Shooter Jennings, son of the late country music icon Waylon Jennings, went through his dad's archives. What he found was amazing. He unearthed a wonderful cache of never-before-released music. Shooter then put together three albums' worth of it, in fact.
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The first LP, titled Songbird, is slated to drop on October 3. The tracks, from Waylon's heyday, had not previously seen the light of day. The reasons that are not really clear. At any rate, they needed some refining to be suitable for release. Some fans may be curious about whether AI was used for that purpose on those albums.
Shooter Said AI Was Not Involved at All
When he was a guest recently on The Drifting Cowboy podcast, Shooter said that he did not use AI at all on any aspect of his dad's album. He explained, "Oh, the AI thing? It's so amazing that like like right when AI happens, we get a new Waylon record. I mean, I would probably be the guy saying that, you know, cause I'm cynical... that's why we took so many painstaking steps to ensure that... of course, it's not AI."
He went on. "Like, I don't even know how to use AI to make music right, and I'd rather think it would be able to do that. But also just as far as everything involved with it, like making sure there's nothing AI related, or there's no steps even in the art or in anything. Because I can't pollute the material."
Shooter added some details to clarify his point. "Because the Waylon thing, man, what's so cool about it is like, if we mixed it, I mixed it on a 1976 custom API in the Sunset Sound using only outboard gear. We didn't use any kind of digital processing."
He Evidently Treated the Material with the Utmost Respect and Care
From the tone and nature of his comments, Shooter Jennings handled the tracks of his father's with the greatest reverence. That meant ensuring that all the songs on these albums sounded exactly like Waylon intended them to sound. It seems as though Shooter did everything possible to make sure of that.
