February 27- March 5, 2026

Week of February 27 – March 5, 2026 — Shifting Gears

This week was heavy with the day job, but I still managed to keep the memoir moving. Not at the manic pace I hit in December, but steady enough to feel like something is building again. The more I sit with it, though, the more I’m starting to question one of the central ideas behind the Diane Method. I’m no longer convinced that the “truth-telling loop” itself is the main reason my mood has improved over the past few months.

If I’m being honest, it’s probably only part of it. Maybe twenty or thirty percent. The bigger factor seems to be the creative engine itself — simply having something to build every day. Writing. Editing. Thinking about structure. Losing myself in a project that moves forward a little bit at a time. That alone seems to quiet a lot of the noise that used to sit in my head.

And lately it hasn’t just been the memoir.

Last week I went back to an old concept album I wrote more than twenty years ago with another collaborator. I had the idea of using Suno to generate “cover versions” of the songs — not rewriting them, just letting the system reinterpret them as if another band were performing the material. What started as a curiosity turned into an all-night marathon of mixing and refining the fourteen tracks. My collaborator seemed excited and said he would come over Saturday to listen to everything.

Saturday morning I got a message saying he was sick.

Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But the moment I saw the text, something familiar came rushing back. Twenty-five years ago this same person was chronically late, unreliable, full of excuses. Back then I ended up finishing most of the original album alone because he kept disappearing. When he canceled this time, all those memories snapped back into place. For a brief moment I thought maybe people really do change after enough time passes. But it appears some patterns run deeper than that.

I’ll still see what happens. If he gives his blessing, maybe I’ll release the reinterpretation as a cover project. If he doesn’t, that’s his right. Half the work belongs to him.

The experience did make me think about something else, though. People argue constantly about whether human beings change. Some say we never do. Others say we can reinvent ourselves completely. I’m not sure about anyone else, but I do believe I’ve changed over the years. I’m calmer than I used to be. A little more reflective. Hopefully a little more sensitive to other people than the younger version of me was. And some of that probably does come from the habit of looking back honestly at my life — the good parts and the parts that are harder to look at. That kind of reflection has value, even if the Diane Method itself isn’t the whole story.

At the same time, another thread has been running through my head this week: AI and music.

Because the deeper I look into it, the clearer the battle lines are becoming. A lot of musicians reject anything touched by AI outright. Total dismissal. If a machine was involved at any point, the result is automatically invalid. I understand where that reaction comes from, but it also feels overly simple to me. Music was already deeply artificial long before AI showed up. Endless digital processing, quantization, pitch correction, layers of studio manipulation. The idea that recorded music was once completely “pure” feels like nostalgia more than reality.

Still, AI clearly changes the equation. The backlash is real, and it will shape what happens next. My guess is that live performance will become more important again, maybe the last space where audiences feel they are encountering something undeniably human. That’s ironic for me because the last thirty years of my life have been focused almost entirely on the recording process. If recorded music gradually loses cultural value, that really does mark the end of an era.

So I’m conflicted. Curious, excited, uneasy all at the same time.

The strange thing is that none of this fits neatly into the Diane Method blog I originally imagined writing. At this point I’m less concerned about that. I’ve started to think of this weekly entry as more of a logbook — a place to record where my head is at the moment, whether it connects neatly to the “method” or not.

Realistically, there may never be much of an audience here anyway. I’m starting to accept that possibility. The site might simply become a record of this stretch of my life, something I can look back on later.

And for now, that’s enough.