Shooter Jennings Says He Used Absolutely ZERO AI On Forthcoming Waylon Jennings Album ‘Songbird’: “Many Painstaking Steps To Ensure That”

No AI here… what a breathe of fresh air.

Earlier this year, Shooter Jennings announced that he had discovered a treasure trove of unreleased Waylon Jennings music, which he managed to turn into three separate albums that are slated for release in October.

The first one, Songbird, will be out on October 3rd, and features songs he recorded decades ago, during the height of his career, but for whatever reason never made it to an album or got completely finished. Shooter, who produced the project, said they didn’t need too much work, but he did add some background vocals and other instrumentation just to polish it up and make it ready to be put on a professional album in the modern world of 2025.

But of course, because these tapes are so old and AI has already been used in the country industry, probably on many songs we don’t even know about in terms of both the writing and production, and legends like Randy Travis have openly used it to create entirely new music where he obviously didn’t sing a note in real life. People have speculated that other archival projects, like the Johnny Cash one that was released last year, Songwriter, used AI in some way, and it’s a fair question considering the nature of this project in a technology-driven world.

During a podcast appearance on The Drifting Cowboy podcast this week, Shooter put those rumors to bed, saying he actually went out of his way to do it all as old school as possible and did not use AI for any aspect of the project, including marketing or artwork, and he went out of his way to do it that way:

“Oh, the AI thing? It’s so amazing that like like right when AI happens, we get a new Waylon record. I mean, I would probably be the guy saying that, you know, cause I’m cynical… that’s why we took so many painstaking steps to ensure that… of course, it’s not AI.

Like, I don’t even know how to use AI to make music right, and I’d rather think it would be able to do that. But also just as far as everything involved with it, like making sure there’s nothing AI related, or there’s no steps even in the art or in anything. Because I can’t pollute the material.

Because the Waylon thing, man, what’s so cool about it is like, if we mixed it, 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.”

He explained how much he went through to ensure the state of the tapes stayed at the highest level of integrity:

“I used ProTools to prepare the tracks in the sense where, when they were open, they were exactly as they were put. They were digitized, but they were exactly as they were on those those tapes.

So they were like 24 track sessions, the older stuff were 16 track, but most it was all 24 track. What I didn’t wanna do is do anything that would degrade that, the state of it. So what I did, some of them had like five vocal takes or six vocal takes, so I used ProTools to comp the way I would comp Charley’s records or Turnpikes.

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, right? Just to hear all the different takes and go through it.”

Shooter also explained how the whole process worked with mixing the previous vocals and instruments, which each individually had multiple takes per song, and there were over 100 songs.

Shooter has done it all so tastefully, and it makes me respect him even more knowing he went out of his way to do it the hard way, with integrity, to entire the music was done right, just as his father would have done it. That type of character is hard to find, especially in the music industry, and I’m sure his dad would be proud and obviously Waylon fans like me can’t wait to hear it because of how well it’s been done.

There’s a reason Shooter’s probably the most highly sought-after producer in country right now, and this is a perfect example of why.

The full podcast is available below.

So far, they’ve released two songs, including the title track and “The Cowboy (Small Town Texas),” and the full album will be released on October 3rd.

“The Cowboy (Small Town Texas)”

“Songbird”

The post Shooter Jennings Says He Used Absolutely ZERO AI On Forthcoming Waylon Jennings Album ‘Songbird’: “Many Painstaking Steps To Ensure That” first appeared on Whiskey Riff.