All I Need Is Jesus and My Coffee

Dr. Candace Hayden

IT’S ME — THINKING OUT LOUD!.. I need to start with something that makes this entire reflection a little strange for me. I am really not that into music. Now, that doesn’t mean I don’t like music. I do. I listen to it. I enjoy it. But I’m not one of those people who follows artists closely. I’m not waiting for somebody’s next album. I’m not building playlists for every possible mood. And I am definitely not usually searching for concert dates. Music has just never occupied that kind of space in my life.

Dr. Candace Hayden

So when I tell you that I recently heard an artist and immediately started wondering where she would be performing, you need to understand how unusual that was for me. This woman’s voice caught me. And I don’t mean I thought, “Oh, she sounds nice.” No. I stopped. I listened again. Then I listened to another song. There was something in the sound that felt familiar, but not predictable. Her voice had this depth to it. It sounded like there was a person behind it who had lived something. Like there was a story somewhere underneath the music. And before I knew it, I was looking her up. I wanted to know who she was. I wanted to know where she came from. And then I started looking for concert dates. That is the part that still makes me laugh , because I was genuinely prepared to travel to see this woman perform. I didn’t care where the concert was. If I could make the timing work, I was going. That is how strongly I responded to the music.

Dr. Candace Hayden

And then I found out I would not be seeing her in concert. There was no tour. There was no stage. There was no human performer behind that voice in the way I had assumed. The artist was AI. And I remember sitting with that for a minute. I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel tricked. It was more like my brain had to reorganize the experience because I had already created a person behind the sound. I had assumed there was a woman somewhere who had gone into a studio and sung those songs. I had imagined a personality, a life, maybe even some history behind the voice.

Dr. Candace Hayden

That is what we do when we hear music, isn’t it? We connect what we hear to the person we believe is expressing it. But in this case, the person I had imagined wasn’t there. At least not in the form I expected. And the strange part was that learning that did not erase my original response. I still liked the music. The voice still caught my attention. I searched for more. I was still willing to get on a plane and go see an artist who, as it turned out, could not walk onto a stage. The discovery came afterward. My response happened first. And that has stayed with me. Because what exactly was I responding to? Was it the voice? Was it the way the music was arranged? Was it the emotion I thought I heard? Was it simply that the song matched something my ear liked? I don’t know. But whatever it was, it was strong enough to make someone who is not particularly interested in following musicians start planning a concert trip.

Dr. Candace Hayden

Then it happened again. I came across a song called All I Need Is Jesus and My Coffee. That title alone made me stop. But I gotta say the man on the cover was FINE. The song was catchy. Not catchy in an annoying way. Catchy in that way where you hear it once, and then it keeps showing back up in your mind. I listened to it, and then I listened more closely to what it was actually saying. It was clever. It was relatable. It had this simple truth in it that made me think, “Okay, now this is good.” There was something about it that felt lighthearted and real at the same time. And then I found out— that one was AI too. Now I’m paying attention. Because once is interesting. Twice starts to feel like something I need to examine. The music that has caught my attention lately—the music that has made me stop, look up an artist, replay a song, or pay closer attention to the words—has repeatedly turned out to involve AI. And I don’t quite know what to do with that yet.

Dr. Candace Hayden

I think my first reaction was to treat “AI music” as though that meant the entire experience came from a machine. Machine-generated voice. Machine-generated music. Machine-generated emotion. But even saying it that way feels incomplete. Because the machine does not hear the song the way I hear it. It does not sit back and say, “That line is true.” It does not smile at the title. It does not decide that it wants to get on an airplane and hear the song performed live. I did all of that. So the response was human, even if the voice was not. And that creates this very strange separation between the source and the experience. If a human singer performs a song and I connect with it, that makes sense to me. I assume that something in their voice, their life, or their interpretation reached something in me. But what happens when I have the same response to a voice that does not have a life? There is no childhood behind that voice. No heartbreak. No Sunday morning. No long night sitting at a kitchen table. No cup of coffee. No faith. No memory. And yet, the song can still make me feel as though all of those things are present. That is fascinating to me. And maybe slightly unsettling. Not unsettling in a frightening way. Just in a way that makes me question what I have always assumed creates emotional connection.

Dr. Candace Hayden

Do I need to know that the singer actually felt what she was singing? Do I need the story behind the voice for the song to matter? Does the experience become less authentic after I learn how the voice was created? Or was the experience already complete before I knew? Because I can’t go backward and pretend the music did not reach me. It did. I cannot say I only liked it because I knew a human being had created it, because I did not know anything about who or what created it when I first heard it. I simply heard it, and something in me responded. That part is undeniable.

Dr. Candace Hayden

But then I started thinking about the phrase “AI-generated,” and I realized I may be making assumptions there too. I know the performer was synthetic. I know the voice was not attached to the woman I had imagined. But I don’t actually know how the song came together. I don’t know who supplied the original idea, or who chose the subject. I don’t know who wrote the words. I don’t know how many choices a person made before that particular version became the song I heard. And I think I moved past those questions too quickly. Because there may not have been a human performer behind the voice. But that does not necessarily mean there was no human behind the expression. That is a different question. And I think that question may need its own reflection.

Dr. Candace Hayden

But for now, I’m still sitting with the first question. Why is AI-generated music reaching me when so much human-created music passes right by me? Is it because the systems have learned something about what catches our attention? Or, is it because the music is pulling together patterns that already resonate with us? Is it because I am hearing something that feels both familiar and new? Or does it simply mean that I like what I like, and the source matters less than I thought? I honestly don’t know. But I do know this: I was ready to fly somewhere to see a woman who did not exist in the form I imagined. I heard a song about Jesus and coffee and found myself completely pulled into it. And now I am looking at this little collection of AI music that has managed to reach me in a way I did not expect. So I keep coming back to the same question. What does that mean about me? And maybe the next question is whether I was looking for the human in the wrong place. But I need to sit with that one a little longer. Yeah… I’m still thinking out loud.