My new favorite music artist!

And yes, he is AI generated.

Aug 16, 2026

Real John here, and not going to edit this or clean it up at all, this is a stream of consciousness written at 8:24am ET on Aug 16, 2026. Let’s see how human I am this time. King of Clubs, if you know you know. Ok, moving on.

Yesterday, I created Rhett Halden, you can visit his website here: https://rhetthalden.com. Yes, I created him. It was not a gruelling process, it wasn’t a 16 hour day to make it happen. It simply took a little patience, a little thought, and a lot of refinement/judgement.

So who is Rhett Halden?
He’s a 40 something country singer from Chattanooga, TN.

He was raised on gospel, sober, still rooted in his faith, and makes music somewhere between country, hip-hop, soul, and Southern gospel.

He’s been through life and doesn’t pretend to be anything special, and not chasing anything, just sharing his life stories through his music.

There is a lot of criticism about AI music and AI in general, but here’s what I learned by doing it myself. It is easy to do. It takes a little patience and trial and error. The images generally suck for consistency. However, it does not remove the creative part at all. It removes the business side of things.

This post is going to take you through my journey on exactly how I did it.

Here’s how it began I prompted ChatGPT to do this:
Let’s talk about the Suno artist creation. What kind of artist should I create? Given I like Country, Rap, and K-Pop, I’m a bit confused, but I’m really leaning into creating a country/hip-hop artist.

That was it. Then it came back with a long description and explanation of what I want to build.

Step 1-A: (kind of a side note, but don’t want to skip what I actually did)
Should I signup for premier?, Should I pay monthly or annual? Are you familiar with the SUNO interface?

Step 2:
I signed up for Premier on Suno.

Step 3:
Went back to ChatGPT and asked:
I sent it a screenshot of the SUNO interface and wrote: here we go

It then gave me a song description, told me to open the lyrics section, and we iterated on the lyrics together and I pasted it into SUNO.

I then asked about the optional sections and give me specific directions:
Yep. For this first generation, I’d set it like this:

Lyrics: Write
Exclude styles: leave blank
Vocal Gender: Male
Weirdness: 35–40%
Style Influence: 65–70%
Duration: Auto
Song Title: Starting Now

The next part was working on his name. It is crazy how many artists are out there. Actually, there is a John Mann who passed away from cancer who was musician from Canada. There is also a John Mann in Texas who is an organ player. Anyway, we worked on his name, came up with several and then wanted to run it through a google search and spotify/apple music to make sure there wouldn’t be any confusion.

Turns out there was a lot of artists. We landed on Rhett Halden. I then went to my domain provider and registered that domain. I setup an instagram for him also here. After that I went back to the studio… LOL.

We created 2 more songs, and when we wrote No Proof Needed, it hit me so hard that it brought me to tears. That is what music does. It is the authenticity in the story, not who generated it, but is the story real. That is what I have always loved about country music. Rap music was there for a minute, but has degraded signifincantly. NWA said it best:

It's not difficult, in fact it's kinda simple
To create something funky that's original
You either talkin' 'bout the place to be
Who you are, what you got, or about a sucker MC

Anyway, what did I do next, I had ChatGPT create a banner for Rhett for the Suno home page:

And then create an image of him, which you saw at the beginning.

Then the final piece was creating the website. I took the banner image and the headshot, and went to Claude and had it generate a website with the songs we created. That was it. That was the birth of Rhett Halden.

I had fun doing it. I loved the music we created. I’m excited about listening to music that matters to me. Not music for the masses, but music for me. If you like it great, if you don’t great. I’m not trying to go viral, take over the music industry, or any of that insanity. I’m simply tired of trying to find music I really like (Ok, I do like Brantley Gilbert a lot). But with the tools we have now, we can create what we like, not what your parent’s like, not what your girlfriend likes, but music for you. That’s what Rhett is for me. He’s my collaborator with his own stories, own experiences, and we get together and write some great songs we both love.

If you think you can’t do this yourself, you are wrong.

Total Cost: