As Thanksgiving dinner dishes clink and clatter this Thursday afternoon, millions of Americans will open their phones and begin playing Christmas music. One of the EP’s they’ll likely see is “A Soulful Christmas,” which contains four songs by a new artist named Solomon Ray.
The cover art shows a young, attractive smiling Black man with a fedora and a comfortable jacket walking through the warm glow of Christmas lights down a quaint, quiet street as the cool winter gray sky rests in the background.
Solomon has quickly become a star in Christian music, with his hit “Find Your Rest” climbing the charts to the No. 1 spot for the Christian category in Apple Music. And in a nation filled with such racial unrest, it’s encouraging for many to see a Black man being welcomed so enthusiastically in a category whose listeners are made up in large part by white evangelicals.
But there’s a catch.
Solomon Ray isn’t Black. Ray also isn’t a man. In fact, Ray isn’t even human. Instead, Ray and the music that rose to the top spot on the Christian charts are created by artificial intelligence.
Battle of the AI bands
We’ve all seen AI images and videos becoming more popular on social media. While they’re often easy to spot, their prevalence has led to many people exchanging their sense of innocent wonder for suspicion that anything beautiful they see might be fake.
Now, AI is becoming more popular in the music world. One example is the AI band “The Velvet Sundown,” which took off on Spotify this summer and acquired more than a million listeners a month, but turned out to be entirely created by AI. Similarly, the country song “Walk My Walk,” which has garnered more than 3 million plays on Spotify, also is AI.
Supporters of utilizing AI in music point to the way it democratizes the music industry. No longer does one have to wait for gatekeepers to offer them a record deal or spend years trying to save up enough money to afford to fund an album on their own. Now they can produce a hit in their basement overnight, as in the case of Solomon Ray.
The creation of Solomon Ray
“I co-write with ChatGPT,” the creator of Solomon Ray told Billboard. “I put in, ‘I want a gospel song, with a choir, here are the lyrics, here’s what I want the hook to be.’ I changed this, changed that, and eventually, once I got the song how I wanted to flow the words, lyrically, I copied and pasted that into Suno.”
Suno is a program where users create and arrange songs by combining AI-generated content with their own uploads.
As the creator of Solomon Ray told Billboard, “Every time you create (on Suno Studio), it costs credits. It gets pretty expensive. I just regenerated every section until I got what I wanted. Then I used landr.com, a mixing and mastering program online. Once the song’s done, I go to Artlist.io to generate Solomon Ray’s look. From there I can generate images, sitting on a truck or walking or whatever.”
“I started working on it in an evening, and by the next night, I had completed everything.”
Regarding his “A Soulful Christmas” EP, he said, “I started working on it in an evening, and by the next night, I had completed everything — mastered all the songs, created the graphics for the album and uploaded it to Distrokid.”
After asking ChatGPT to give him a list of names that were “biblically sound” and “unmistakably a Southern gentleman,” he chose to use the name Solomon Ray. “It’s King Solomon, so it’s like wisdom, wealth,” he said. “Ray was the sunshine element.”
How should Christians pursue creativity in songwriting?
Christians are having mixed reactions to the arrival of Solomon Ray.
“I think it’s important that we just pause a little bit and kind of ask the questions of like, is this something that we want?” Christian singer Forrest Frank posted on Instagram, “At minimum, AI does not have the Holy Spirit inside of it. So I think it’s really weird to be opening up your spirit to something that has no spirit.” On a side note, Frank has been losing in the charts to Solomon Ray and also released Christmas music this month.
Many of Frank’s followers were shocked. “Wait, so Solomon Ray isn’t a real person?” one commenter asked. “Neither is Juno Skye. I’m blown away and this is not good,” wrote another.
Worship leader Phil Wickham weighed in, saying: “It’s difficult to envision a future where we look back and think creating AI was a net positive for our world. At most it should be a tool for humans, not a replacement for them.”
Christian artist Colton Dixon added: “I’m honestly still wrestling with the whole AI music thing. Can it be a tool to speed up a rather long tedious process — yes. But can it also be used as a crutch instead of finding inspiration and direction from Holy Spirit — also yes. Regardless, I’m believing God will be magnified.”
On the other hand, some Christian musicians who aren’t competing with AI artists on the charts are more sympathetic to the idea.
“I’m really torn on this topic at the moment,” one Christian mom said. “I love & value real musicianship as a songwriter myself. And I rarely use AI personally. But on the other hand, as a full-time homeschooling mom it’s been such a gift to record and produce my music for our home. I have dozens of word-for-word Bible passages that I’ve put to song to help our children learn them. Music is a fantastic way to memorize Scripture! It would be impossible in this season for me to record & document these songs/verses for our kiddos.”
Christianity Today worship correspondent Kelsey Kramer McGinnis encouraged people in a Facebook reel to remember “the importance of the process of making music with other people.” McGinnis noted how we gain something when we make music together without having a product to sell.
But when someone can create a No .1 hit in their basement overnight by themselves, they lose the experiences of writers, musicians and singers coming together to collaborate on putting into song what they’re journeying through as a community.
The Christian community is anything but univocal on a lot of topics, especially when it comes to incorporating AI into their worship. So when AI is utilized, it may be worth asking some questions about the person behind it.
Who created Solomon Ray?
Christopher Townsend
The person behind the AI “Mississippi-made soul singer carrying a Southern soul revival into the present” is actually Christopher Townsend, a rapper who goes by the name of “Topher.”
He also happens to be a vocal supporter of MAGA and President Donald Trump.
Two months after the January 6 insurrection, he released a song titled “The Patriot” that included the lines:
March around the capitol, storm the city gates
Putting pressure on their necks until the truth breaks
All walls of corruption, take out all the snakes.
The song goes on to talk about standing up for the Constitution, casting down the cowards, going to combat with “blazing guns” and taking your colors into battle.
When they found out the violence he was promoting, Spotify took his song down and Instagram prohibited him from using the platform’s live-streaming feature.
But Topher suggests the violently political nature of his songs has nothing to do with the soul of his AI artist Solomon Ray. “To a certain extent. Somebody might have a preconceived bias toward the music simply because what they think about me,” he told Billboard. “That can be (true) for any artist out there. But I believe the art is going to supersede a lot of that noise.”
Still, the money from all the streams isn’t going into Solomon Ray’s bank account. It’s going into Topher’s. And that’s only going to further serve Topher’s larger objectives.
Follow the money.
Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.