TUCSON, Ariz. — For most of his life, Daniel Stoker’s music existed in a place few people ever saw. His notebooks, an old four track, voice memos on a dozen smart phones collected over the years, partial digital recordings, and rough demos. That’s all changing.
For more than 35 years, he’s written hundreds of songs every year, an output that adds up to thousands upon thousands of ideas, verses, hooks, chord progressions and full compositions. They span styles and voices, pop to rock, alternative to hip-hop, R&B to grunge, acapella to orchestration. Some are meant for soft, intimate vocals. Others are built for a shout, a rasp, a tight rap cadence, or a soaring chorus.
And yet, for decades, Stoker’s work was essentially private, something he made for himself, for the satisfaction of creating, not for the spotlight. That’s beginning to change now, with the release of two albums, “Sound of Terror” and “In Theory”, and a new approach that Stoker says finally solves the one part of music making he never loved, recording. And he’s using AI to help.
A songwriter first and a missed opportunity
Stoker’s story doesn’t follow the usual path of the musician chasing stages, studios, and social media attention. He tried those roads early on. He played in bands. He performed. He experimented with recording.
But over time he realized the part he returned to, again and again, was the songwriting itself.
“The only thing that I really found joy in was writing the music,” as Stoker describes it. The dream wasn’t fame as a front man. It was something quieter, to write songs other artists could bring to life. “My last gig was over 20 years ago, a three hour set of music at a popular bar next to the University of Arizona that left me exhausted. I just wanted to be home, writing music.”
That focus sharpened after an experience in his early 20s that still stings years later. Stoker had been invited to a major studio after ranking one of his songs in the top 10 among tens of thousands on a newly launched platform supported by George Martin, garageband.com. A rare door opening for a young songwriter. He made the long drive to California, expecting a meeting that could change everything.
It never happened.
According to Stoker, when he arrived, the meeting he’d been asked to come for was not granted at all. No sit down. No conversation. No chance to showcase his songs.
The moment left him disillusioned. And it pushed him toward a decision that would define the next chapter of his life. If the gatekeepers weren’t going to let him in, he’d keep writing anyway, but he’d do it for himself.
In his words, “I’m just going to write music for myself. I’m just going to enjoy it privately. But I still have the congratulatory email from George Martin for getting in the top 10, that is a treasure.”
Songwriting kept easy, recording kept hard
Stoker kept composing, year after year, as the collection grew. But getting the songs recorded in a way that matched what he heard in his bedroom and in his head proved harder, especially from Tucson, far from the major label studio ecosystem he once tried to enter.
Over the years, he connected with different audio engineers, hoping to turn his demos into finished tracks. But the process, he says, rarely worked the way he wanted. It often meant pouring time and money into projects that didn’t come back with results worth the investment.
One summer became a turning point with months spent trying to record just five songs. When the sessions ended, Stoker felt the finished recordings didn’t reflect the quality of the writing.
For someone who measures joy in creation, not production, traditional recording became a kind of friction. He’d start down the path of tracking vocals or instruments, then abandon it. Not because he was lazy, he says, but because the moment he tried to record, his mind went back to writing.
“My heart was not in recording. It was also a struggle finding the time and resources.”
And in the time it would take to finish one track, he might write five more songs.
That cycle, create endlessly but struggle to produce, kept his catalog growing but largely unheard.
AI as a studio, not a songwriter
Now, Stoker says technology has finally provided a path forward. Using AI assisted production tools to help master his songs into polished, professional sounding recordings.
The distinction matters to him.
He’s not using AI to write the music, he says. Not for lyrics. Not for melody. Not for chord progressions on guitar or piano. The creative heart of each song, the part he loves most, remains entirely his.
What AI does provide, is the kind of engineering support he couldn’t consistently access in the past, professional level mixing and mastering, and effects like reverb and compression, expertly executed, that can lift a track from demo quality to something closer to radio ready.
In other words, Stoker uses AI like a virtual control room—an efficient way to bring clarity and polish to songs that already existed long before these AI tools did.
And for a songwriter who has never enjoyed hearing his own voice, the new tools offer another option, vocals that don’t require him to be the singer. This is especially needed for the songs he has written for vocal ranges he can’t reach like soprano and alto.
