Jack was a good friend, and he never even met Epstein. Nor have I.
Years ago, when I was involved in the intelligence community as a “clerk-typist trainee MOS 006”, I heard a curious bit of professional slang used to describe the underworld agents against whom the good guys were pitted.
In underworld slang, assassins were sometimes called “mechanics.” The idea was simple: a mechanic fixes a problem using tools and technical skill. In that world, the “problem” happened to be a human target.
The term always stuck with me because later, when I moved through the music world, I discovered the exact same concept hiding in plain sight.
When you hire a studio musician, you’re hiring a mechanic.
A studio musician is not part of the band. He or she is brought in to supply a particular instrumental or vocal track that the band can’t supply.
Calling someone like Jim Keltner or Bill Green a “mechanic” might sound harsh at first, but it’s actually very accurate. A studio musician’s job is to come in, read the chart, understand the chord structure, and mechanically execute the notes with precision and feel. They are highly skilled mechanics of sound. They repair musical problems, fill in missing parts, tighten the rhythm, add the necessary harmonic structure, and make the track work.
But here’s the interesting part: the entire process of songwriting itself is mechanical.
Songs follow rules.
Chord progressions follow rules.
Rhythm follows rules.
Harmony follows rules.
Song structure follows rules.
Verse, chorus, bridge.
Tension, release.
Setup, payoff.
Even inspiration tends to arrive through patterns that can be described and repeated.
In other words, what we call creativity is very often a sophisticated mechanical process running inside the brain.
The human brain itself is basically a biological computer. It runs on chemistry and electricity. Silicon computers run on electricity and circuits. One uses saltwater and neurons, the other uses chips and transistors. But both systems follow rules, patterns, and signal processing.
A flesh-and-blood saltwater computer and a silicon computer are performing the same fundamental operation: they take input, process it through structured rules, and produce output.
That’s why tools like Suno can generate music that sounds so convincing. They are simply executing the same structural mechanics that human musicians have been using all along.
The melody rules.
The harmonic rules.
The rhythmic rules.
The arrangement rules.
Once the system understands the mechanics, the song appears.
This doesn’t make music less magical. If anything, it makes the magic easier to reproduce. Once you understand the mechanical skeleton of a song, you can generate endless variations. Change the style, change the instrumentation, change the emotional emphasis — but the engine underneath is still the same set of musical mechanics.
In that sense, every musician is a mechanic.
Some of us are guitar mechanics.
Some are piano mechanics.
Some are rhythm mechanics.
And now we also have silicon mechanics helping us out.
The interesting twist is that when the mechanics are working well enough, something strange happens. The mechanical process begins producing moments that feel emotional, mysterious, even spiritual.
Out of a system of strict rules comes something that feels alive.
Maybe the miracle isn’t that machines can make music.
Maybe the miracle is that mechanical systems — whether biological or silicon — can produce beauty at all.
Now this idea becomes especially interesting when we look at the method I’ve been using for generating songs.
Many of you in the Zoom group have seen me demonstrate what I call the Song Matrix method. It’s a very simple mechanical system. I take one lyric sheet and feed it into the song generator. Then I apply one of ten different style prompts. Each prompt produces two musical interpretations of the same lyrics.
So with one lyric sheet and ten styles, I end up with twenty different versions of the same song.
Then I repeat the process with another lyric sheet, using the exact same ten styles. And again, two results per style. Over time this builds a matrix of songs: ten lyric sheets multiplied by ten styles. The result is a hundred mechanical song constructions, each one interpreted slightly differently.
What’s interesting is that I don’t throw any of them away.
Every version has its own personality because the mechanical rules interact in slightly different ways each time. The same lyrics can sound like a barbershop quartet, a New Orleans jazz band, a sea shanty, or a country ballad. The underlying structure is the same, but the mechanical expression changes.
This is exactly how mechanics work.
Give the same blueprint to ten different mechanics and you’ll get ten slightly different machines. All of them follow the rules, but each one has its own character.
The Song Matrix simply turns that principle into a deliberate creative practice. Instead of waiting for inspiration to strike, the system produces variations automatically. Among those variations there are always a few golden ones — the versions where the mechanical structure suddenly comes alive and something special appears.
And that’s the funny part.
What begins as a mechanical exercise often ends up producing moments that feel inspired, emotional, or even mysterious. Out of a set of rules comes something that feels almost magical.
So when people ask whether machines can write songs, I usually smile.
Mechanics have been writing songs all along.
The only thing that has changed is that now we have a few more mechanics helping us.
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During the Renaissance, most skilled work was organized through guild systems. A guild was essentially a professional association that regulated training, quality, and methods for a specific craft. There were guilds for painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, printers, instrument makers, and musicians.
Artists were not originally thought of as mystical creative geniuses the way we sometimes imagine today. They were considered craftsmen — trained technicians who had mastered a mechanical system of rules.
A painter learned strict methods for mixing pigments, preparing panels, constructing perspective, and arranging figures. A composer learned counterpoint, harmonic structure, and formal musical patterns. These rules were studied, practiced, and repeated until the craft became second nature.
In fact, Renaissance workshops often looked very much like modern studios or production houses.
A master painter like Leonardo da Vinci or Rembrandt van Rijn ran a workshop where assistants performed highly mechanical tasks. Apprentices prepared canvases, mixed pigments, painted backgrounds, and filled in routine sections of large works. The master would step in for the important parts — the face, the hands, the final details.
The same thing happened in music. Composers working in churches or royal courts produced music under extremely strict systems of harmonic rules. Counterpoint manuals laid out the allowable movements of voices almost like engineering diagrams. A trained composer could generate music almost mechanically because the structure itself dictated what could happen next.
In other words, what we now call creativity was historically understood as mastery of a craft system.
The Renaissance artist was a mechanic of beauty.
Once the mechanical rules were mastered, something remarkable happened. The work began to appear inspired, even magical. But underneath the apparent inspiration was an invisible framework of technique, training, and repeated practice.
Which brings us right back to the present moment.
Today we have new tools — silicon computers instead of apprentices — but the principle is exactly the same. The machine learns the rules of harmony, rhythm, structure, and style. It then recombines those rules into new arrangements.
In a strange way, modern AI music tools behave a lot like Renaissance workshops.
The rules produce the structure.
The structure produces the work.
And occasionally, out of that mechanical system, something unexpectedly beautiful appears.
So the idea that creativity is partly mechanical is not new at all. The Renaissance masters understood it perfectly.
They just called it craft.
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Hoopla, behold, the Bardo bus arriveth! Clamber aboard as best you can!
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See You At The Top!!!
gorby