There’s something quietly compelling about a song that sat in scratchy student recordings for 25 years before finally getting a proper release. Liri Dais, a singer-songwriter from Sevenoaks, England, wrote “Counting Hours” back in 2001 with their student band Landslide – and those original recordings never made it past rough tapes. The April 12th release fixes that, with Dais using Suno’s AI production tools to reconstruct the song around their own vocals and guitar performance, recorded in London. The result is a studio-quality version of something that was always there waiting.
The song itself is great, and the lyrics hold up remarkably well for something written over two decades ago. The narrative moves through desperation and loss with cinematic specificity – a man with a gun, a candle lit to purify a burning room, a familiar bench, and a pack of cigarettes bought by someone who’s never smoked. It’s the kind of writing that doesn’t date because it’s dealing with things that don’t date. The production approach here is also worth noting: Suno handles the polish and the mixing while the performances – Dais’s vocals and guitar – remain entirely human. That’s probably the right limit for this kind of tool. The humanity stays in the room, and the AI takes care of the parts that would otherwise cost a studio budget. For independent songwriters sitting on decades of material they never had the resources to properly record, this is a reasonable and cost-effective way to finally get it done.
“Counting Hours” is the kind of song that makes you wonder what else is sitting in those old tapes from Landslide. If the rest of the catalog is at this level, Liri Dais has a lot of ground left to cover, and to me personally, that potential is exciting and I’m looking forward to what the future holds for Liri Dais.
