and a finished track, giving me the momentum to keep showing up every single day.
Twelve songs on Mixtape Mindset were created through this exact partnership. Every single one was produced this way, shaped with care and intention.
Go listen and tell me if it sounds like it was made with love, because it truly was.
Since I talk about collaborating with AI pretty openly, I want to give you a real behind-the-scenes look at how it actually works. People often imagine AI creation as pressing a single button and having a finished, polished track handed back to you.
The reality is much more active, hands-on, and—honestly—time-intensive. It is a constant loop of refining, tweaking, and iterating.
1. The Spark: Old Notebooks & Human Emotion
It always starts with me—and usually with years of physical notebooks filled with scribbled lines, half-finished ideas, and memories. I bring the original concept, the emotional core, or a rough first verse.
What I need in the room isn’t an automated replacement for a writer; I need a creative sounding board to help me develop those old ideas and push past my initial clichés.
2. Crafting Lyrical Truth with Claude
That’s where Claude comes in as my songwriting partner. I’ll open a session with a clear prompt or feed in a draft from my notebook, like:
“I’m writing a song about the old Blockbuster ritual. It’s warm, nostalgic, and slightly bittersweet. The chorus needs to feel anthemic. Here’s a rough pre-chorus I drafted…”
From there, we workshop in real time. Claude offers options, and my job is to curate, edit, and steer:
“Okay fine, kid, get the good backpack” came directly out of this back-and-forth. The line started off too sentimental, so I kept pushing the prompts toward the raw, true moment—that exact second your resistance as a parent completely collapses just looking at your kid’s face.
We iterate line by line, paragraph by paragraph, until every word feels grounded, authentic, and true to my voice.
3. Bringing the Sound to Life with Suno
Once the lyrics are locked, I take them into Suno for music production. This is where the marathon of iteration really begins.
Finding the right arrangement, tempo, vocal timbre, and emotional cadence isn’t a quick upload. It takes endless generations, adjusting genre tags, shifting structure cues, and testing different arrangements to get the track to sound like what I hear in my head.
4. Visuals & Storytelling: Gemini & Canva
A song doesn’t stop at the audio—it needs a visual world to live in.
Gemini for Image Creation: I use Gemini to build out the visual mood, album concepts, and imagery. Getting the exact right tone, lighting, and feel means writing, rewriting, and tweaking image prompts over and over.
Canva for Social Media: Once the artwork and imagery are created, I move into Canva to design cover art, promotional graphics, and social content to share the story behind each track.
The Real Work is in the Iteration
If there’s one takeaway, it’s that using these tools doesn’t mean skipping the effort—it means spending so much time changing things, testing variations, discarding what doesn’t work, and polishing what does.
All twelve songs on Mixtape Mindset were built this way: notebooks full of history, a stack of AI tools working together, endless hours of iteration, and a human heart guiding every choice.
I get asked a lot: how do you write a song that feels like a memory rather than just a song about a memory?
There’s a real difference. A song about a memory describes it from the outside. “I remember when we had payphones. That was a long time ago.” Fine. Technically accurate. Emotionally hollow.
A song that feels like a memory puts you inside it. It uses sensory detail. The smell of newsprint. The click-click-clack of a VHS rewind machine. The weight of a laminated Blockbuster card in your pocket. The specific feeling of glitter gel pens rolling down a hall.
Specificity is the time machine. The more precise the detail, the more powerfully it triggers the listener’s own version of that memory. “Glitter gel pens rolling down the hall” doesn’t just describe a folder. It puts you in a specific hallway with a specific smell and suddenly you’re eleven again.
That’s the whole goal of Mixtape Mindset. Not to describe the 90s. To put you back inside it, even for three minutes.
Working with Claude on these lyrics helped enormously. We pushed each other toward specificity constantly. The first draft is always more general. Revision is always about finding the detail that unlocks the door.
I was not looking for treasure today. I was looking for tape.
I was digging through the closet in my office, past the safe, past a box of DVDs I still refuse to let go of (don’t judge me, we all have one), and my hand landed on something spiral-bound. Then another. Then another. All different colors, purchased different years. By the time I sat back on my heels, I had six college-ruled spiral notebooks stacked in my lap, the kind you’d grab off a Target back-to-school shelf for a quarter back in the day. A quarter! I think they’re two dollars now if they’re a penny. Inflation has come for even our notebooks, y’all.
I didn’t open the first one expecting anything. I thought maybe old to-do lists, maybe some scratch paper from a job I don’t even remember having. Instead, I opened a time capsule of my own handwriting: dated pages, undated pages, poems, journal entries pouring out feelings I’d clearly needed to pour out somewhere, and songs. So many songs. Most of them complete with chord charts scribbled in the margins, like twenty-something me knew exactly what she was doing even when the rest of her life felt like she had no idea.
