the song
- length
- 3:48
- voices
- a duet: my lines, and a voice that answers me as “you”
- covers
- January to December 2025
why this isn’t slop
Anyone can type a prompt and get a song back in a minute. I didn’t start with a prompt. I started with a year: a new home, a retrenchment, going back to class, solo trips, a camera, and music finding its way back into my days. I asked an AI search engine about all of it, in plain words, as it happened. Those questions are dated. Reading them back, they told my year better than a diary would have.
AI sang it. I lived it. Every line below happened, and you can see the question that sits behind it.
every line, and the question behind it
Questions are as I typed them, typos and all, cut short where they ran long. A few moments are summarised instead of quoted, where the questions were too personal to share.
- January
Nine hundred kilometres round an island in the rain, knees on fire, Taiwan mornings…
27 Jan “After a round island cycle trip from taiwan and i rode 900km + in 9 days…”
6 Jan “When riding round island taiwan, my knees suffered sore and pain…”
- 2025
Came home to a set of keys…
A new home in 2025.
- February
Then a letter on a Monday said the company would change, Friday was my last day…
You typed into the search bar, what are the first three things to do…
Late February: a retrenchment notice, then a week of questions about what to do first.
- all year
“Tell me like a layman,” again and again.
16 Nov “is this a gold cable ? How to tell layman in one sentence”
“In layman” turns up in my questions from January to December.
- March
Bought your own machine, signed up for class… learned the names of tools you’d never heard of…
14 Mar “First thing in a career transition is to get a personal laptop”
1 Mar “Locate all the sctp courses in sg”
19 Mar “Notion what is it”
- April
Took a bus to Penang, sat by the sea on floor thirty-two, hiked through Cameron’s mud to see a flower bloom.
14 Apr “Describe facing the sea on 32 floor of hotel in Penang”
29 Apr “I am in Cameron highlands and i be visiting the rafflesia flower w hikin…”
- June–July
Built a little helper out of prompts and code, every “validate this”…
12 Jun “I wish to build random quiz question source from…”
20 Jul “Are you able to do a perplexity task prompt to help me check carousell…”
“Validate…” is how I opened a great many questions: checking a post, a claim or a headline before believing it.
- September
Picked a camera up and learned to bend the light, a flash on a stand…
12 Sep “How to master the use of Godox AD200 Pro II flash unit for my mirrorless…”
17 Sep “I am using a light stand with Godox AD200 Pro II and EC200II…”
- October
Then you edited a film and needed headphones for the sound…
27 Oct “How do I install davinci resolve studio on my laptop”
29 Oct “Monitor headphone in SG budget”
- November
…and somewhere in the music, you felt your feet touch ground.
7 Nov “I feel when I listen to DAP SP3000T my mind w auto off to sleep relax…”
- November
A player with a tube inside, a record from Beijing, I closed my eyes on the MRT…
3 Nov “SP3000T lifespan of the tubes”
30 Nov “260 RMB worth it and it’s new” (a vinyl record, in a Beijing shop)
2 Nov “Using SP3000T with DT770 pro on the move to take MRT and bus…”
- December
The year turned into a final round, a handshake, and a door.
December: a final-round interview.
the choices along the way
- 1 · read back
Pulled all 5,301 of my 2025 questions, with dates, and read them month by month.
- 2 · words
Drafted the lyrics from what happened, with Claude, then checked each line against the dated questions. Took one personal detail out before it went public.
- 3 · first take
Made a version with English verses and a Mandarin chorus. Listened, and scrapped it.
- 4 · duet
Rewrote it as a duet in English. I sing my side, and a second voice answers me as “you”, like someone walking beside me through the year.
- 5 · timing
Transcribed the finished song word by word and matched it to the lyrics line by line. Fixed three lines by hand where the transcript drifted.
- 6 · video
Each line types itself into a search box as it’s sung, because that’s where the year was written. No stock footage, no generated faces.
the tools, and what each one did
- the year
- Perplexity: where I asked the 5,301 questions
- the words
- Claude: helped draft and check the lyrics from my history
- the song
- ChatCut: music and both voices, AI-generated
- the video
- HyperFrames: the lyric video, timed to the transcript
More on one thread of the year: a year of learning hi-fi, one question at a time.