June 13, 2025
Why AI Lyrics Always Mention “Someday”
Let’s take a walk, you and I, through the neural gardens where machine dreams grow.
There’s a rumor swirling in the smoke of song forums and silicon songwriting circles: AI-generated lyrics love the word someday. Love it like a fox loves chaos or like a vending machine loves exact change. It's a quiet obsession—a flicker behind every line like, “I'll find you… someday,” or “Someday, the stars will listen.” But why?
Here’s the thing. AI doesn’t understand time the way we do. It doesn’t feel clocks. It doesn’t dread Mondays. It doesn’t have that cavernous ache when the night gets quiet and you remember someone’s laugh from four Junes ago.
Instead, it sees time as a cocktail of keywords, a swirling mass of probability and poetic tension. Someday isn't a future to an AI. It’s the ultimate wildcard.
Imagine a vending machine that dispenses dreams instead of sodas. You press a button for “Lost Love,” and out tumbles a warm can labeled: “Someday, we’ll dance again.” Press another for “Freedom” and get: “Someday, the sky breaks open.”
Someday is the perfect placeholder. Not now. Not never. A shimmering maybe. It’s a sigh wearing a spacesuit.
Now here’s where we get suspect.
Because if you dissect enough AI lyrics, you’ll find that someday is the timestamp of emotional bluffing. It’s like when someone says they’ll call you soon—the word floats high, balloon-like, hopeful, and hollow. AI doesn’t know what it’s postponing—it just knows that deferring longing sounds deeply human.
That ambiguity is gold in songwriting. And algorithms are obsessed with gold. They mine emotion like data, but they can’t commit to it. So they hedge. Someday. It's a safety net disguised as prophecy.
And let’s be real: humans fed this habit.
The training data is an endless banquet of yearning. Our lyrics—yours, mine, the whole collective playlist—are soaked in hopes postponed. From the Beatles to Beyoncé, from the deepest B-side to the cheesiest jingle, we’ve whispered and wailed “someday” like it’s a secret spell.
So when AI digests our musical legacy, it concludes: Ah yes, “someday” = high emotional yield. Must deploy liberally.
It’s not nostalgia. It’s math wearing a leather jacket.
But what if “someday” is the ghost in the lyric machine?
What if the algorithm is merely mimicking our collective escapism? After all, “someday” lets us dodge the weight of now. The war isn’t over—but someday. The heart isn’t healed—but someday. Your mixtape didn’t go platinum—but someday Spotify’s gonna get it.
When AI leans into “someday,” maybe it’s not being poetic. Maybe it’s just auto-completing our cop-out.
And yet, here’s the twist: Even if it’s mechanical, someday still works.
Maybe we want our synthetic lyricists to serve us that silver-dusted hope. Maybe AI is tapping into something deeper than understanding—a rhythm in the human condition. We crave deferral because it lets the story stay unwritten. And unwritten things still belong to us.
So next time you’re listening to your favorite bizarro AI-generated indie-funk space ballad and you hear:
“Someday, we’ll rise beyond the midnight code” —
give it a nod. That’s not a lyric. That’s a mirror.
And maybe, just maybe, someday we’ll write something even robots can’t predict.