Kid Rock says artificial intelligence built the choir on “Heal My Faith,” his song with Eminem. He shared this on Real Time with Bill Maher, and the talk soon became a debate with Maher over how AI hits working musicians.
Maher asked about AI and told him, “They can put out a Kid Rock song now that’s almost indistinguishable.” Kid Rock said he has no clue where the technology is headed. Still, he used prompts to finish the song.
“I sang that [hook] myself. I did the harmonies myself. My singers weren’t around,” Kid Rock said in a clip posted by Blue Georgia on Saturday, Oct. 31. “I’m an impatient guy. It’s not about the money of getting the choir, but everything I look in life now is time. How much time do I have?”
He then described his method. “So I go into AI, I [prompt] the harmony notes, I prompt the, uh, the lead notes, you know, Southern gospel choir, blah, blah, blah,” he said. “I have to do this several times. I put it together. I’m like, I love that. So, the choir on there is AI.”
Maher didn’t let it slide. “A lot of people in a choir, and we put them all out of work. Isn’t that what really happened?” Maher said.
He kept going. “You didn’t have to get a choir in there. When The Beatles used a choir they needed to get a … choir.” Kid Rock fired back, “Did we put drummers out of work when the drum machine was invented?”
“I know AI is something different,” Kid Rock said. “I always tell people, you know, it’s a tool right now. I see the dangers of it. I one thousand percent believe it needs to be regulated at the highest levels.”
On “7 Sins,” another song from the album with Lil Wayne, Kid Rock took a different path. “How I made the choir was, I had my two female singers, one male background singer, and we kept stacking the part,” he said.
His album Halfway 2 Jesus arrived on Oct. 17, Eminem’s birthday. “Heal My Faith” was released as a single. Neither drew much mainstream attention.
The song united two Detroit artists who are still friends even though their political views differ.
They have worked together before. Eminem appeared on a 1998 Kid Rock song, and years later Kid Rock showed up in the music video for Eminem’s 2013 single “Berzerk.”
