By this point, a lot of us have been duped by AI, especially when it comes to music. Now when something sounds too good to be true, like a new album from a country legend such as Waylon Jennings, you can bet people will be skeptical. However, on Dillon Weldon‘s podcast, Waylon’s son Shooter Jennings was intent on setting the record straight.
“Yeah, I mean, I would probably be the guy saying that, you know, cause I’m cynical,” joked Shooter. “But of course it’s not AI. Like, I don’t even know how to use AI to make music, and I don’t think it would be able to do that.”
The album that spurred accusations is the new collection of unreleased ’70s gold entitled Songbird, which is a mesmerizing cover of Fleetwood Mac’s original song. The three-part record features recordings produced between 1973 and 1984 and were all expertly compiled and mixed by Shooter after he began sorting through his father’s studio recordings. His process, though modernized, did not tamper with the authenticity of the sound.
Fans were ecstatic to hear that the new album, which is set to ship out on October 3, isn’t tampered with in a negative way and will feature some pretty incredible tracks.
“Never in a million years would think AI,” confirmed a fan.
“Been on repeat,” claimed one fan. “Pretty dang cool to get to experience a new Waylon song being released.”
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What Waylon Jennings Fans Can Expect from Songbird
“I mixed it on a 1976 custom API in the Sunset Sound using only outboard gear. We didn’t use any kind of digital processing,” affirmed Shooter. “I used Pro Tools to prepare the tracks. They were digitized, but they were exactly as they were on those tapes. What I didn’t want to do is do anything that would degrade the state of it. Some of them had like five vocal takes or six vocal takes. I used Pro Tools to comp the way I would comp Charlie’s records or Turnpike’s, in the sense that out of those five vocals, I’ll go through and make a vocal track of the best vocal, which was really cool to do on my dad.”
The goal was to preserve the integrity of the recording without making it sound too much like it was imitating ’70s recordings. Shooter also noted he cut back on fading songs out and left nuggets like Waylon laughing to cap off the end of certain tracks.
The songs included in the posthumous album offer some interesting takes on ’70s country classics like Crystal Gayle‘s Wrong Road Again as well as Hank Williams Jr.‘s (I Don’t Have) Anymore Love Songs.
Waylon was just 64 when he died on February 13, 2002, but luckily his devoted son Shooter is intent on keeping his legacy, memory, and music alive.
This story was originally reported by Parade on Sep 23, 2025, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com ’
