Behind Bee Brightly
The Story Behind Bee
One day my wife and I came across this clip and found it fascinating. We had heard about AI music, but had never really given it much thought until we saw this interview. We looked at each other and said, “That might be fun! We could do that!” We are both lifelong music lovers, but for years, our songs only lived as drafts in our emails or melodies in our heads. "Can we make this personal?” We didn't want a computer to automate creativity; we wanted a tool that would finally let us express it. We decided to see if we could bridge that gap.
Building Bee began with a simple conversation and turned into a project that would occupy our thoughts more than we could ever imagine. We started with the avatar. I’d ask Jennie, “What color hair?” or “How old is she?” and feed those prompts into AI image generators. After countless versions, we finally saw her. Thus, Bee Brightly was born.
Interestingly, while her purple-tinted hair suggested Alt-Rock, Bee had other plans. Every time we generated her image or her first tracks, she had this knack for appearing by barns or in cowboy boots. We realized then that Bee wasn't just a pop project—she was a Country artist with a heavy dose of Soul and Rock grit.
Tech Meets Passion
We use Suno as our primary "instrument," but it’s far from "push-button" music. The real work is in the lyrics and the "Prompt Engineering." Most of the songs are written from Bee’s point of view as if she lived those words, usually with a melody already in mind. We write every lyric of every song for Bee.
The challenge—and the art—is translating that idea into words the AI understands. We’ve discovered that working with Suno is a lot like dealing with our Beagle: it chooses to understand what we’re saying about 10% of the time, but when it finally listens, the results are magic. We use everything from custom "Personas" to external tools like Audacity to polish the tracks until they sound like the songs we’ve been hearing in our heads for decades.
Are we trying to "replace" human musicians? The answer is a hard no. Nothing replaces the connection of a live concert. For us, AI is about accessibility. It gave two people who don't play instruments a way to finally share the songs that had been "Starbucks cup" scribbles for years.
The first time I heard my words turned into a song I could actually listen to, it literally brought tears to my eyes. We created Bee’s backstory to give those songs a soul—a face and a personality that could live the lyrics as much as we do.