Melanie Grace

Tag: songwriting process

  • Writing “Bring Us Home” with AI — My Honest Creative Process

    Writing “Bring Us Home” with AI — My Honest Creative Process

    This is the last post in my “Bring Us Home” series, and I wanted to save it for the end on purpose — because by now, you know the story. You’ve met Aviva, Miryam, Saba Elan, Daniel, Belshazzar, and Nabu. You know the theme, the history, the songs. So now I want to pull back the curtain all the way and show you how this thing actually got made.

    I’m always open about this: I use AI as part of my creative process. Claude for writing and lyrics. Suno for music production. Canva for art. And honestly? The process was a lot messier than the finished story makes it look.

    Where it started: a LOT of back and forth

    “Bring Us Home” did not arrive fully formed. It came together through an enormous amount of brainstorming, drafting, rewriting, redoing, and reformatting — most of it in long conversations with Claude. We’d build out a scene, and then I’d go, “no, this isn’t right,” and we’d take it apart and rebuild it. Characters got reshaped. Songs got moved. Whole sequences got reordered more than once as the structure of the show became clearer to me.

    That’s just… how this works, for me. The first draft of anything is never the thing. It’s the raw material for the thing.

    The Suno disaster (and I mean disaster)

    Okay, here’s the part I promised would be funny — and it really is, looking back, even though it was not funny in the moment.

    My first idea was to use Suno to create a fully narrated, multi-voice version of the script — like an audio drama, with different voices for different characters, dialogue and songs woven together.

    It did not go well.

    I’d very specifically prompt for a “young female” narrator voice for a section — and Suno would just… give me a male voice instead. No explanation, no acknowledgment, just a completely different voice than what I asked for. And then on top of that, it would layer in music underneath the spoken dialogue — music I never asked for in that spot — and the whole thing would come out sounding garbled. Voices fighting with music, the wrong gender narrating emotional scenes, transitions that made no sense.

    I actually still have that playlist saved on Suno if anyone ever wants proof of how rough this got. It is genuinely not good. I laugh about it now, but at the time I remember just staring at the output thinking, “this is not the same project I wrote.”

    The pivot that fixed everything

    After enough of that, I made a change that ended up being the single best decision in this whole process: I switched to having the entire recording/narration script handled by one consistent narrator voice — no more trying to get Suno to juggle multiple character voices in the narration sections.

    The difference was night and day. Suddenly things were coherent. The narration carried the story the way it was supposed to, and the songs — which is where the actual character voices live — could do what they do best without fighting a broken narration layer underneath them.

    Sometimes the fix for a complicated problem isn’t “make the tool smarter.” It’s “ask for something simpler.”

    Where Claude fit into all of this

    Most of the actual writing — the script, the lyrics, the character development, the Scripture research, the structural decisions (like whether “Can These Dry Bones Live?” should be its own moment or folded into the finale) — came out of long sessions with Claude. A lot of “here’s what I’m picturing, help me find the words for it,” followed by me pushing back, reshaping, rejecting drafts that weren’t right, and refining until something actually felt true to the story I had in my head.

    I don’t think of this as “AI wrote my musical.” I think of it as having a collaborator who’s endlessly patient while I figure out what I’m actually trying to say — which, for a project this big, took a lot of figuring out.

    And then Gemini joined the team

    Somewhere in the middle of all this, I also brought Gemini into the process — mainly for two things. First, catching duplicates: when you’re working across dozens of documents, character notes, song lists, and scripture references over months, things get repeated, contradicted, or left in two slightly different versions. Gemini was genuinely helpful for spotting those inconsistencies so I could clean things up.

    Second — and this was unexpected — Gemini helped me put together Bible study PDFs to go alongside the project. Taking the scriptural grounding behind “Bring Us Home” (the stuff I’ve shared across this whole series) and turning it into something people could actually study and reflect on, not just read about in a blog post.

    Why I’m telling you all of this

    Because I think it matters. I’m proud of “Bring Us Home.” I’m proud of the story, the characters, the songs, the research. And all of that came out of a process that included a LOT of dead ends, a genuinely unusable AI-narrated playlist, multiple full rewrites, and a small army of tools that each turned out to be good at very different things.

    I don’t think that makes the work less mine. If anything, I think it’s more mine — because every single piece of it passed through my judgment, my rejections, my “no, that’s not it, try again.” The tools didn’t make the decisions. I did. They just helped me get there faster, and occasionally hilariously wrong along the way.

    Thank you for following this whole series

    If you’ve read through this entire month of posts — the theme, the characters, the research, the songs, and now this — thank you. Genuinely. “Bring Us Home” has been one of the biggest creative undertakings of my life, and getting to share the process with you, start to finish, has meant a lot.

    The music is coming. I can’t wait for you to hear it.

    Stay with me for what’s next

    💬 Comment below — anything from this whole series you want me to revisit, or any questions about the process I didn’t cover?

    📱 Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at @TheMelanieGrace — more music, more behind-the-scenes, more projects coming.

    💌 Sign up for my email list so you’re first to know when “Bring Us Home” music starts releasing.

    🎧 Follow me on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music so every release — this project and beyond — reaches you the moment it drops.

    This is the end of this series, but not the end of this story. More soon. 🎵

  • Why I’m Calling It “Bring Us Home” — The Story Behind the Title

    Titles matter to me. A title isn’t just a label — it’s a promise. It tells you what kind of story you’re walking into before you’ve heard a single note. So today I want to talk about why this musical is called “Bring Us Home,” and why that phrase ended up doing double duty in a way I didn’t fully plan, but that I now think is one of my favorite things about the whole project.

