There was never really a decision to write Mommy to Mom.
Mom was turning eighty. Jax and I were talking about the party and, at some point, I said something along the lines of, “You know I'm going to be expected to write her a song.”
Nobody had actually asked me to.
They didn't need to.
Writing songs for important family occasions has become something of an institution over the years. Weddings, anniversaries, milestone birthdays — apparently somewhere along the way I’ve become the family songwriter.
The slightly awkward part was that I'd spent much of the previous eight or ten years explaining to myself why I wasn't one.
Hearing it from the other side
In my mind, I’d never completely stopped writing. Ideas still arrived. Lines still appeared. Songs still made noise somewhere in the basement.
I had just found a way to keep the basement mostly closed.
Part of it was life. Some of it was that certain things I wanted to write about felt too private or too painful. And some of it was a much older argument I had been having with myself for years.
If you're good enough, you get published.
If you're not getting published, perhaps you're not really good enough.
And if you're not really good enough, what exactly are you doing writing songs?
It's a spectacularly effective way of not writing songs.
Then, early in 2026, I discovered Suno.
I'd already been experimenting with AI, mostly through long spoken conversations during my commute. Suno was different. It offered the possibility of hearing one of my songs as something other than me, a guitar and whatever arrangement I could construct in my head.
The first old song I seriously threw at it was Strange Lightness.
I knew that song intimately. I'd been carrying its melody around for decades. I could sing it unaccompanied in the car. So I spent perhaps twenty attempts pushing it through different arrangements — country, pop, various things that weren't remotely what I was hearing — until suddenly one was.
And I cried.
Not because I'd forgotten the song or suddenly discovered what it meant.
For a few minutes, I could almost stand on the other side of it and hear what I'd always hoped somebody else might hear.
And somewhere in that experience was a rather unfamiliar thought:
Maybe I'm not as terrible at this as I thought.
A mixtape for my mother
That changed the scale of Mom's birthday present.
Mom has been listening to my songs for most of my life. More importantly, she has somehow managed to remain my greatest fan while retaining just enough maternal quality control to prevent the position becoming entirely ceremonial.
There was the slightly raised eyebrow at the golden-haired fantasy girl in I'll Find That Girl.
And the memorable “Oh, really?” when young Warren announced in Paula that he was “a man who loves women.”
So I thought I'd gather the songs.
Initially it was basically a modern mixtape for my mother: produce the old songs properly, turn them into MP3s and give them to her.
Then a plain USB stick seemed a bit underwhelming.
I discovered credit-card-sized flash drives that could be custom printed, even if I only wanted two. Then came artwork. Presentation. A wooden box with a Tree of Life on it. A way of navigating the songs.
One idea led rather irresponsibly to another.
I didn't know it yet, but the little birthday project was already beginning to turn into something much bigger.
First, though, I needed one new song.
Writing Mom
Writing Mommy to Mom wasn't particularly difficult.
Writing for people I know seldom is.
I don't need to invent the emotional landscape. I already know where I want the song to go. The first job is simply to empty the memories onto the page.
Grade One, and Mom doing tuck-shop duty — with a Chelsea bun put aside for me.
Sitting on the wooden floor of her bedroom while she sewed.
Lunches lined up on the kitchen counter.
School holidays at home, with Mom finding the winter sunshine to sit and read her Bible, her Weigh-Less breakfast beside her.
The clothes she made.
The people she fed.
The faith that was simply there.
None of those things seemed particularly remarkable when they were happening. They were just childhood.
Much later, after the song had been written, I asked Mom what she remembered when she listened to it.
Of the Bible-reading image, she said:
“I didn't know that you noticed that.”
And of the wooden floors and the sewing:
“I didn't realise what memories it was making for you.”
I love that.
One person is simply getting on with an ordinary day. The other is quietly keeping pieces of it for fifty years.
This was also the first time AI became part of the actual songwriting conversation for me.
Not “write me a song about my mother.”
That's never been particularly interesting to me.
It was closer to having a notebook that talked back.
I'd throw in an image, a memory, a possible direction. It would suggest something. Most of the time I'd reject it. Occasionally it would knock loose another thought. I'd change that, argue with this, steal back my own idea in a better shape and keep moving.
It wasn't entirely unlike the creative friction I'd once had writing with Roland or talking songs with Dragon.
Except this particular irritating collaborator was available at any hour and didn't require beer.
Once enough of the song existed, the guitar came out.
And then the fingers did what they've apparently been learning to do for most of my life.
They found somewhere to go.
The bridge
The bridge was different.
My memory of exactly who suggested what is already slightly fuzzy. AI may have suggested the conceptual change. It may simply have labelled the need for a bridge.
What I remember much more clearly is suddenly understanding what that part of the song could do.
Until then, Mommy to Mom had been close-up.
These were my memories of my mother.
