I have a confession to make, and this one comes with a soundtrack.
For most of the past year, I’ve been quietly posting AI music under a fake name. Not a stage name. A full secret identity, with a face, a backstory, and at last count 477 songs. His name is Bubba Zuckermusk, and this is the post where you two finally meet.
The Legend of Bubba 🤠
The premise is simple. What if Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg had an illicit cloned love child, gave him up for adoption, and left him to be raised by foster parents in rural Alabama? That’s Bubba. Trucker cap, flannel shirt, a farm at sunset with a WiFi antenna on the barn. His bio reads “country tradition meets the digital age, with a dash of nonsense.”
I made him absurd on purpose. There is no way to take that profile seriously, and that’s the point. Hold that thought.
Bubba was born in August 2025, and like a lot of country legends he came out swinging at current events. Cracker Barrel had just retired Uncle Herschel from its logo, the internet was furious, the stock was sliding, and for the first time in my life I could do the thing songwriters get to do: riff on the moment. His debut single was “Uncle Herschel’s Gone (Cracker Barrel Blues)”, a mournful pedal-steel protest ballad about a restaurant logo. “From barrel to bland in just one day.” Cracker Barrel eventually brought Uncle Herschel back. Bubba takes full credit.
Why I Needed a Pen Name
I’ve written about AI and music here before, but that post was written from the safety of the audience. Here’s what I didn’t say.
I’ve loved music my whole life. I also have, verifiably, no talent for making it. That’s not humble-speak. I’ve tried, more than once, and the aptitude just isn’t in me. So my role has always been eager audience member, and I’ve played it happily for decades, in as many small venues as I could get to.
Then Suno came along, and for the first time in my life I could create the thing I’d only ever consumed. I love it more than I expected to.
But publishing those songs as Charles Hood originals felt wrong. Unearned is the closest word I’ve found. It felt like showing up to open mic wearing someone else’s calluses. A pen name solved it, at least in my head. I’m not claiming I wrote these songs. Bubba did. Maybe that’s a rationalization. It was enough for me.
And the ridiculous name does something I only came to appreciate later: it’s truth in labeling. The sketchy corners of AI music work by pretending to be human, fake bands with fake backstories farming streams from listeners who don’t know better. Nobody, anywhere, hears “cloned billionaire love child raised in Alabama” and thinks they’ve found an authentic hardscrabble singer-songwriter. Bubba confesses before the first note plays.
The Part Where My Musician Friends Wince 🎸
Some of my friends are real musicians. Real artists, with real calluses. Plenty of them hate AI music, and I understand why. I’m not going to pretend this post lands comfortably with everyone I love, and I’m not going to try to argue anyone out of their position.
What I can offer is precision about what I’m actually claiming, which is: not much. I don’t say I wrote these songs. I don’t say I composed them or performed them. When someone asks, I say I made it with Suno, and that feels like the honest formulation.
The mental model that finally settled things for me came from Rick Rubin. He has produced some of the biggest records of the last forty years, and he famously can’t read music and barely plays an instrument. He has said in interviews that what he brings to the studio is taste. He listens, he reacts, he shapes. Nobody calls Rick Rubin a fraud. That’s the chair I try to sit in with Bubba: bring the idea, apply the taste, keep only what’s worth keeping. To be clear, I’m not claiming the man’s talent, or his results. Rubin is the model that made this okay in my head, not the level I’m claiming to play at.
477 Songs, No Lanes
I don’t limit Bubba to a genre. That’s the beauty of the whole thing: I’m free to explore anything the model can do, and I’ve made songs I’d genuinely stand behind in more genres than I can list. The hat implies country, and there’s plenty of it, but the catalog wanders wherever curiosity points.
The numbers, since this is a reveal post: 477 songs, 253 followers, about 5,300 plays, 854 likes, and three tracks that strangers liked enough to remix. All of it organic. I’ve mentioned Bubba on Facebook and X a few times, and I learned something useful: almost nobody clicks.
That used to deflate me a little. It doesn’t anymore, because it forced me to admit what this actually is. I make this stuff for me. It brings me happiness. If someone stumbles onto a track on Suno or Reddit and it brightens their commute, wonderful. But that’s a bonus, not the goal.
The Two Songs That Found People 🎵
Bubba’s most played song is a Christmas song. Of course it is. The AI country satire project’s biggest hit is in the most sincere genre there is. “A Town Where Christmas Follows Through” is quiet and warm and completely unironic, and yes, I see it: a machine-made song whose chorus is about the world feeling real again. All I can tell you is the longing in it came from somewhere real. The celeste didn’t, but the homesickness did.
The second most played is the one that matters most to me. “Same Stool, Same Stage” is about a guy who grinds through his work week for the one hour on Thursday night when he plays the same open mic he always plays. Same stool, same stage, same three songs, because for that hour he gets to be who he actually is.
I ain’t chasing records, ain’t chasing some big break I just need one hour where I’m not a thing to take
I didn’t set out to write my own artist statement. But read those lines back against everything above, and tell me that isn’t exactly what I’ve spent this whole post trying to say. Bubba got there first, and he rhymed.
So that’s my secret identity. The catalog lives at suno.com/@bubbazuckermusk, and those two songs are the right front door.
Share with me: If you’ve been quietly making things with AI, under your own name or someone else’s, I’d be curious what you’ve made and how you square it with yourself. Comments are open. 💬