Where Does the Spirit Go? Writing Music, Exploring Loss, and Experimenting With Generative AI

By Steve Baskis

We live in an interesting time.

Technology has always changed the way people make music. Recording studios became digital. Drum machines, synthesizers, sampling, software instruments, and home recording changed what one person could create without needing a room full of musicians or an expensive studio.

Now generative artificial intelligence has entered the room.

I’m still figuring out exactly what that means for me as a musician.

Listen to “Where Does the Spirit Go?”

The video below is the Suno AI-generated video version of the song. I recommend listening first and then reading about how the song developed.

A Special Thanks to Nate Allen

Before getting into the writing process, I want to thank my buddy Nate Allen.

Nate lives with me here in Montrose County, Colorado, and we spend a lot of time jamming, playing instruments, recording ideas, and experimenting with music together. His voice was used as the vocal contribution and vocal source for the generative-AI rendition of this song. The resulting vocal performance carries a tone and range that sound very similar to Nate.

So, Nate—thank you, brother.

Although this became a deeply personal writing project for me, his vocal contribution helped give the finished recording its character.

Lyrics: “Where Does the Spirit Go?”

Intro

Listen up.

What I gotta say matters.

You hear that?

You feel that?

Verse 1

On solid ground. Six feet above.

Looking down at the name of someone I loved.

Cold wind cuts. Feel it in my bones.

People come and go. I’m standing alone.

Tears falling down. I catch my breath.

One deep sigh, in the silence of death.

Good days, bad days, run through my mind.

All those things we never said.

No fear. No shame. No bitterness.

Just trying to make some sense of this.

A life lived. A story to tell.

We knew the highs. We lived through the hell.

Now I’m staring at your name in stone.

Trying to understand how you’re gone.

Body in the ground. Still, the memory grows.

Leaves me wondering… where does the spirit go?

Hook

Clock keeps ticking, your heart lost time.

World keeps moving, leaving us behind.

One last breath, then the whole room slows.

Where does the spirit go?

Time moves on, it doesn’t wait.

One heart stops, the clock won’t break.

I’m still here, that’s all I know.

Where does the spirit go?

Verse 2

Memories running through the back of my mind.

Your energy. Your spirit. Frozen in time.

You had that drive. That yearning for life.

Kept pushing forward, through struggle and strife.

Another road. Somewhere new to go.

Another place. Another world to know.

I’d give anything, just to hear your voice.

One more embrace. Like I still had a choice.

Look in your eyes, just one more time.

Talk about tomorrow, like we had all night.

Cold air cuts. Morning starts to glow.

Wind through the leaves, moving soft and slow.

Sun coming up. Warmth against the cold.

Makes me shiver. Like you’re still close.

Warm on my face. Reminds me I’m alive.

You lived your life. Now I’m living mine.

Hook

Clock keeps ticking, your heart lost time.

World keeps moving, leaving us behind.

One last breath, then the whole room slows.

Where does the spirit go?

Time moves on, it doesn’t wait.

One heart stops, the clock won’t break.

I’m still here, that’s all I know.

Where does the spirit go?

Bridge

If I heard your voice,

I know what you’d say.

Keep moving forward.

Don’t throw time away.

Remember the good.

Remember our days.

Give it your all.

While time remains.

Final Hook

Clock keeps ticking, your heart lost time.

World keeps moving, and so will I.

One heart stopped, still the story grows.

Maybe that’s where the spirit goes.

Time moves on, it doesn’t wait.

I’m still here with a life to make.

Carry you with me down every road.

Maybe that’s where the spirit goes.

Outro

Six feet above.

Cold air.

Sun rising.

Still here. Still living.

This Did Not Begin With “Write Me a Song”

I want to explain something important about how I used ChatGPT, because simply saying that I “used AI to write a song” does not accurately describe what happened.

I didn’t sit down, type “Write me a song about death,” accept whatever appeared, and call it finished.

Instead, I had a conversation.

I had already spent a great deal of time thinking about death, grief, memory, time, and the strange question of what happens to us—or to some part of us—when life ends.

I used ChatGPT partly by asking it to ask me questions.

What would I see if I were standing at someone’s grave? What would I feel? What would the air feel like? What memories would enter my mind? What would I want to say to that person? If I could hear them speak again, what would I hope they might say back? What would it feel like to stand there as darkness gave way to morning?

Those questions triggered ideas in my own mind.

I responded with thoughts, fragments, images, individual words, rough phrases, poetic lines, and plenty of things that were not poetic at all.

Then I worked with them.

