Behind the Music: A Song Stories Showcase
Built a new section of the site dedicated to AI-assisted songwriting — each song gets its own page with backstory, lyrics, and an embedded Suno player.
I’ve been writing songs with Suno for a while now — AI-assisted folk and bluegrass, mostly built around real trips and real moments. The problem was that Suno is where the songs live, but not where the stories live.
So I built a Music section for this site.
What it is
Each entry is a Song Story: one page with three things on it.
The backstory — where the song came from. The drive, the place, the moment that made me want to write it. That’s mine. Suno doesn’t know any of it.
The lyrics — formatted by verse and chorus, in a sidebar that reads like a songwriter’s notebook. Each stanza gets its own block.
The player — an embedded Suno widget, right on the page. Hit play, then read while it plays. That’s the intended experience.
How it’s built
The /music section uses Astro’s content collections. Each song is a Markdown file with frontmatter that holds the Suno track ID(s), tags, and lyrics as a literal string. The body of the file is the backstory prose. The slug page renders everything — two columns on desktop, stacked on mobile — with the player full-width below.
Multiple tracks per story are supported. If I ever want to compare an original against a reprise, or put two alternate productions side by side, both embed with labels.
The first entry
Sacajawea’s Grave (Reprise) — we almost missed the turn. A small brown highway marker in the dust, outside Fort Washakie, Wyoming. My friend Cathy said “let’s stop.” I turned the truck around. What we found there took a while to process.
The song came out of that visit, but not immediately — it was a few days after I’d returned home, when the memory had settled, that the words came together.
More songs coming. The Yellowstone playlists are full of them.