This Wasn’t Supposed to Be a Comeback

Sheridan Rhodes is the name I gave to thirty years of music that refused to stay dead.

I’m from Chicago. I know what the city looks like late at night, especially from Lake Shore Drive when the traffic thins out and the skyline starts doing most of the talking. A lot of the music here lives in that same space.

Smooth jazz. Rhodes keys. Saxophone. Muted brass. Brushed drums. Bass (of course) Room to breathe.

Music for driving home too late, sitting awake when everybody else is asleep, or staring out a window with no particular need to explain yourself.

I Was Doing This Before AI Was Part of the Conversation

I started recording music in the late 1990s on a stock desktop computer with a whopping 256 MB of RAM.

That’s not a typo.

I had a cheap audio interface, a mixing board, and whatever recording software I could get my hands on. It wasn’t a professional studio. It was a corner of my living room. It was enough.

I recorded an album. Then I kept going. For more than a decade there were songs, half-finished songs, instrumentals, lyrics, and ideas waiting for me to figure out what the hell to do with them.

Then, in 2014, it was all gone. Every multitrack master. Decades of work. What I had left could fit in a sandwich bag.

Eleven Years Is a Long Time to Avoid Starting Over

I didn’t stop caring about music. I just had no inspiration for rebuilding everything from zero. There’s a difference.

Eleven years passed before I seriously touched any of it again. By then, generative AI had entered the picture, so I started experimenting with AI music tools. Most of the early results sucked. Hard. Some were almost impressive in how badly they missed the point. But I kept at it.

Then a lyric I had written in 1996 finally found the music I had been hearing behind it for nearly thirty years.

That changed things. Not because a machine suddenly became creative. Because I finally had a tool capable of helping me finish something I already knew I wanted to make.

That’s where Sheridan Rhodes began.

One Musician. No Fiction About How This Is Made.

There is no Sheridan Rhodes band.

The instrumentation is one musician, several instruments, and AI collaboration.

I direct the songs, make the choices, reject the bad takes, reshape the arrangements, and decide when a track is finished. Sometimes that means going through version after version because the machine keeps giving me something technically decent that I simply don’t like.

I’ve been listening to, writing, and working with music for more than forty years. AI didn’t give me an ear. It gave my ear a new set of tools.

The judgment is mine. The taste is mine. The final decision is mine.

I’m not interested in pretending musicians were in a studio playing these tracks when they weren’t. I’m also not interested in pretending that typing a sentence and accepting the first result is the same thing as directing a piece of music.

Both arguments are lazy.

This project lives in the much more interesting space between them.

So, What Is Sheridan Rhodes?

It’s unfinished business.

It’s old lyrics getting another chance.

It’s decades of musical ideas being pulled out of memory and put through tools that did not exist when I first had them.

And yes, it’s also an ongoing experiment in AI-collaborative creativity.

The music is here. The process, arguments, occasional frustrations, and my thoughts about making music with AI are on the blog.

I’m not asking anyone to pretend it’s 1998. I’m interested in what one person can make in 2026 when the old limitations are no longer calling all the shots.

That’s Sheridan Rhodes.