The bridge pulled the camera backwards.
Suddenly this wasn't only about Chelsea buns, sewing machines, wooden floors and a boy watching his mother live her life.
It was about what happened afterwards.
Children.
Grandchildren.
Great-grandchildren.
A life quietly flowing into other lives.
The song suddenly had scale.
Majesty, even.
Musically, that presented another small revelation. I'd always tended to think of a bridge as requiring some exotic new piece of musical knowledge I probably didn't possess.
Instead, I discovered that many of the same chords, put into a different sequence and given a different rhythm and emotional weight, could make the whole song feel as though it had stepped into another room.
And interestingly, when Mom later spoke about the song, she singled out that same idea:
“I absolutely love that you mentioned the influence it's having on my grandchildren.”
So if you're listening to the song, listen for the bridge.
That's the moment the camera pulls back.
Listen to the bridge in Mommy to Mom →Starts three seconds before the bridge.
Hearing me inside it
By the time I put Mommy to Mom into Suno, I had learned a little more about how to communicate what I wanted.
I'd also played the song repeatedly myself. I knew I was going to have to stand up at Mom's birthday and perform it, so the melody, phrasing and guitar arrangement were already fairly settled.
The result therefore felt quite different from that first experience with Strange Lightness.
It didn't take twenty-odd attempts.
And when the version arrived that worked, my reaction wasn't:
Look what AI did with my song.
It was:
I can hear me inside it.
It wasn't my voice.
It wasn't my guitar.
But somehow the melody, the phrasing and the way the words moved still felt like mine.
For somebody who had spent years wondering whether the gap between what he imagined and what he could actually produce was evidence that he wasn't particularly good at this, that mattered more than I realised at the time.
Mom turns eighty
Mom had given each of us a role for her eightieth birthday. Mine was to give a speech.
The song wasn't actually on the list.
Apparently everybody — including me — simply assumed there would be one.
By then I'd also started experimenting with another use for AI: taking spoken memories and turning them into something I could work with.
So I asked people who knew Mom from different parts of her life to send me voice notes — Dad, Auntie Pat, my brother, my sister, and Mom's sister/foster daughter.
Don’t ask. It’s Springs.
I transcribed them and began assembling the speech.
What struck me was that everybody remembered a slightly different woman — because of course they did.
She was sister to one person, wife to another, mother to us, grandmother to somebody else.
Different relationships. Different stories.
And yet, underneath them, the same person kept appearing.
She was different to everybody.
But she was the same to everybody.
I ended the speech with the song.
I'd practised it enough to know I had one significant technical problem remaining:
my mother was going to be sitting in front of me.
During rehearsals I'd already discovered that certain lines could stop me halfway through the song if I allowed myself to think too hard about them.
At the party I mostly avoided looking at people.
Especially Mom.
At one point I made the mistake of looking across at her and could see that she was crying.
That nearly finished me.
So I did what any deeply committed emotional performer would do.
I looked somewhere else and concentrated very hard on the guitar.
I got through it.
There weren't many dry eyes.
And afterwards Dad came to me.
Dad is in his eighties.
He was emotional.
“I'm so glad you're writing again. I was so sad when you stopped writing.”
My immediate reaction, at least internally, was:
But I haven't.
I'd never stopped writing.
Except...
Perhaps he wasn't entirely wrong.
The songs downstairs
The ideas hadn't stopped.
The basement had been busy for years.
What I'd largely stopped doing was allowing those ideas to become finished songs.
There were things down there I didn't particularly want to confront. One song in particular had spent years coming up the stairs only for me to beat it back down again because I couldn't work out how to write it honestly without hurting somebody.
There was another song waiting down there about the nagging suspicion that, whatever I could imagine, what I actually produced would always fall somewhere short of it.
And behind both of those was that same old question:
What is the point of writing songs if you're not really good enough?
Something had changed.
Strange Lightness had been allowed out.
Then Mommy to Mom.
Soon some of the harder songs followed.
Not because I'd suddenly decided I was brilliant.
I still haven't suffered that particular crisis of confidence.
But perhaps I'd begun to realise that a song doesn't have to be published to justify being written.
It doesn't have to reach thousands of people.
Sometimes one will do.
From Mommy to Mom
What began as a birthday present didn't stop with the birthday.
The USB became a collection.
The collection became an archive.
The archive became a website.
And then I started opening boxes.
Old notebooks. Cassettes. Song sheets. Church files. Photographs. Half-finished lyrics. Things I'd kept and things I'd completely forgotten I'd kept.
And, unexpectedly, things Mom had kept.
School reports.
Certificates.
Programs.
Pieces of a creative life I had spent years quietly downgrading in my own memory.
I had started the project because, at eighty, I wanted to give my mother the songs she'd spent a lifetime believing in.
I hadn't realised that, all those years, she'd been keeping pieces of the songwriter for me.