I refined them. I changed them. I rejected some. I kept others. I combined ideas. I asked for alternative ways to phrase something. Sometimes ChatGPT offered a useful line. Sometimes I didn’t like a suggestion at all. Other times, something it suggested caused me to think of a completely different idea that became more important than the original suggestion.

That was the process.

For me, ChatGPT became less like an automatic songwriter and more like an interactive writing room—a conversational tool that could ask another question, challenge an idea, examine a phrase, help with meter, or push my thinking in another direction.

Why I Was Thinking About Death

Death is not an entirely abstract subject for me.

I’m a veteran and former service member. During my military service, I witnessed death, loss, violence, injury, and some of the realities that come with war.

Those experiences stay with you.

I’m also now in my 40s, at an age when loss begins showing up differently. Friends around my age are losing mothers, fathers, relatives, and other people who have been part of their lives for decades.

The older we get, the less theoretical mortality becomes.

I found myself thinking not only about death itself, but about everything surrounding it: memory, absence, time, unfinished conversations, things left unsaid, and the desire to speak to someone one more time.

Eventually, one question began to sit at the center of everything:

Where does the spirit go?

Returning to My Musical Roots

Music has become increasingly important in my life.

I love playing music. I love practicing an instrument, making mistakes, repeating something over and over, and gradually realizing that something which seemed impossible a month earlier is starting to become possible.

I didn’t grow up thinking of myself as a songwriter or singer. Earlier in my life, much of my musical identity revolved around drums and rhythm.

After becoming blind, I eventually found myself returning to those musical roots and expanding beyond them.

I started playing piano.

I started singing.

I began spending more time studying chords, harmony, melody, rhythm, songwriting, recording, and music production.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m an amazing singer. I’m not.

I’m also not going to pretend that I’m an amazing piano player. I’m not.

I’m learning.

And I think there is something important about being willing to say that.

You don’t have to be a virtuoso before you’re allowed to create. You don’t need to master everything before you have something worth expressing.

Sometimes creativity starts because something has been sitting in your mind and you need to find a way to get it out.

Technology Is a Tool

That’s also how I’m trying to approach generative AI.

I don’t want technology to replace the experience of playing an instrument.

I don’t want it to replace practicing.

I don’t want it to replace sitting in a room with another musician and discovering something together.

But I also don’t believe every new technology should automatically be rejected because it makes some part of the process easier.

We live in a time when technology can automate an enormous amount of creative work. That raises legitimate questions for musicians, writers, photographers, filmmakers, producers, and other artists.

If software can generate a piano part, why practice piano?

If an AI system can generate lyrics, why learn to write?

If a computer can generate a musical performance, why spend years learning an instrument?

For me, the answer is that the experience of doing something has value beyond the finished product.

I still want to practice piano. I still want to improve my singing. I still want to play instruments. I still want to make music with Nate and other musicians.

At the same time, I am curious about what these new tools can do.

Sometimes I might use generative AI sparingly. Sometimes I might use it much more aggressively.

Right now, I’m experimenting.

“Where Does the Spirit Go?” became one of those experiments.

Starting With a Subject, Not Finished Lyrics

The song began with death and loss rather than a finished lyric.

I started supplying words, fragments, images, emotions, and concepts.

Death. Tragedy. Despair. Sorrow. Whisper. Spirit. Transition. Loss. Remembering. Cherishing. Forgiveness. A coffin. A funeral. Dreams. Resolution. New life.

They weren’t lyrics yet.

They were an emotional vocabulary.

They gave me something to explore.

From there, I wanted the conversation to become increasingly visual and physical.

Where am I?

What am I actually seeing?

What does grief feel like in the body?

Six Feet Above

One of the most important images came from thinking about a gravesite.

Everybody knows the expression six feet under.

But I became interested in the opposite perspective.

What about the person who remains?

What about the person standing over that grave?

They’re not six feet under.

They’re six feet above.

I experimented with several ways of expressing that until it became:

On solid ground. Six feet above.

That line became one of the foundations of the song.

The person who died is beneath the ground.

The narrator is still standing on it.

Breathing. Thinking. Hurting. Remembering. Living.

Standing at the Grave

Then I began filling in the physical environment.

Tears. An ache in the heart. A ragged breath. Cold air. Silence. The grave.

I specifically wanted the word sigh incorporated into the scene.

Eventually those thoughts became:

Tears falling down. I catch my breath.

One deep sigh, in the silence of death.

That changed something.

The song was no longer simply discussing mortality as an abstract concept.

Someone was physically standing somewhere.

There was ground beneath his feet.

There was cold air against his skin.

There was somebody beneath him who wasn’t coming back.