He still prefers the idea of real artists performing his songs. But when a song needs a voice to be released as a finished track, he can choose an AI supported vocal performance as a stand in, something that lets the song be heard now, rather than waiting indefinitely for a perfect collaborator, studio budget, or an available and willing professional vocalist.
For Stoker, the technology isn’t replacing artists. It’s helping him finally share work that has been building for decades.
“I understand there is some backlash for using AI in songs, and for some people, using AI in general. As a person who writes songs, stories, and has a theoretical, toy model universe for resolving the black hole information paradox, the introduction of mainstream LLMs felt like an attack on my creativity, my innovation, my entire existence.
But I’ve come to learn that LLMs aren’t ‘thinking’ so much as predicting. They generate their output through probabilities for what text, audio, etc., is most likely to come next based on all of the data they’ve trained on. In terms of music creation, that ensures songs that will most likely sound familiar. It’s not producing outlier responses like breakthrough songwriters who throughout the years have created strong melodies that are also vastly different from what we’ve heard before.
Essentially, all new technology comes with the question, ‘Will this hurt me more or help me more?’ and often that answer depends on you, your ability to adapt with the technology and use it to boost your goals in life. I’ve chosen to use AI to help me achieve my artistic goals without compromising my artistic work. In other words, if I had access to a professional recording studio, I could get the same result. The AI is technically not necessary, it’s just very helpful.
But I also understand that professional recording studios are also using AI to help hear songs and flesh out effects, styles, variations, as well as in final production. So that’s the irony of it, if I was invited to a major studio, I would probably be passing my songs to an engineer doing the same thing I’m doing with the AI.”
“Sound of Terror” and “In Theory” albums – songs pulled from a lifetime of songwriting
That shift has already resulted in two album releases, one in the genre of pop and the other in alternative rock.
Stoker’s release of “Sound of Terror” and “In Theory” make 16 songs available from about 30 years of songwriting. And he has six more albums across four different genres of music currently being worked on to release this year.
The concept is personal and chronological. Songs Stoker has written in just the last couple years like “Fault” and “The End” are featured on “Sound of Terror” while songs he wrote in his youth like “Stay Awake” and “Undressed” are featured on the “In Theory” album.
Taken together, the albums play like a time capsule of a songwriter growing up across decades, changing tastes, and shifting styles, while still maintaining a consistent habit of making music simply because he loves to and frankly, can’t not make it.
The release is also a kind of proof-of-life for the catalog he’s kept for so long, these songs weren’t a short burst of creativity. They’re a sustained body of work.
And for Stoker, while it’s an ending to his private life of songwriting, it’s also a beginning, and hopefully, as he puts it, “a chance for my songs to now live on beyond me.”
The goal is still artists over algorithms
Despite the new tools, Stoker’s ideal outcome hasn’t changed. He wants other artists, real performers with real voices, to hear his songs and imagine their own versions.
If “Sound of Terror” generates attention, he hopes it will do so in a specific way, not just streams, but connections. The kind that leads to a singer saying, “that one is mine,” and recording it in their own voice, their own style, their own story.
In that sense, the AI assisted release is both a showcase and an invitation. It’s Stoker’s way of saying that the songs are here, they’ve always been here, and now they can finally be heard.
Calling the hidden songwriters
Stoker’s story also comes with a call for others, especially people who have created in private for years, not for fame, but for themselves.
He’s curious if there are other songwriters out there who have quietly stockpiled thousands of songs for decades, music they listen to while driving, or keep on their phones, never shared widely. People who wrote their own lyrics and melodies long before AI was part of the conversation, but who may now have a tool that helps them cross the last mile of production quality.
He’s careful about that line. He’s not talking about using AI to generate the song itself. He’s talking about finishing what already exists.
For him, that’s the real shift, a world where independent writers don’t necessarily need a perfect studio situation, or a lucky break at a major label, to let their work out into the world.
In Tucson, where Stoker has spent years writing largely out of view, the change feels personal, the first time in decades that the barrier between song and listener has felt manageable.
And after a lifetime of melodies that mostly stayed private, that might be the biggest news of all.
“Ultimately I do agree that we shouldn’t being using AI to song write, because at scale it can add a lot more volume to what’s already most typical, instead of amplifying the rarer, human-specific creative leaps. I believe it should be confined to a tool for assisting in producing, not writing. In other words, ‘We are the music-makers. We are the dreamers of dreams.‘”