This year I became my own most-played artist on Apple Music. Beyoncé held that spot for years.

I've always written, but not for an audience. Late last year I started turning some of those poems into songs using Suno. I kept going. I've put together at least two personal compilations and I'm about to wrap a third. At some point, I passed Beyoncé as my top played artist of the year. We're not even halfway through 2026. (The real indignity: I'm pretty sure it won't show up in my year-end Replay because they aren't in the Apple Music catelog. I will be robbed of the receipt.)

What got me here started with a different idea. Before I found Suno I was thinking about putting together a poetry collection — just the words, on a page, in some form. What excited me about Suno was the possibility of taking my words into a new medium entirely. And that's opened up a bigger question I'm sitting with now: what would it look like to share this work as something layered — poetry and music together, maybe more than that. I don't have a fully formed answer. But I'm genuinely excited about what tools like Suno make possible for that kind of thinking.

Suno can take a poem, a vague idea, or just a mood and produce a full song — lyrics, production, arrangement, vocal performance. You don't need to know music theory. You don't need to play anything. A rough input can come out the other side as something better than it has any right to be. What I brought to the process was craft in the inputs: source poems, and for each song a style prompt built around the specific vibe I was going for.

Building a style prompt

Rather than picking a genre checkbox and hoping, I think about specific songs, albums, and artists whose sound I want to embody for a given track, then use Claude to help me translate that into vocabulary Suno actually responds to. Each song gets its own prompt because each song has its own feel. For "Bring It Down" — the song I'm sharing here — the prompt ended up reading like production notes:

This Neo-Soul Interlude Opens With Softly Brushed Or Muted Drums In A Half-Time Groove, Anchored By Lush Sub-Bass. Minimalist Keys — Gentle Rhodes Chords — Lead, Joined By Airy Guitar Swells And Faint Ambient Pads. The Close-Mic'd Vocal Glides In With Easy, Spoken-Sung Phrasing That Rests Just Behind The Beat, While Layered Backgrounds Softly Echo And Fall On Select Words For Release. Subtle Dynamics And Repetition Hold Focus On Breath And Space, Letting Warmth And Simplicity Smooth Each Phrase; It Settles Gently, Avoiding Climax, Evoking The Stillness Of Morning Light.

What the translation actually required

The poems I brought in varied — some observational, some not, some tight and fast. What they shared is that they were written for the page. A song has to move you in real time. The translation work was mostly about converting reflection into experience — turning something observed into something felt in real time.

A few examples of what that looks like in practice:

If a line describes what happened, it has to become an instruction, a decision, or a sensation. Cut "I think," "I realized," "I felt like" — those are psychological reports, and lyrics don't have room for a narrator standing outside the experience. What replaces them is rhythm, vowel, breath.

Worth noticing in that table: the poem had no bridge, no prechorus, no chorus structure. Those got built around what was there. Suno expanded the emotional architecture, not just the word count. One line — "I got up. I got up. I gotta get up, so I can get back down." — was already so close to lyric that it survived almost unchanged. The repetition was already musical. Suno recognized it and kept it.

Strong songs also tend to build outward from one or two phrases that hold the whole emotional weight. In the source poem that center is usually already there, buried somewhere. Part of the work is finding it and moving it where it can do its job. For this song it was three words: bring it down.

The platform itself

What surprised me is how collaborative it is. You can publish songs, remix others, share hooks. I remixed someone else's track and watched it reach people I wouldn't have reached on my own.

The song

This one I'm comfortable sharing publicly. It started as a poem about a specific kind of Saturday — the kind where you wake up and decide, consciously, not to perform productivity. Ethiopian beans, medium-fine grind, burr grinder, bloom time. New pajamas tumbled in the dryer just to feel the warmth. Getting back into bed before noon, on purpose.

This is a song I actually play on Saturday mornings when I need things to be easy. It has a good groove. What it captures — the ritual of making coffee slowly, the intention behind it, the stillness — is something I still value and still practice.