The Question Became the Song

Out of those conversations came the central question:

Where does the spirit go?

I eventually realized that I didn’t want to give the listener a definitive answer.

I could have made the song explicitly religious. I could have said heaven. I could have explored reincarnation, energy, the universe, or any number of explanations.

But none of those were really the point.

The interesting part was standing there not knowing.

The narrator wants an answer to something that may be fundamentally unknowable.

As the song progresses, he slowly becomes more comfortable living without that certainty.

What Do We Remember?

Then I started thinking about memory.

Good days. Bad days. Things we said. Things we should have said. Someone’s personality. Their drive. Their energy.

The strange experience of having pieces of somebody else’s life replay inside your own mind.

Even individual words mattered.

At one point, a line referred to things running through my head.

I changed it to mind.

That’s a tiny change, but it better represented what I was trying to say.

That kind of editing happened constantly.

I wasn’t simply accepting generated output.

I was listening, changing, deleting, restoring, and deciding whether something actually sounded like me.

If You Had One More Conversation

Then I started thinking about something I suspect many people who have lost somebody understand immediately.

What would you give for five more minutes?

To hear their voice?

To hug them?

To look into their eyes?

To have one completely ordinary conversation about tomorrow as though tomorrow were still guaranteed?

Before somebody dies, tomorrow can seem almost meaningless.

Of course we’ll talk tomorrow.

Of course we’ll see each other again.

Then suddenly there is no tomorrow with that person.

Something completely ordinary becomes impossible.

What Would They Say Back?

Eventually I changed perspectives.

Instead of only asking what I would say to someone who had died, I began asking what that person might say to me.

My answers were relatively simple.

Live your life.

Keep moving.

Remember the good times.

Don’t waste the time you still have.

Give it everything you’ve got.

That is where the song begins turning.

It starts by looking toward death.

Now it begins looking back toward life.

Morning

I didn’t want the entire song trapped in darkness and grief.

So I imagined dawn.

I pictured standing outside early in the morning.

Cold, crisp air.

A breeze moving through the trees.

Leaves shifting.

The first sunlight.

Warmth beginning to reach your skin.

A physical shiver.

And then the realization:

I can feel this because I’m alive.

The sunrise isn’t just scenery.

It moves the story.

The narrator begins standing above a grave surrounded by cold.

He eventually feels sunlight warming his face.

That warmth becomes evidence that life is continuing.

Heartbeats and Clocks

Another conversation centered on time.

A heart stops.

A person’s life ends.

But every clock around them continues moving.

The world does not stop because somebody died.

We experimented with a literal “tick, tick, tock” idea.

I eventually removed it.

It felt too obvious.

This is one of the things I found interesting about working with ChatGPT.

Generating words is easy.

Deciding which words shouldn’t survive is where a significant part of the creative process happens.

Writing for a Rap Performance

The structure changed several times while I was working.

We experimented with shorter verses because the instrumental was mellow and needed room to breathe.

But I felt that too much of the stronger material was disappearing.

Eventually, I moved back toward a recognizable hip-hop structure:

Intro → 16-bar Verse 1 → Hook → 16-bar Verse 2 → Hook → Bridge → Final Hook → Outro

The track was centered around approximately 88 BPM.

But I didn’t want every line delivered at exactly the same speed.

I wanted conversation.

Sometimes sitting behind the beat.

Sometimes accelerating through a phrase.

Sometimes almost speaking.

Sometimes leaving silence around a thought.

Even punctuation became part of the performance direction.

Those periods weren’t there only for grammar.

They became little instructions.

Stop.

Breathe.

Let the thought land.

Then move.

From ChatGPT to Suno AI

Once I had substantially established the lyrics, structure, emotional arc, and performance direction, I moved into production.

This is where Suno AI became part of the process.

The musical framework settled around 88 BPM in A minor, with a reflective alternative and conscious hip-hop environment.

I wanted dusty live drums, deep melodic bass, sparse upright piano, muted electric guitar textures, organic percussion, restrained cinematic strings, subtle analog synthesizer atmosphere, tape saturation, room ambience, and an imperfect human groove.

I initially experimented with the phrase aggressive conversational rap.

It didn’t fit.

The song was too intimate.

So I shifted the direction toward intimate conversational rap with controlled intensity.

I also wanted variable cadence—a relaxed pocket for much of the song with occasional quicker phrasing and natural rhythmic acceleration without actually increasing the tempo.

Nate’s Voice and the Generated Performance

This brings me back to Nate.

For the generative-AI rendition, Nate Allen provided the vocal contribution and source.

