David Bowie died in January 2016 — suddenly, from the point of view of the world. He had been hiding his illness, and he had just released his last album on the Friday. I woke up to my phone lit up with the news, an article about it still open on the screen. It got me thinking about him, and doing a deeper dive into his music.
Not too long after that, I saw him in a dream. It was very realistic. He came up to me and said, "Hey man, I've got a little song for you," and he sang this quirky song about a farmer chasing a rabbit. The tune was so distinct that when I woke up, I sang it into my Voice Memo app.
Last year, when Suno was getting good at transforming demos, I thought I should test it out on that David Bowie song. I made sure to describe his style in the mid 70s, and I was absolutely amazed with the result. When I tried to find the uploaded voice memo on Suno later, I found out it was the first Suno project I ever did. I took the polished version and made a Midjourney animated video to it.
I love how it turned out, and it's my tribute back to David Bowie.
Leith is Jessie Leith Munro, a Canadian singer-songwriter recording for Akira Records. "The Messenger" — written with Will Bloomfield and produced by Jonah Summerfield and Bloomfield — was in her live set through 2025, played in Paris and London, before the single and its video (directed by Natasha Pheko) arrived in February 2026. You can find her on Spotify.
The song is written from the worst seat in a friendship: the 3 a.m. phone call. She has watched her friend's relationship burn out from the sidelines — "he doesn't make you smile" — and taken the anger that isn't really meant for her. The chorus turns on one line: "It's too late to say I told you so / But not too late to say I love you though."
That is where the title lands. Don't waste the shot on me, she sings — I'm just the messenger. It is a love song aimed sideways: not at a lover, but at a friend who isn't ready to hear the truth yet, from the one person who will still be waiting in the wings to build her up again.
Mikaela Davis is a Rochester-born singer, songwriter, and harpist who has spent her whole life bending a classical instrument into pop, psychedelia, and folk rock. She took up the harp at eight years old, studied in youth orchestras rather than garage bands, and earned a degree in harp performance at the Crane School of Music. That training powers a catalogue that runs from her Rounder Records album Delivery in 2018 to And Southern Star in 2023, and along the way she has shared stages with artists including Bob Weir, Bon Iver, and Lake Street Dive.
Her new album, Graceland Way, was released April 24, 2026, on Kill Rock Stars. It was co-written and co-produced with guitarist John Lee Shannon — the debut of the Davis–Shannon songwriting partnership — and its songs together tell the story of an unnamed antihero navigating life in a failing world: "The songs were written from our personal experience, but together they tell the arc of humanity," Davis says.
"(Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses" is the opening track, and it announces that story in one gesture. It opens with a harp glissando burst that her album notes compare to being burst through a blissful wormhole, then settles into dark Western tones, with Kurt G. Johnson's pedal steel and harmonies from guest vocalists Madison Cunningham and Tim Heidecker — both also credited as featured artists on the song and its video. Of Cunningham, Davis says: "I feel like I found my Emmylou."
The lyric is a jilted lover's inventory of false hopes, sung clear-eyed after the fact: "Throwing pennies in an empty fountain / Rainbows in the dark / Pulling petals from a dying flower / A sudden change of heart." She painted pretty pictures with the stories she was told, she sings, but the colours all ran — and the title turns into the diagnosis: looking through rose coloured glasses, thinking it might be blue. The video, directed by Mama Hot Dog, gives that waking-up a dreamy, film-textured world.
It is a perfect album opener because it does two things at once: the harp says wonder, and the words say the wonder was a mistake. The rest of Graceland Way sets out from exactly that place — a journey into the unknown, taken with open eyes this time.
Gia Margaret is a Chicago singer-songwriter, pianist, and composer who had to discover her voice by losing it. Her 2018 debut There's Always Glimmer was well received, but a vocal injury in 2019 left her unable to sing for years. She did not stop making music — she changed languages. The two largely instrumental albums she made in that time, 2020's Mia Gargaret and 2023's Romantic Piano, are built from piano, synths, and pure sound, and Romantic Piano's "Hinoki Wood" found a second, viral life online. Jagjaguwar's album notes put it plainly: "There was a time when I really didn't know if I would sing again."
Her voice did heal, and Singing — released April 24, 2026, on Jagjaguwar, and recorded in London, Eau Claire, and Chicago in 2024 and 2025 — is her first vocal album since 2018. The title is literal, and hard-won.
