Synthwave Dreams

I made the Synthwave Dreams album flat on my back.

A little while after the accident I was in bed with a brace on my leg, with the kind of time on my hands that nobody asks for. You run out of series to watch faster than you think. I was looking for something, anything, to point my head at.

My younger brother told me about Suno. I opened it the same evening.

I have loved synthwave for years. Not the nostalgia exactly, more the feeling of it: a city at night, headlights, something ending and something about to start. So that is what I typed into the first prompt. Then the second. Then a lot more. At some point I stopped experimenting and started writing an album.

Eleven tracks about rewinding

I did not plan the theme. I noticed it afterwards, reading my own tracklist: Déjà Vu Dreams. Polarized Moments. Life on Pause. A man who could not walk properly, making eleven songs about time loops and going back to choose differently. It was not subtle.

Déjà Vu Dreams opens the album and is the track it is built around. It is a nod to Life is Strange, a game about a girl who can rewind time and discovers that every rewind costs something. That idea landed differently in a bed in 2024 than it would have at any other point in my life.

I was not trying to write about the accident. I was trying not to think about it. The album is what came out instead, which is usually how that works.

How the Synthwave Dreams album came together

The tool is the easy part. Anyone can open Suno and get something back in thirty seconds. Getting something you would put your name on takes the same thing everything else takes: knowing what you want before you ask for it.

I write prompts the way I would brief a session musician. Genre, tempo, instrumentation, the emotional arc, what the vocal should do and what it should not. Then I generate a lot, throw most of it away, and keep the takes that sound like the thing in my head. The curation is the work. The generation is just the part that is fast.

The other thing I learned is that an album needs an order. Eleven good tracks in the wrong sequence is eleven tracks. In the right sequence it is a record. I moved things around for days, and the running order you see on this page is the one that finally felt like it went somewhere.

People ask whether it counts as making music if a model generated the audio. I understand the question and I am not going to pretend it away. My honest answer is that I chose the concept, wrote the words, set the direction for every track, threw away far more than I kept, and decided the order. If somebody else had done all of that, it would be their album and not mine.

What came after Synthwave Dreams

The album went out on 23 December 2024, distributed by Symphonic. Since then there have been seventeen more releases and a hundred and forty-eight tracks, across synthwave, deep house, rock, meditation and Latin. None of that was the plan either. You can hear all of it in the discography.

Right now I am making a music video for Déjà Vu Dreams, a character running through a glitching city in the rain, which is roughly what the song feels like from the inside.

If you only listen to one track, make it that one. And if you want the lossless files, the Synthwave Dreams album is in the shop in FLAC and MP3 320.