Bill Kirst

Songs Finding Their Voices

Breathless & Becoming is a collection of original lyrics written by a man who sees the world through a songwriter's eyes. A poet is but songwriter in a different hat. Each song begins with words on a page, always handwritten, then crosses into unfamiliar territory as it is transcribed into a tool powered by Generative AI to explore melody, voice, rhythm, arrangement, and sound. The voices are synthetic, and the melodies always arrive through deep collaboration with machine learning. The stories, emotions, questions, and words originate from one man's lived human experience.

This is not a finished inspiration for an EP or record. It is more like a living songbook: to see what the words could become someday. Some artist will someday whisper these alive. Some hearts will ache when listened to someday.

Breathless & Becoming documents an apprenticeship in real time. It explores what emerges possible when someone who has spent years writing poetry and lyrics can suddenly trace the phantom echoes of imagined melody brought close enough to touch. Note: AI will never substitute the songwriter and instead sits as an instrument in the box of those at our feet. Perhaps for discovery or inspiration or a way of shortening the distance between imagination and audition. Always in hope that the lyric written in silence finds its way home to a harmony and eventually human worthy of singing it and adopting it.

Threshold Verses draws from a collection of poetry spanning several decades. Some of it arrived as stream of consciousness. Some of it showed up on the page before I was aware I was writing it, then got erased and traced again a few times over. It moves through three thresholds — declaration, grief, and waking — and touches loss, Ireland, ancestry, and the question I keep asking in rooms that would rather I didn't. Form or free never mattered to me. What matters is that it finds you in its own time.

Remember, poets are playdates for the brokenhearted.

What would it look like if we applied the same regard and rigor we give to scale, speed, and efficiency to empathy?

This journey includes a collection of nourishing, restorative conversations hosted on Substack Live and on various podcasts with fellow humans from all over the world. Echoing the stories of growth, grace and grit.

Meditations that help us re-member our humanity in a time where everything is changing all the time, everywhere, all at once. A mix of words heard from beyond, blended with blushes of poetry and wisdom's whispers. Can we get still enough to hear them?