I Hid a Love Song From My Wife for 12 Years. AI Finally Helped Me Give It to Her.

What a voice memo, a Broadway audition, and an AI music tool taught me about the dreams we never actually outgrow.

My first Off-Broadway performance, and yes in case you’re wondering, I still have those pants.

Twelve years ago, I wrote my wife a love song and recorded it as a voice memo on my phone, then hid it there like it was evidence.

Not because I didn’t mean it. Because I did and I wasn’t good enough to finish it.

IMO: Giving someone the half-built version of what you feel the most is somehow worse than saying nothing at all.

So I said nothing…for twelve years.

But to understand why, I need to tell you a story.

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In my early thirties, I got the call to audition for the understudy for Elder Price in The Book of Mormon on Broadway.

I had been quietly rehearsing Tony acceptance speeches in my bathroom mirror since I was fourteen, so I handled the news with complete composure...

Totally kidding. I screamed into a couch cushion for four minutes (We lived in a 450 square foot studio in Midtown. Sound travels. No one came to check on me, which tells you everything about New York.)

Round one: Nailed it.

Round two: Still standing.

Round three: Feeling genuinely dangerous.

Then the casting team said, “We’d love to see you back Monday for the dance audition.”

I have a degree in jazz percussion and I know rhythm.

So I had the kind of thought only a confident idiot can have: Tap dancing is just playing drums with your feet. How hard could it be?

I asked my then girlfriend, Meg, an actual Broadway caliber dancer, if she could teach me over the weekend. She looked at me the way a surgeon looks at someone offering to perform their own appendectomy.

“You’re out of your mind,” she said.

She was right. But I was four rounds deep into a childhood dream, so I acted like belief could replace preparation, bought tap shoes so shiny they still looked like they were on display, and showed up to a beginner class at Steps on Broadway on Saturday morning.

The other beginners were twelve…

I stood in the back row shuffle-ball-changing with the confidence of a man who has made a terrible mistake and is choosing not to know it yet.

Come Monday morning at Ripley-Grier Studios, I decided to go 45 minutes early so I could visualize success and get in the zone, which worked great, right up until I opened the door and saw the room.

Every person there was a sharpened version of me.

Same jaw, same energy, but with the quiet certainty of people who had been doing this since before they could spell their name.

Nobody was talking. It was strangely quiet…For a split second I felt completely out of my league.

When my number came up, I did it.

It was the kind of horrible where the entire room suddenly becomes very interested in the floor.

I could sing, I could act, but I could not tap dance and two out of three was a polite way of saying no.

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So I did what you’ve probably done too.

I folded the dream, put it in a drawer, and got very busy being a grown-up.

Career. Marriage. Three kids. Enough noise that I didn’t have to think about the drawer.

We call this “outgrowing” things.

Like maturity is the reason.

Like wanting to create was a phase we graduated from, instead of just something we got tired of being rejected for.

We didn’t outgrow anything. We just stopped auditioning.

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Back to the voice memo.

So the year is 2013, and I’m in our newly shared apartment on 28th, and this melody just showed up in my head out of nowhere.

I chased it, caught it, and recorded it right there, one take, into my phone, no instruments, just my voice.

Then I played it back, heard every place it fell apart, and quietly shelved it next to the tap shoes.

That’s the shelf and we all have one.

The half-written novel.

The business idea in a Google Doc you haven’t opened since 2021.

The things that felt so alive when they arrived, and went quiet the moment they demanded skill, attention and focus.

This past February I went looking for a Valentine’s gift for Meg. Something that meant something and low and behold…I found the memo.

On a hunch, and honestly a little desperation, I dropped it into Suno AI, an AI music tool that takes raw audio and builds a full arrangement around it.

When I pressed play on what came back, I cried..the leaning back in my chair, the kind of crying that surprises you.

Because what I heard was the song I always meant to make.

It kept my voice, my melody and my words.

But it built a world around them, drums, harmonies, texture. It sounded exactly like the thing I had heard in my head twelve years ago.

Here’s the detail that wrecked me: in the second verse, the lyrics and music don’t quite sync. (You can listen to it yourself below)

There’s a slight delay, like the character singing is so overwhelmed he can’t keep pace with the music.

That wasn’t a glitch, the AI read the emotion and made a choice I would have made if I’d had the skill.

It didn’t write the song.

I wrote the song. Twelve years ago..in our apartment on 28th.

It just finished what I started.

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🎵 Here's the original voice memo. One take. No instruments. No shame…okay, some shame. I'm a drummer, not a singer, and this recording will make that extremely clear.

🎵 And here’s what Suno built from it, twelve years later:

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I’m not here to give you an AI sermon. This isn’t about technology….well human powered kinda is…but it’s the intersection of humanity and technology.

It’s about the drawer.

You see, the AI tool didn’t make me brave.

I still had to press play and I still had to hand her my phone and I still had to risk her hearing me, unfinished, imperfect, human.

But it lowered the friction just enough for me to move.

That’s what AI actually is, when you strip the hype away. It’s not a replacement for you. It’s a finishing tool. It takes the raw, imperfect, not-ready-for-anyone-to-see version of what you’ve been carrying/creating/dreaming about and helps you close the gap between what you imagined and what you could produce alone.

My rule is simple: the dream doesn’t die. It just waits for the right tools.

Broadway didn’t work out and that’s ok.

I still perform. I still write. I still create. The version of me that screamed into that couch cushion didn’t disappear, he just found a bigger, more meaningful stage.

Three kids who watch their dad go after things.

A wife who finally got her song.

And a community of people I get to help cross their own finish lines.

The dream didn’t need saving. It needed room to evolve into something I couldn’t have planned for when I was fourteen, rehearsing in the mirror.

The door I thought was locked?

It was never locked.

It just led somewhere better than I expected.