Monty and the Blues Algorithm is a recording project built around songs that have stayed with me for a long time, technology that arrived much later, and the belief that some ideas simply wait until the moment they can finally be heard. I decided to put this project together to mark a rather significant milestone birthday (#60!).
I wrote the lyrics and music for this project, some of them decades ago. This debut album, One Sky (2026), brings together songs that span nearly forty years of writing. Someone Who Stays reaches back to a 1987 cross-country motorcycle trip, when I scratched out lyrics on a loose piece of paper and a musical idea that has lived in my head ever since. Alone, Dead A Long Time, Hard to Believe, I’ve Been Thinking, and So Right were written between 2004 and 2005. Long Gone was sketched out during the same period but remained a page of incomplete scribbles until 2025. Stolen Bodies first took shape around 2008, rooted in social-inequality lectures I was delivering at the time, while One Sky emerged from a 2009 children’s film (Imagine That) and a memorable character, played by Thomas Haden Church, who spoke about living under one sky. Even Truth Inside the Twist, written in 2025, draws from earlier experiences as a bartender in Calgary in the 1980s.
I composed the original music with my limited vocals and guitar-playing, then turned to Suno, an AI-driven music application, to help bring the arrangements and performances to life. In that sense, the “band” is algorithmic: the vocals and instrumentals are created through artificial intelligence, guided by my writing, musical intent, and editorial choices. One choice that I made early in the process was that these particular songs required a bluesy style.
I have written the songs, but used AI to perform them. The heart of the work remains human: memory, travel, doubt, love, loss, endurance, and the slow accumulation of perspective. One Sky is both a debut and a retrospective, made possible by tools that simply did not exist when nearly all of these songs were first written.
I recognize that it would be more ideal to have these songs performed by live musicians, and I hope that one day they will be. Until then, Monty and the Blues Algorithm exists as a bridge between past and present—between handwritten lyrics, rough guitar sketches, and modern technology that finally allowed these long-waiting songs to be heard.