    It starts with Psalm 137

    Almost everything about this musical grows out of one psalm — Psalm 137. If you’ve never read it, it’s the lament of the Jewish exiles sitting by the rivers of Babylon, weeping when they remember Zion. It’s the psalm that gives us the image of harps hung in the willow trees. It’s the psalm with that gut-punch line: “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

    That psalm is the emotional DNA of this whole show. The setting, the ache, the refusal to perform their sacred songs for their captors — it’s all there. And underneath all of it is one simple, desperate cry: bring us home.

    The opening number — and the title

    The very first song in the musical is called “Bring Us Home.” It’s sung by the company as the exiles are marched out of a burning Jerusalem and into captivity. It’s a cry — raw, communal, and immediate. Nobody on that stage knows if it will ever be answered. They just know what they’ve lost, and they know what they’re asking for.

    So the title comes straight from that opening cry. Simple enough, right?

    But then there’s the ending

    Here’s the part I didn’t fully see coming until I was deep into writing the finale. The very last song of the show — the one that closes the entire story, after seventy years, after the decree of Cyrus, after the long walk across the desert to a ruined Jerusalem — is called “We Are Home.”

    “Bring Us Home” opens the show. “We Are Home” closes it.

    The title isn’t just describing the beginning. It’s the whole arc. It’s a prayer in Act One that becomes a declaration in Act Two. The same ache that opens the show with a question is answered, seventy years later, with a statement of fact.

    Why that matters to me

    I think a lot about how we talk to God in seasons of waiting. “Bring us home” is a prayer a lot of us have prayed in one form or another — not always about a physical place. Sometimes it’s about restoration. Sometimes it’s about a relationship, a calling, a season of life we feel exiled from.

    What I love about this title is that it holds both ends of that journey at once. It’s the cry and the answer. The longing and the arrival. And I think that’s true to how faith actually works — it’s rarely instant, but the prayer you start with often becomes the truth you end up standing in.

    One title, two bookends, one story

    So when you see “Bring Us Home” as the title of this musical, I want you to know it’s not just naming where the story starts. It’s naming the whole shape of it — the prayer that opens the show, and the promise that closes it.

    I can’t wait to keep sharing more of this with you.

    Stay close to the story

    💬 Comment below — has there been a “bring us home” season in your own life? A prayer you prayed for a long time before you saw it answered?

    📱 Follow me on Instagram and Facebook at @TheMelanieGrace for daily behind-the-scenes looks at this project.

    💌 Sign up for my email list — I’m sharing the story behind every song as it’s written.

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    Tomorrow, I want to dig into the question at the very heart of this whole show — one I think a lot of us have asked, even if we didn’t have the words for it.

  • How to Write Song Lyrics: A Real Songwriter’s Honest Process

    How to Write Song Lyrics: A Real Songwriter’s Honest Process

    How do you write song lyrics?  Writing song lyrics starts from one of three entry points: a title or phrase that demands to become a song, a melody that needs words shaped around it, or an emotion you need to process. From any starting point, the craft involves drafting without judgment, revising with skill, and the discipline to actually finish what you started.

    Where Do Song Lyrics Actually Come From?

    People ask me about the lyric writing process fairly regularly and I love the question genuinely because no two songs in my catalog came the same way. Every single track I have released in 2026 had a different origin story. Understanding the most common entry points can help any songwriter, beginner or experienced, move from blank page to completed draft more consistently and with less waiting.

    The first entry point is the title or the phrase. A line catches in your mind and you know immediately and with certainty that there is a song in it. Do Not Disturb was exactly like that. The title arrived before a single lyric existed and it essentially told me what the entire album needed to be, what tone, what emotional territory, what purpose. When a title shows up fully formed, follow it without arguing. It almost always knows something you do not yet.

    What Are the Different Ways a Song Can Start?

    The second entry point is a melody. You find yourself humming something with no conscious intention, in the kitchen or on a drive, and you reach for your phone to record it before it disappears. The lyrics come later, shaped carefully around the melody’s natural rhythm and the emotional quality of where the line wants to land. Melody-first writing often produces the most singable results because the words have to earn their place in the music rather than simply occupy a lyrical slot.

    The third entry point, rarest and most gratifying when it happens, is when a song arrives almost completely formed. You sit down and something comes out and an hour later you have a draft that barely needs revision. Those songs feel like gifts more than accomplishments. You cannot plan for them or summon them deliberately, but you can be available when they decide to arrive.

    How Do You Actually Finish a Song?

    Finishing a song requires making the decision to finish it, which sounds obvious until you are in the middle of a project that keeps revealing new possibilities. There is always another revision option, another bridge direction, another rhyme that might serve better. At some point you have to decide the song is what it is and let it be done. Done and released serves the listener. Endlessly revised and never released serves no one.

    What has helped me most in 2026 is releasing on a regular schedule. The deadline creates the finish in a way that unlimited time simply does not. When something needs to be complete by a specific date, you stop tinkering indefinitely and make the final choices.

    What Is Your Advice for Beginner Songwriters?

    Write the bad ones. Every experienced songwriter I have ever respected has a large collection of things no one will hear, false starts and wrong turns and songs with one genuinely good line and nothing else around it. Every single one of those was worth writing because it cleared the path to the next thing. The craft of lyric writing is built through volume. The songs that connect, the ones people share and return to, come on the other side of many, many imperfect ones. Write those imperfect ones without apology. They are not failures. They are the road.