Riffusion and my first album

Years ago I used to write poetry. Most of it bad. I had a friend that suggested I write song lyrics, because they're basically just poems.
I worked out two that I thought were decent enough to be songs, but people I knew that could play music weren't necessarily good at composing.

It was a bit frustrating, having an idea in my head, and the only outlet is a flat piece of paper, no fulfillment of the idea.
I didn't expect them to hit the charts and make me famous, but just the idea that something I did could maybe tease some emotion was intriguing.

Enter the age of AI.
It is amazing and almost frightening what Ai has become in just the short few years since they started working on it. I tried to have AI set a couple of my lyrics to music a few years ago, and they were bad. It was neat that they were there, but it wasn't good enough to do anything with, really. That is, until now and Riffusion.
I am blown away by how good this app is. I got in early, in beta, and managed to create most of my music for free. The most recent, however, I've signed up for the monthly sub, because the free version doesn't give you the ability to add lyrics, just create random Ai slop, though I believe you get one or two "studio time" songs that you can create from scratch before it cuts you off.

Each of these are my personal lyrics with AI music. The prompts are similar, because I like melancholic music, except 'They Did It For Us', a Celtic lament

If you want to make your own music, give Riffusion a try.

Crimson Echo

After I started using this app I went back through pages and pages of my teenage poetry, and this was the only decent one. It's nothing but randomness, stream of consciousness, meaningless color slop, but it sounds pretty good.

Senses Lost

Back in 2002 a friend came to me and wanted me to write him a poem to send his girlfriend. I wrote the chorus of this song, but I liked it so much I kept it to myself and wrote another that wasn't as good. My wife at the time submitted it to poetry.com and it won several awards.
I know now that poetry.com is kind of a scam, they just want you to buy the books that your poems are in, but they did choose my song for a best of award, and that felt pretty good, even if it was just to try and get me to buy something else (I didn't buy the collection from the first thing it was in, either).
It was several years later when I was wanting to learn how to write music, and I wrote the rest of the words, then realized that this poem fit very well as the chorus and I combined the two.

Your Grin

The response I got when I released this song is, "Are you okay, man?" and "I need to hear the story behind this," but honest, there is no story behind it.
The words came, I wrote them down, they sounded good, and the AI did an amazing job of creating some heavy hitting music to draw the emotion from it.

They Did It For Us

This song is different than the rest. A few weeks ago I wrote a talk for church, based on the conference talk of Hans T. Boom, 'True to the Faith that our Parents have Cherished'. I spoke of ancestry, a connection to our people and our lands, that we are not here by accident, but by intention.
I was later having a conversation with my wife about the state of our country. We have different views, and she is less connected to ancestry.
I wrote this song inspired by both the talk and the conversation.

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They Did It For Us

I have been watching The Last Kingdom on Netflix, a story about Uthred son of Uthred. The Saxon born son of a noble, captured and raised by Danish Vikings during their conquest of Britain in the 9th century.

It's based off the true story of Uthred, written by his descendent, a historical novelist named Bernard Cornwell.

One thing I have noted about this show is that it is brutal. The Danes raided British villages and decimated the populations. A lot of people died back then. Life was hard.

I bring this up because my ancestry is Danish, English and Scottish. My ancestors were the Danes that invaded Britain. My ancestors were the Saxons and Celts that fought them off. In all that death and brutality, I exist here today because my ancestors lived through it, and a thousand years later, their decedents travelled to America to settle a wild and untamed new frontier.

My talk comes from Elder Hans T. Boom's talk from the April conference titled, 'True to the Faith that our Parents have Cherished', and he begins by telling the story of 14yo Mary Wanlass that left Missouri in 1862 with her family, heading for Salt Lake. Mary had promised her dying stepmother that she would make sure her father and siblings would make it there safe.

My great-great-great-great-grandfather, Henry [surname redacted], had moved his family to Ontario, Canada in the 1850s, just before Mary Wanless was heading to Salt Lake. His grandson, Albert [surname redacted], moved to [city redacted], Idaho, where I grew up.

In 1868, only a few short years after Mary Wanlass made her trek, my great grandparents, Hans [surname redacted] and Marie [surname redacted], left Denmark and went to Liverpool, England to take the Mormon Immigration ship the Emerald Isle with 875 other passengers on an almost 8 week voyage across the ocean to New York.

On the sea voyage, the journal of the group leader, Hans Jensen Halls, describes the rough conditions, and the deaths of 37 of those passengers.

They met and were married [some accounts say on the ship, others say after arriving in America] and upon arrival in New York, made a train trip to Laramie, WY, and then an ox train to Salt Lake, where church leadership sent them to help settle the Draper area.

Other branches of my ancestry, the Goodridges, settled Massechusetts in the early 1600s, before this was even a country.

My point in all of this is, it is no accident of birth that we are here, in this great land. It is no accident of birth that our ancestors survived harsh conditions and dangerous situations to settle the wilds of America and build the society we currently enjoy.

It was no accident that my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Moroni [surname redacted], the child of converts to the church, born in England in 1845, moved to Utah. His granddaughter met and married my grandfather, Harold [surname redacted], in the Salt Lake temple before they moved back to [city redacted].