"Good Friend" is track seven, the bright centre of the record, and it was released ahead of the album with a video directed and edited by Guy Kozak. The song is about trying to be a good friend across a distance. It opens with a friend home sick with the flu, the singer "all the way in Chicago," and it keeps returning to a small, modern image of care arriving from far away — "I'm on a bus to work / Full day ahead / A flash of light from a message you send." Her answer to the distance is the song itself: "I want to be a good friend so I'm writing a song for you."
That is the lovely tension in "Good Friend": a quiet, intimate singer, back from years of silence, making the most playful track on her comeback record — a song about friendship that is itself an act of friendship.
My best friend John and I have known each other for decades, ever since we met in a college acting class. When I met him, my college punk band had just broken up, and I discovered he was a really good singer and guitar player — so we started collaborating under the name End Construction, because Duluth was covered in construction signs at the time while the town renovated its whole street structure.
"Another Verse" came out of my college theory and composition class, where I told my professor I wanted to try writing more "normal songs" — the classic verse-chorus structure. That is why the song's chorus references the word "verse" itself: self-referential, in a cheeky way. I had my own primitive demo of it, but I didn't know guitar well enough to make the chord changes in time with the music. Once John played it and added his background vocals, the song came together amazingly. We had a good, short collaboration — we even performed on stage at the Bull Pub at the University of Minnesota Duluth, which ran an open mic every month.
A couple of years later, when we were both living in Minneapolis, we did experimental recordings together under another name: Quincunx.
Last year, when Suno was just starting to get good, I did the same thing I had done with "Down To The Town" — took an older recording and used AI to cover it as a polished version in a different style. I fed our duo recording of "Another Verse" into Suno and asked for a ballad version in the style of James Taylor, adding piano, bass, and drums. John gave the result a thumbs up. The video is in a painting style, showing two guys like us playing the song around Duluth and near the Aerial Lift Bridge — an iconic Duluth image. And since Duluth is the most inland ocean port on the Great Lakes, the other iconic thing about the town is seagulls, everywhere.
Nymphlord is Tia Rabinovitz, a Los Angeles-based indie singer-songwriter and producer who grew up in the wooded foothills of Northern California and released experimental indie-pop under the name "taia" before this project. Her sound pulls from '90s alt-rock, Laurel Canyon acoustic textures, and punk intimacy, with a Top 40 instinct running underneath — songs that feel close to the microphone and wide open at the same time.
"Garden" is the opening track of her debut album Shedding Velvet — ten tracks, released May 15, 2026, on Lauren Records — recorded over ten straight days with producer Katie Von Schleicher, whom Rabinovitz had never actually met in person before they went in to make it. The video is by Gabriella Kashi.
The song's origin is the song. The chorus came to her in a conference room, mid-meeting — that is literally its first line: a guitar pick in her pocket at the marketing all-hands, both of her lives true at the same moment. She has said being steeped in office beige for hours a day pressurized her creativity until it popped out, and that she may have conceived as much as half the album behind the steering wheel on the drive home. Nymphlord calls "a coming-of-age anthem in corporate drag" — confident but a little off-kilter, sung for anyone sitting at a desk feeling trapped in a life they didn't realize they chose. And the heart of it is the conclusion she reached writing it: so what if she has to work in order to create — "I can still claim my identity as an artist first." The chorus says the same thing as an image instead of an argument: "I am a garden that keeps growing, and you can't fence me in."
Shye is a Singapore-based singer-songwriter, producer, and engineer who started out as a bedroom music project and became one of Singapore’s most recognized independent artists — very much a do-it-herself story: all the music and lyrics on “Smoke” are hers alone.
“Smoke” arrived in April 2026 as an advance single — alongside “I Always Knew” — for her sophomore album The Doves Came Home, released May 8, 2026, where it sits as track five. The album around it is rooted in ’90s dream-pop and shoegaze textures, and “Smoke” is that sound at its most weightless: hazy guitars, soft drifting vocals, and slow-burning textures that blur into one another.
The song started with a picture, not a sound. Rewatching Twin Peaks, Shye was struck by the image of smoke drifting through spaces — never settling, always in motion — and she built the production to match, layering guitars and synths until, in her words, you couldn’t tell the instruments apart. The lyric works the same way: it opens with a name written on the fog of a train window, gone before it can be held onto, and the refrain turns that into a statement of being — “I move like smoke.” It is a song about emotional detachment, about being physically present in a room and a conversation while feeling invisible inside it — present, but not quite reachable, even to yourself.
I love its classic combination of shoegaze and dream pop that really takes you to another place. The fuzzy visual montage matches how the music feels. Merging in the lyrics only helps pull out the emotional passion.