The generated performance carries a tone and range that are very similar to his actual voice, which gives the recording a connection to the person I regularly make music with here at home.

Nate and I spend plenty of time messing around with instruments, recording things, trying ideas, laughing at things that don’t work, and occasionally stumbling onto something worth keeping.

That human relationship matters to me.

So when somebody hears this AI-assisted recording, I want them to know that there is still a real friend behind that voice.

Thank you again, Nate, for being part of the experiment.

Who Did What?

I believe in being transparent about the creative roles involved.

Steve Baskis: writer, composer, concept and narrative development, original lyrics and lyrical ideas, imagery, creative direction, song structure, arrangement direction, production direction, prompting, revisions, and final creative decisions.

Nate Allen: voice contribution and vocal source used for the generative-AI version of the song.

ChatGPT: collaborative writing and development assistance, questioning, brainstorming, lyrical refinement, editing, song-structure development, meter and syllable refinement, rap-flow and cadence suggestions, rhyme and phrasing assistance, and production-language assistance.

Suno AI: generative music and audio production and musical realization based on the supplied lyrics, creative direction, style prompting, and vocal material.

Why I’m Telling You How It Was Made

I want to be transparent about my use of AI.

Generative AI raises real questions for musicians, writers, artists, filmmakers, photographers, producers, and almost every other creative profession.

I don’t have all the answers.

I’m exploring it.

I still want to sit at a piano.

I still want to practice.

I still want to become a better singer.

I still want to become a better musician.

I still want to jam with Nate and other musicians.

I still believe there is tremendous value in spending years becoming genuinely skilled at something.

But I also live in 2026.

These tools exist.

They’re becoming more capable and more prevalent.

I’m curious about them.

Sometimes I may use AI a little.

Sometimes I may use it extensively.

What matters to me is being honest about what I actually did.

I don’t want to claim I performed something that I didn’t perform.

I don’t want to claim I wrote something entirely alone if another person or a machine materially contributed to the process.

But I also don’t think the phrase AI-generated should automatically erase all of the human thinking, decision-making, experimentation, and emotion that may have happened before the computer ever generated a sound.

With this song, I spent a lot of time thinking.

Talking.

Imagining.

Answering questions.

Writing lines.

Rewriting them.

Rejecting ideas.

Searching for images that represented what I was actually trying to express.

AI was part of the process.

But the process began with a human being thinking about death.

Maybe That’s Where the Spirit Goes

Something interesting happened toward the end of the writing process.

The recurring hook asks:

Where does the spirit go?

But I didn’t want the final hook to repeat the same question as though nothing had happened during the song.

By then, the narrator has stood over the grave.

He has remembered.

He has longed for another conversation.

He has imagined what the deceased might say to him.

He has watched the sun rise.

He has felt warmth on his face.

He has realized that he is still alive.

So the language changes:

World keeps moving, and so will I.

And eventually:

Maybe that’s where the spirit goes.

Not:

That’s where the spirit goes.

Maybe.

Perhaps some part of somebody continues through memory.

Through stories.

Through lessons.

Through their influence.

Through the people they affected.

Through decisions we make years later because of something they once said or did.

I don’t know.

And I didn’t want the song pretending that I do.

Still Here. Still Living.

The ending was eventually reduced to four simple statements:

Six feet above.

Cold air.

Sun rising.

Still here. Still living.

Those few words ended up containing almost the entire emotional journey.

Death is beneath the narrator.

The cold hasn’t disappeared.

But the sun is coming up.

And he is still here.

The question about death remains unresolved.

But another question gets answered:

What does the person who remains do now?

Live.

Listen, Read, and Tell Me What You Think

I wrote “Where Does the Spirit Go?” on September 19, 2026, in the living room of my home in Montrose, Colorado.

It began as a meditation on death.

It became a conversation about memory.

And somehow it ended up being a song about living.

If you have a few minutes, listen to it.

Then come back and think about how it was made.

Maybe you’re a musician.

Maybe you’re a songwriter.

Maybe you work with technology.

Maybe you love generative AI.

Maybe you hate it.

Maybe you’re still trying to decide what you think.

Or maybe you’ve simply lost somebody.

Either way, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

Send me a message. Tell me what you thought about the song, the meaning behind it, or the process used to create it.

Tell me where you think these tools belong—or where you think they don’t.

For me, this was a songwriting experiment, a production experiment, and an experiment with a new kind of technology.

But underneath all of that was something much older and much simpler.

A person standing above a grave.

Thinking about somebody who is gone.

Wondering where they went.

And eventually realizing:

I’m still here.

Still living.

Learn more about my music, projects, and work at SteveBaskis.com