No matter where your ancestors came from, you are here because of their perseverance, their will to survive, and their faith.

Elder Boom reminds us of the lyrics to the children's song, 'Bring the World his Truth', or as I like to think the real title to be, 'Army of Helaman':

We have been born, as Nephi of old, To goodly parents who love the Lord. We have been taught, and we understand, That we must do as the Lord commands.

He says, "Do we feel that this is absolutely true when we sing it? Do you feel that you are “as the army of Helaman” and that you “will be the Lord’s missionaries to bring the world his truth”?.."

"Or what do we feel when we sing the hymn “True to the Faith”?

Shall the youth of Zion falter In defending truth and right? While the enemy assaileth, Shall we shrink or shun the fight? No! True to the faith that our parents have cherished.

"To those of the rising generation," he says, "wherever you are and in whatever situation you may find yourself, please learn and receive strength from the faith and testimonies of those who came before you. It will help you understand that in order to gain or grow a testimony, sacrifices will have to be made and that 'sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven.'"

Testimony is important to us as a people. We dedicate one of our precious hours one Sunday per month to sharing our testimonies with each other. It's so important that when we have our semi-annual conference that uses up what is normally a testimony day, we have testimony the week before, just to make sure we don't miss it.

Why do we do that? We are all here in church. Don't we already have a testimony?

In Nephi, 25:26 we read:
And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.

Through revelation from God through the power of the Holy Ghost, we can come to know that God exists, that Jesus is the Messiah and our Redeemer, that the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been restored in these latter days, and that the Book of Mormon is part of the Word of God. Such knowledge we often describe as a person's "testimony." (5:35)

When I was alone, cut off from everyone I loved, sitting in a jail cell in [city redacted], my mother's testimony strengthened me and turned my life around. She sent me a quad and a letter. The letter said, "Something has to change."

I don't even remember what else the letter said, but those words and that quad left such an impression on me that it has since forever been burned into my heart, and when things don't seem to be going the right way, I remember those words and the connection to the scriptures.

I met a man named Matthew whom was not 'born to goodly parents'. His mother was a rather awful woman that manipulated her husband, stood in the spotlight for Matthew's accomplishments, and utterly rejected him for his shortcomings.

I could see the pain in his face when I spoke about the love of a parent, as I realized he had no idea what that was like.

Elder Boom has a message for those in this situation as well:

"Even when this might not be the case,.. You can become one of those 'goodly parents who love the Lord' and provide a righteous example to others."

Matthew, when I met him, had no religion. He organized punk shows for the local music scene in [city redacted], he was a writer and teacher. We spent a couple years as friends, and he came to me one day and said, "You're always happy. How do I get what you have?"

I told him, "Come to church."

And he did. The idea of heavenly parents that love him was difficult on him. Because of the terrible example of his mother, Matthew had ended the possibility of having children when he was 18, and our focus on families was difficult on him as well. He stopped going for awhile, but one day, after I had moved on, he wrote me an amazing testimony. Unfortunately, I can't find that letter, but I did find this one from him, where he talks about the changes he's attempting to make in his life:

...I have been focusing on some personal inventory msyelf, cleaning up my mouth, avoiding unkind words, consciously considering how other see my actions. I have been reading a lot fo the marriage & family relationship books, since I do not have a good & healthy grasp on how to share the life of another, much less how to allow someone else to be close to me. I still have an aversion to being touched, but prison does not strike me as the proper environment to work that out in! I just pray that I develop into the kind of man a good woman prays to have in her life.

Matthew heard in my words, "Come to church," the testimony of the gospel of happiness, something he had not known in his life, and something that he is striving for now.

1 Peter 3:15 says:
But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear

Peter's advice was just what I needed when Matthew came to me and asked "to have what [I] have."

Some people describe the times when they don't feel close to God as, "struggling with their testimony". When we are struggling with our own faith and testimony, sometimes the reassurance from others of their faith and belief in Christ helps to strengthen ours, to give us something else to ponder on, and can help us to find a way to grow closer to him.

I heard a story once that went like this:

A man and his wife were in the car on a drive. The wife leaned against the passenger window, feeling sad, and said to her husband, "What happened to us? We used to sit so close, you would put your arm around me as we went on a drive."

To which the husband replied, "Honey, I haven't moved."

The moral of this story is: when we don't feel close to God, who moved? (10:10)

The testimonies of our parents, our friends, our loved ones, can help to remind us the importance of having God close to us, that he will be there to throw His arm across our shoulders and welcome us.

While I don't have a written testimony of my ancestors, like Albert [surname redacted], or Moroni [surname redacted], Hans and Marie [surname redacted], I have the example they made, of getting on ships and sailing to the Zion of their time. Of walking away from their homes and lands for the promise of a better life for their children in the presence of their creator.

A Greek proverb says, 'A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they may never sit.'

Elder Boom wraps up with these words:

All of us, whether we are the first generation in the gospel or the fifth, should ask ourselves, What stories of faith, strength, and celestial commitment will I pass on to the next generation?

The testimonies of our ancestors are those trees, and we can follow the same example by passing down our own testimonies to our children, grandchildren, or the children in our lives if we have none ourselves, so they may sit in the shade of what we have prepared for them.

And I leave this with you in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.

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