johnnyonion.com Blog

"500 Miles": The Demo

2026-08-24T00:00:00Z

The demo of "500 Miles" is done.

My son, John Anthony, sang it for me right before he headed back to school, and hearing it in his voice was its own kind of relief. You write these things alone for weeks. Then someone else sings them, and suddenly the song is real in a way it wasn't before.

You can listen here: 500 Miles on SoundCloud

And you can find John Anthony on Instagram: @jaonion6

Lyrics:

Verse
Why did I agree to take this call
Do you even care for me at all
I tried, oh how I tried
To keep my head clear
Is it a lie to say that I'm alright?
Do I even care enough to fight?
I tried, oh how I tried
But you're so cavalier

Chorus
Five hundred miles with your song playing on repeat
Five hundred miles but the door was closed and left us incomplete

Verse
How did I misread your every word
Was the truth between us getting blurred
I tried, oh how I tried
But I'm coming undone
Was I something else to push away
There's so many things you didn't say
I tried, oh how I tried
Yet we've barely begun

Chorus 2
I bravely crossed four goddamn states to be with you
But brave and stupid drives for miles and miles, without a hope, without a chance to follow through

Bridge
Every song we shared
Every string repaired
I'm a person not a face behind a screen
We learned to play your song
But there was something wrong
And it wasn't just the miles in between
Every interview
Every follow through
Every keyword missing on my resume
Every good rapport
Ending like before
"We decided to go a different way"
Every door I try
Is a delayed goodbye
Every no just hits me harder, on the floor
Pick up this guitar
Play another bar
But the music's gone - I can't hold it anymore

Finishing "500 Miles"

2026-08-19T00:00:00Z

I've written hundreds of songs. And every time I sit down to write a new one, I wonder if I can actually do it.

It's a weird thing to still feel after this long. But I get to wondering if I've run out of ideas, or ability, like there's a finite amount of creativity in my bones, and once it's used up, that's it. No more songs.

When I sat down to write "500 Miles," I knew what the song was supposed to be. It's Jordan's solo, and by the end of it, his music is gone. He sets the guitar down, and the final chord resolves in a crash. He rallies in the next scene, but another rejection sends him spiraling, and this is the moment it breaks him. I couldn't help wondering, like I usually do, if the music was all used up for me too. But this time felt different, because I knew, specifically, that it had gone dry for him. That was the job. Not mine.

Then I finished it (three movements, anger to ambivalence to collapse) and brought it to the writer's group this week. First time anyone had heard it out loud. It landed. And for a few days after, I felt safely like a songwriter.

Today, I don't know. Doubt ushers back in. I imagine it'll be there again the next time I sit down to write one.

A demo of "500 Miles" is coming soon. I'll post it here first.

AI Music and What Actually Protects a Songwriter

2026-08-12T00:00:00Z

Suno announced this week that it's adopting Musixmatch's "Sentinel" tool — a system that screens prompts and AI-generated output for copyrighted lyrics in real time, in under 100 milliseconds. It's Sentinel's first commercial deal. It also landed six days after a Munich court found Suno liable for copyright infringement.

I don't think that timing is a coincidence, and I don't think I'm supposed to.

Here's what catches me about it: Sentinel checks whether specific lyrics have been lifted. It doesn't ask whether the model was trained on a songwriter's catalog in the first place, or whether that songwriter ever agreed to it, or gets paid for it. The American Federation of Musicians is separately pushing UMG and WMG on exactly that point — alleging labels haven't compensated the musicians whose work fed the AI models being trained right now. Two different fights: one about lyrics getting copy-pasted, one about a career's worth of work becoming training data with no consent and no check.

Sentinel solves the first problem. It's a real, useful thing — nobody wants their hook showing up verbatim in someone else's AI-generated track. But it's also the easier problem to solve, and the one that happens to be least expensive for the platform to fix. Real-time lyric matching is a filter you can bolt onto a product in a press release. Figuring out how to compensate every songwriter whose style, phrasing, and choices shaped the training data is a much harder, much more expensive question — and it's the one still sitting there unanswered.

I write songs the slow way — a line that doesn't scan right for three days until it does. That process is mine in a way that's hard to fingerprint. No detection tool notices if a model learned how I make those choices, only whether it reproduced a line I've already written. So when a company announces a copyright fix, my question isn't "does this stop plagiarism" — it's "does this change anything about how the model got built." Usually it doesn't.

I don't think the answer is to be anti-AI-tool on principle. I think it's to stay honest about which problems these fixes are actually solving, and to keep asking about the one nobody's fixed yet.

Further reading: Music Week on Suno's "responsible AI" principles

Writing "500 Miles"

2026-08-05T00:00:00Z

Act One of 500 Miles, 2 Hearts and a Guitar ends with two blunt words: "Go home."

Randy says them to Jordan after he drives five hundred miles to surprise her in person, at the exact moment her father is dying in the next room. It's not really about Jordan. But he doesn't know that yet, and neither does the audience — not for a while.

That's the gap the song "500 Miles" exists to fill.

It's Jordan's solo in the second act, and it's the first time we hear what's actually going on inside him after that rejection — not the deflecting, joke-cracking Jordan we've come to know, but the real one. The song moves through three movements: anger, then ambivalence, then collapse. He starts sure he's the wronged party. By the end he's not sure of anything.

While writing the lyrics I noticed "miles" can be sung with one syllable or two. In the chorus:

Five hundred miles with your song playing on repeat
Five hundred miles and the door was closed and left us incomplete

I caught myself singing the first "miles" differently than the second, depending on the melody. It felt important to settle on one way and stay consistent.

The staging idea I keep coming back to: Jordan holds the guitar through the whole song — his instrument, his connection to Randy's late father, the thing that's tied every good moment in this show together — and loses his grip on it as the song goes on. By the final chord, he's set it down. That chord is unresolved. It just hangs there.

I like that it doesn't resolve. Neither does he — it's the start of his downward spiral.

Still finishing the full lyric, but the shape of it is locked. More when it's ready to share.

Starting This Blog

2026-08-04T00:00:00Z

Hi, I'm Giovanni. If you've found this page, you've probably already seen the shows and the novel-in-progress elsewhere on this site — this is where I'll actually talk about how that work is going.

Expect posts about:

New demos and readings — when a song drops on SoundCloud, when a scene gets a table read, when a show moves from "idea" to "actually happening"
Detector — progress on the novel rewrite, research rabbit holes, and (eventually) how to get an early copy
What I'm looking for — collaborators, producers, festivals, and anyone who wants to help get one of these off the page and onto a stage (or a bookshelf)

If you want to follow along, subscribe to the RSS feed or join the email list below.

More soon.