About Tommy Howe

Pre-Mo and The Goth Cowboys is the creative project of songwriter and retired Network Engineer Tommy Howe.

For most of his career, Tommy worked in the world of computers, networks, and technology. While music was always a passion, songwriting presented one frustrating obstacle: he could write lyrics, but he couldn't write music. Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, he filled notebooks and folders with song lyrics, hoping that one day he would find someone who could help turn those words into actual songs.

That day arrived in an unexpected form: Artificial Intelligence.

Like many people, Tommy initially used AI as little more than a sophisticated search engine. Then he began discovering its creative possibilities. What started with simple experiments soon led to a realization: those decades-old lyric sheets sitting in a folder could finally become the songs he had always imagined.

Working with ChatGPT, Tommy refined and polished some of the lyrics, improving their flow while preserving the original words, ideas, and emotions. The lyrics themselves remain his own, written years before AI music generation existed. From there, ChatGPT helped create descriptive prompts for the AI music platform Suno.

The results were astonishing.

For the first time, songs that had existed only on paper had melodies, arrangements, and performances. More importantly, they sounded remarkably close to what Tommy had heard in his head for decades.

While some critics dismiss AI-generated music as simply pressing a button and accepting whatever appears, Tommy's process is far more involved. Acting as songwriter, producer, and creative director, he spends countless hours refining prompts, adjusting arrangements, selecting instrumentation, rewriting sections, and generating multiple versions of the same song until it captures the feeling he envisioned. It is not uncommon for dozens of versions of a song to exist before the final one is chosen.

In many ways, Tommy approaches AI the same way a traditional producer approaches a recording studio: using technology as a tool to bring a creative vision to life.

The result is Pre-Mo and The Goth Cowboys, a project that blends classic songwriting with modern technology. The songs span decades of memories, relationships, hopes, heartbreaks, and observations, all written long before AI became part of the conversation.

This album is not the story of artificial intelligence creating music.

It is the story of a songwriter who waited nearly fifty years for the technology to finally catch up with his imagination.