I love this album. Been listening to @alexskolnick.bsky.social 's new one a lot of late. It's excellent.

"So I write with intention, create music with intention, teach with intention, and as best I can resist the pull to weaken and diminish any of those for greater reach."

Yes to all of this:
www.stevelawson.net/2026/04/28th...

😂😂😂😂😂😂

...seeing just how many of the jobs that come up on LinkedIn in 'academia' and the creative sector just boil down to 'training new AI models', it seems like we're in for a rough ride...

🎯
(this makes me feel better 🤣)

...and if I feel that as a very well connected middle aged white dude, with all the attenant privilege, the intersectional imagining of what faces my students moving into creative work with any intention of making worthwhile art is... 🤷🏽

image of text from an Instagram Post that reads "New research from Cambridge University found that young people from lower-income backgrounds are routinely steered away from creative careers at school as they are told they’re too risky. 42% of 14-year-olds enjoy creative subjects. Just 1 in 25 ends up working in a creative career. For girls from lower-income backgrounds, the researchers have a phrase for it: double disadvantage. Meanwhile, median pay in the creative industries is £42,399, which is above the UK average. The sector employs 2.4 million people and is one of the government’s eight identified growth industries. What advice were you given around creative careers at school and how did it impact your career journey? "

So apparently the median income in the 'creative industries' is £42K. And here I am, 53 with a PhD, a 27-year internationally celebrated solo career, a 3-decade teaching career, struggling to imagine a world in which I made that much without doing absolutely heinous work. 😩🤷🏽🙄🤪

I do need to see what it would manifest as in music! Possibly some very electronic sounding dystopian weirdness 😆

It'd be interesting to see some really large scale sentiment/topic analysis of social media platforms across years. I'm not sure how it would be done, but I know who I'll ask to see if they can do it!
It feels truly dystopian right now. The glut of AI-written biographical bullshit bloat on FB is 😳

it works exactly like gambling these day - almost everyone loses, the house always wins, and the occasional win is let through to keep us all placing bets. See also: Spotify/YouTube/etc.

and what passes for organic reach is just 'what pleases our robotic overlords'. I marvel at all the advice to 'know your audience' that still circulates. It's completely irrelevant to know your audience, when the gatekeeper is an algo designed to generate data/money for/from advertisers.

what's perhaps weirdest is how familiar we've all become with the task of making content for robots - what we know about our audience is secondary to what we know about what the algo will show to our audience. It's absolutely fucked as a way of being online. But we all do it.

even the re-share of it into my stories has been seen by a quarter of the usual viewing numbers... I guess this is what shadow banning must feel like. So weird.

I mean, I get that they're in the bizness of tracking anything that looks like marketing (even though literally everything on IG is marketing) and trying to make us pay for reach, but this wasn't that. It was just a 'hey, look how long my website's been around. remember that shitty design?' post.

Meta's willingness to absolutely throttle anything with a URL in the image is wild. I posted about my website anniversary yesterday, screenshot a few pages of the site - proper nostalgic catnip for a certain sector of my audience - and it gets shown to no-one, and refused to crosspost to FB 😳

listening to the Ronson/Cyrus/Pearl Jam piece now. Really beautiful. Such a rich exploration and reimagining 🙏🏼💜

Steve Lawson - Marry You (Bruno Mars reharm) YouTube video by Steve Lawson

this is one of the vocal reharms, with it slowed and repitched too :) www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXgT...

Ahh there's no guilt in you making music this beautiful 😉 I try to treat it with as light a touch as possible, first take if possible, sometimes intentionally not finishing the arrangement before I start playing just to bring improv and ear training into play :)

Let The Day Begin, for Pip Wilson YouTube video by Steve Lawson

this is one of mine that I particuarly like for its distance from the original (no vocal this time) - www.youtube.com/watch?v=6D-G...

ahhh, listening to the Taylor Swift tune now. I absolutely love this approach, and dive into something similar often. I enjoy using the original acapella and seeing what I can do to it to transform the song... :)

Reimagining Taylor Swift's ''tis the Damn Season' – Piano Interpretation YouTube video by Sorana

I've decided to slowly gather the reworkings/re-imaginings I've done of other people's songs in one place.

My love is to make piano reductions of math rock songs, but I can be goaded into reworking Taylor Swift too - would love to hear your thoughts

#MusicSky #MusicianSky
youtu.be/I1hGCYQO-kw?...

I think the great. invitation of AI is to dive headlong into weird, unpolished, live recording, being wildly diverse and willfully obtuse, while building a relationship with an audience who see undersatnding your crazy music choices as a challenge...

Not Dancing For Chicken (2012 Remaster), by Steve Lawson 17 track album

Any mobile phone has more power and better software than I used for this, and with Reaper on a laptop you've got free* access to something more powerful than ProTools was back then. Oh, here's the album, BTW :)
stevelawson.bandcamp.com/album/not-da...

Telling da yoofs that they have it easy/in our day it was hard etc. is specious nonsense, but I do laugh when my music students tell me they don't have the right gear to make an album when my 2nd solo album was recorded with a Soundblaster Live soundcard into Soundforge, a 2-track mastering program

28th Anniversary of This Website, Now Updated! Using the anniversary of the start of my website as an excuse for a bit of a history lesson in websites, blogging and algorithms. I suspect this is part 1 of a series ;)  Today (April 20th) is the 28th anniversary of me starting my website:  As you can see here...

in 'shit, I feel old' news, my website is 28 years old today. So I wrote about it - www.stevelawson.net/2026/04/28th... :)

EVs have always been a solution for the car industry not the planet...

The Bike Lane Gender Gap: New Research Shows Women Ride More Where Protected Infrastructure Exists.
momentummag.com/the-bike-lan...

This is absolutely beautiful writing. I felt every one of these things on Oscar night. So good to hear someone else articulate the same feeling 🙏

One of my favourite things in the world 🤣

Amsterdam, by Steve Lawson 6 track album

Got lots of new music happening at the moment. It's really quite exciting. My last public* album is one of my favourite things I've ever done, so please do give it a listen if you haven't already :) stevelawson.bandcamp.com/album/amster...

(*public as opposed to Bandcamp-subscriber-only)