We are continuing this week here at Progarchy.com to highlight some of the superb lyrics on Brass Camel (2026), with commentary on each one of the album tracks, and then we will conclude with our album review.

Spoiler alert: we consider the bridge on “Everybody Loves a Scandal” to be a truly magnificent highlight on the album! (Navigation tip: it starts at around 3:33 into the track.)

But for now, here’s Daniel Sveinson of Brass Camel (electric guitar and vocals) on the seventh track of the album:

AI — what a can of worms, isn’t it?

This song, the very first that Aubrey and I co-wrote, came about while talking about AI music and visuals and the ethical conversations around them.

We write and we play our music without any computer assistance, but when the tech was first coming out we would start many of our poster designs with AI and then use a drawing tablet to turn them into our own thing.

For us, a broke indie band, it was the first time where we could afford to present unique graphics for each and every show.

As far as we were concerned, musicians have been dealt one “get used to it” after another over the past decades — first drum machines, then sampling, and then downloading, and then streaming.

We saw a tool that could give us a leg up and we used it for a while. We stopped because:

A) we do work very hard to play/write/scheme up original ideas and didn’t want someone seeing a poster that AI had a part in making and then assuming we write music the same way, and

B) the ethical/environmental arguments against it are compelling enough to not want to touch it.

But having once made what we thought were valid justifications for the use of the technology led to the concept for this song.

When Aubrey and I got together to try writing one-on-one, we thought “let’s write a song written from the point of view of someone who does write their music entirely with AI and is absolutely unapologetic about it.”

By the end of the day we had this song demoed out and it’s one of our favourites on the album because it intentionally covers a lot of different styles, and in the end “the humans win.”

For the music video, we constructed a robot costume and recorded an entire music-video-within-the-video to tell a story of a robot who is suffering from writer’s block so it “prompts” the humans to make a song.

Relevant lyrics:

“There goes the genie

he’s off on his way

the papers said “get back in your bottle”

and he said “not today”

It’s mighty cramped

and you know there’s a chance

that Asimov’s in his grave spinning (the record)

cause you know that he approves

so how about you ignore the words

why don’t you get down with the groove?”