Reading My Own Heart From Twenty Years Ago
Here’s the part I didn’t expect: reading those pages made me sad for her. For me. For the girl writing at midnight about heartbreak and loneliness and love she wasn’t sure would ever show up. Page after page of raw, unfiltered emotion, and somewhere around notebook three, I had the very clear thought: she needed a therapist. Or anti-depressants. Or honestly, both. Twenty-plus years ago, and I’m just now seeing it in black and white, ink smudged, pages worn soft at the corners.
But here’s the thing about a songwriter’s heart: even in the middle of the ache, she kept writing. She kept turning pain into melody, into rhyme, into something that might one day be sung out loud instead of just felt in silence. That’s the gift and the burden of being a lyricist. You don’t just feel things. You have to write them down until they make sense.
And now, twenty years later, I get to be the one who finally gives those songs the ending they were waiting for.
Bringing the Notebooks Back to Life
This is where it got really fun. I started using Claude to help transcribe my absolute chicken scratch handwriting, because let’s be honest, songwriter handwriting in the heat of inspiration is not exactly calligraphy. Claude helped me decode the scribbles, fill in the blanks where pages faded or ink smudged, and gently polish these decades-old drafts into full, sing-ready songs, while keeping every ounce of my original heart intact. Then I take those lyrics into Suno AI to actually produce the music, turning handwritten chord charts from a 2004 notebook into real, listenable songs in 2026.
It’s such a strange and beautiful bridge: my younger self with a pen and a notebook, my current self with AI tools I never could have imagined back then, working together to finally finish what she started. I’ve already pulled nine songs out of just one notebook: songs about waiting for real love, about heartbreak from both sides of a goodbye, about gratitude after the storm, even a genuinely goofy one about a man bag written with one of the most fun people I’ve ever known. Five more notebooks are waiting on my shelf. I have no idea what’s in them yet, and that’s half the thrill.
Here’s a glimpse at one of the songs:
Why I’m Sharing This With You
My heart breaks a little for who I was back then. But I am so, so glad she wrote it all down. Every messy page, every half-finished chorus, every “I don’t know where this is going but I have to write it anyway”: she left me a gift. And I want to share that gift with you.
This is what independent songwriting has always meant to me: taking real feelings (even the hard, unfinished, unresolved ones) and turning them into something that might help someone else feel less alone. If you’ve ever found an old journal and wondered who you even were back then, I hope this makes you feel a little less alone in that too.
I’ll be sharing these restored notebook songs right here on the blog as they’re finished, so if today’s story moved you even a little, stick around: there’s a lot more in these pages.
Don’t miss what’s coming next. Drop a comment below and tell me: have you ever found old journals or notebooks from your younger self? What did you do with them? I’d love to hear your story.
Follow me on Instagram and Facebook @TheMelanieGrace for behind-the-scenes looks at these notebook pages as I go through them.
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And please, follow me on your streaming platform of choice so you never miss a new release when these notebook songs make their way into the world:
I promised to be open about my creative process, and that means talking honestly about something that has become one of my favorite parts of making music in 2026: collaborating with Claude AI on lyrics.
I know this is a topic with strong feelings on all sides. I know some people bristle at the idea. I understand that reaction and I’m not going to dismiss it. What I will do is tell you exactly what our collaboration actually looks like, and then you can form your own opinion.
Here’s the truth: I come with the idea. Always. I show up knowing the emotional territory — the feeling I want to evoke, the story I want to tell, the angle that feels true. I might have a title, a hook, a rough verse. What I need is a thinking partner who can help me shape it, push it further, find the right word when I’m circling around it, and tell me when something isn’t working yet.
That’s what Claude does. It’s fast, it’s thoughtful, and it never gets tired at 11pm when I’m still workshopping a bridge. We go back and forth. I push back when something doesn’t sound like me. I ask for options. I take pieces and leave others. By the time a lyric is done, it has been through multiple rounds of honest revision.
The Proverbs album — 31 songs — would have taken me years to write alone. With this process, it took months. And the songs are GOOD. They are emotionally true. They sound like me.
I think we’re in a new era for independent artists. The tools exist. The question is always how you use them. I use them in service of authentic storytelling, and I’m proud of that.
What do you think about AI in creative work? Drop your honest thoughts below — I mean it, I want to hear all perspectives.
Follow me on streaming for music born from this process — starting with more releases coming very soon. 🎵
