Sometimes a song starts with a melody.
Sometimes it starts with a person.
This one started with me staring at the clock and thinking, “Sunday is a really long way away.”
I had promised myself a social-media fast until Sunday. A little discipline. A little silence. A little practice in not reaching for someone just because I miss them.
Naturally, my brain immediately began looking for loopholes.
So I wondered: Would it be cheating horribly if I sent Stephanie a little musical care package?
Not on social media. Not on YouTube.
Just an email attachment.
Technically, I decided, that was not cheating.
I am a lawyer only in my own imagination.
And so SPARK began.
2/9
The first problem was the name.
An Arabian horse has speed, stamina, endurance, strength over long distances. That felt very energetic.
So I went looking for an Arabian horse name that might capture that.
I found plenty.
Unfortunately, most of them required me to possess a functioning Arabic dictionary, phonetic memory, and perhaps a minor degree in linguistics.
I couldn’t pronounce them.
I couldn’t spell them.
I certainly couldn’t remember them five minutes later.
And some of the associations made me uncomfortable anyway. I kept thinking, “Nope. Not putting my friend in a harem.”
Back to the drawing board.
Then I realized something.
3/9
Instead, I asked a much simpler question:
Who is my friend to me?
The answer came surprisingly quickly.
She is a spark of inspiration.
Not a savior.
Not an answer.
Not some missing piece of my life.
A spark.
Something small that can change the direction of everything around it.
She has a way of making me think differently. She asks questions. She notices things. She sees possibilities. She occasionally says something that sends my brain wandering off into the woods for three days.
This blog exists partly because of that sort of thing.
So does a ridiculous amount of my recent creative output.
Lab note:
There is a difference between someone creating something inside you and someone helping you notice what was already there.
I wanted the song to live on the second side of that distinction.
The fire is mine.
The spark is hers.
4/9
Then came the music.
My first attempts were… well…
Ballads.
Slow ones.
Very tasteful.
Very introspective.
Very likely to put the listener into a comfortable chair with a blanket and a cup of herbal tea.
They were lethargic.
She is not lethargic.
The woman I was trying to celebrate has an internal engine that appears to run on jet fuel and unreasonable amounts of determination.
So I asked myself:
What kind of music makes me think of her?
The answer was immediate.
Reggae.
Not generic pop with a reggae beat pasted onto it.
Jamaican reggae.
Warm.
Rhythmic.
Physical.
Music that makes sitting still seem like a temporary medical condition.
That was the breakthrough.
Once I changed the musical direction, the song suddenly had somewhere to go.
5/9
I wanted the music to feel like movement.
So I built the sound around a deep bass groove, offbeat guitar, one-drop drums, percussion, organ, and a soulful Jamaican vocal approach.
The goal wasn’t to imitate a particular artist.
It was to capture a feeling.
Nighttime.
Warm air.
People outside.
Music spilling into the street.
Someone starts dancing.
Then somebody else.
Pretty soon nobody remembers who started it.
That felt much closer to the idea of Spark.
A spark doesn’t give a speech.
It doesn’t explain itself.
It spreads.
The song became less about “I have something profound to tell you” and more about “Look what happens when inspiration gets loose.”
And that felt right.
6/9
Then I needed a video.
The visual idea was simple:
A Jamaican outdoor music party at night.
Thirty shots.
Band.
Dancers.
Percussion.
Crowd.
Lights.
Movement.
Joy.
I wanted it to feel like a real music video rather than thirty pretty AI pictures standing around waiting for something to happen.
So I deliberately varied the camera language.
Wide establishing shots.
Close-ups of hands on drums.
Bass strings.
Low angles.
Tracking shots.
Drone shots.
Bird’s-eye views.
A camera moving through the crowd.
A singer stepping off the stage and into the dancers.
A final crane shot rising above the entire celebration.
The visual structure followed the song itself.
One spark.
Then movement.
Then more movement.
Then everybody is dancing.
Lab note:
This is one of the things I love about working with generative AI.
The AI doesn’t hand me a finished movie.
It gives me ingredients.
My job is to decide which ingredients belong together.
That’s the alchemy.
7/9
For the images, I used Midjourney to create the nighttime Jamaican music-video world.
The challenge was consistency.
If you generate thirty unrelated party pictures, you don’t get a music video.
You get thirty unrelated party pictures.
So I kept the visual language tight:
Warm amber string lights.
Deep blue-black tropical night.
Saturated clothing.
Outdoor celebration.
Authentic Jamaican roots-reggae atmosphere.
And lots of movement.
The prompts became less about individual beautiful images and more about constructing a visual vocabulary.
That’s an important distinction.
I wasn’t asking:
“Give me a cool picture.”
I was asking:
“What would the next shot be?”
That tiny change in thinking makes a surprisingly big difference.
8/9
The creative stack for SPARK was deliberately simple:
Midjourney — visual generation
Google Music Flow – AI music generation — song composition, arrangement, and vocal performance
Kdenlive Video editing — assembling the shots into a music-video rhythm
The interesting part wasn’t any individual tool.
It was the conversation between them.
The lyric suggested the music.
The music changed the lyric’s emotional meaning.
The reggae groove suggested movement.
Movement suggested the Jamaican nighttime party.
The party suggested the camera language.
And suddenly I wasn’t making a song anymore.
I was making a little world.
That’s my favorite part of this process.
The tools are wonderfully literal.
I am the one who has to keep asking what the thing is trying to become.
9/9
So here it is.
SPARK.
Three minutes of Jamaican-inspired reggae, nighttime color, dancing, percussion, friendship, and gratitude.
It started because Sunday felt too far away.
It became a song because I was trying to figure out how to say something simple:
You have inspired me.
That’s all.
No grand declaration.
No obligation.
No expectation.
Just gratitude for the strange, wonderful fact that sometimes another human being can cross your creative path and make the world look a little more interesting.
Lab note:
I think I’ve finally figured out what I like about the word “spark.”
A spark doesn’t have to become a fire.
It doesn’t have to last forever.
It doesn’t even have to know what happens next.
It just has to be bright enough, for long enough, to make you notice something.
And sometimes that’s enough to get the forge burning again.
The video alchemist strikes again.
Fortunately, nobody was harmed in the making of the metaphor.
Steve Teare
video alchemist
TerminallyBored.Monster
Palouse, Washington USA