Randy Travis Collaborators Talk Using AI to Give Singer His ‘Voice Back’ on First Single Since 2013 Stroke
It has been more than a decade since Randy Travis has recorded new music. But on Friday (May 3) the country legend released the gentle “Where That Came From,” an emotional ballad featuring his signature warm baritone and lovestruck lyrics.
Related
In an interview with CBS News Sunday Morning‘s Lee Cowan slated to air this weekend Travis’ longtime producer describes how the singer’s team constructed the track using artificial intelligence in the wake of the near-fatal 2013 stroke that took away the Grammy-winning country star’s voice.
“It’s Randy Travis. Randy’s on the other side of the microphone … It’s still his vocal,” says Cris Lacy, co-chair/president of Warner Music Nashville in the interview. “There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to make music … And to deprive him of that, if he still wants to do that, that’s unconscionable to me.”
While Lacy acknowledges the “chatter about all the negative sides of AI,” he says that when the Travis team began thinking about recording “Where That Came From” using AI they wondered what that would look like for them. “And the first thing that came to mind… was we would give Randy Travis his voice back,” Lacy says.
According to the piece, when Travis suffered the stroke doctors gave him a 2% chance of surviving after discovering that in addition to paralysis the brain attack caused damage to the area of his brain controlling speech and language that had left it nearly beyond repair.
Cowan also spoke with Travis, 64, and wife Mary for the piece that takes viewers behind-the-scenes for a look at how longtime producer Kyle Lehning pieced together the song with the singer’s blessing using old audio tracks of his voice as a launching pad. With another singer pitching in, a custom AI program overlaid Travis’ voice on the new recording, with Lehning using the country legend’s input to “painstakingly” mold the AI-generated vocals into a song that felt authentically Travis.
“It’s not about how it sounds. It’s about how it feels,” Lehning says. “Him being here and him being able to be, you know, a vital part of the decision-making process makes all the difference to me.” If he’s being honest, though, Lehning says when he first realized that the AI experiment was working it, “freaked me out… when I played it back it was like, ‘oh my!’ And I immediately thought, ‘this might work.'”
The more he listened and dug into the nuance, Lehning says the song clearly needed more “massaging,” which required him to approach it “syllable-by-syllable.”
Cowan also observed the moment when Travis’ fellow country music friends and family heard the song for the first time, with stepdaughter Cavanaugh Mauch commenting, “It’s so weird to try and explain everything that goes through your head when you’re listening to it.”
In the wake of the stroke, Travis’ manager Tony Conway cooked up the idea for The Music of Randy Travis tour, which features the singer’s eight-piece band fronted by James Dupré, who played Travis’ son in the 2015 movie The Price. The latest iteration of that show, the More Life tour, is currently on the road, with the next date slated for May 23 at The Paramount in Abilene, Texas.
Travis — who was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016 — has also released a trio of albums post-stroke, including two volumes of covers, Influence Vol. 1: The Man I Am and Influence Vol. 2: The Man I Am, as well as 2020’s Precious Memories (Worship & Faith), a collection of worship songs recorded in Feb. 2003 at the Calvary Assembly of God in Orlando.
The CBS News piece will run on Sunday (May 5) at 9 a.m. ET on CBS and Paramount+. Listen to “Where That Came From” and watch a preview of the CBS segment below.
Gil Kaufman
Billboard
