Empty the Silence is comprised of Keith Rankin and Sean Rankin. Now I’m going to take you on a brief journey here so stay with me. My brother and I are three and a half years apart. The journey begins back in 1975 in Louisville, KY. That year I (Keith) was bussed across town to elementary school at Brandeis elementary school. In the basement of Brandeis that year I took violin lessons. Nothing sexy like electric guitar or drums, but the connection was made.

In the mid 70s, I believe it was late December of 1976, we moved to Fort Lauderdale. Now is when the fun begins. In fourth grade we had this guy who would come around every week, I forget which day, and he had a record player on a cart. He’d come to our room for an hour and we would listen to Stevie Wonder, the Bee Gees, and a whole host of different music and styles. I would go home after school, do my homework, and then lay on the floor in the living room with those monsterous headphones on my head listening to albums over and over again until I had the lyrics and timing down to songs from a wide range of artists. Johnny Cash, Bee Gees, Stevie Wonder, Simon and Garfunkel. I could not get enough. Don’t worry, the brother is coming soon.

A few years later in middle school I had an encounter in science class. Having hailed from Kentucky, the vast majority of my exposure prior to Fort Lauderdale, was country, bluegrass, and my Maw Ma’s favorite, Elvis. I listened to the aforementioned Johnny Cash, Jimmie Rodgers (The Singing Brakeman), and a very heavy dose of bluegrass. One morning in science class, however, a classmate brought a cassette player, not a Walkman, one of those clunky Radio Shack jobs. My classmates had learned that I had not been schooled in more modern Rock. This kid puts the cassette player on the counter before class starts and proceeds to press play on the strains of Hells Bells by AC/DC. I was blow away and hooked from the moment I absorbed those first notes. So my world went from Country, Bluegrass, Pop, Disco, and Elvis to all of that plus Rock. The thing is, my love of all things musical never left out the rest. My joy still comes from a very eclectic collection of artists and genres. You are just as likely to find me enjoying The Ramones or Metallica as you are to catch me delving into Carmina Burana or Vivaldi. How did that get in there, you ask. Stick with me.

Middle school had all manner of surprises for me. I joined the band in eighth grade where I ended up playing the bassoon. Oh, make no mistake, I wanted to play drums, but the teacher asked me to play bassoon because all of the boys wanted to play drums and they desperately needed a bassoon player. I have to tell you, for that entire school year I pedaled my Mongoose BMX bike roughly four miles back and forth each day with that bassoon case dangling from my handlebars. Now, in the likely event that you are not familiar with the size and weight of a bassoon and the important logistics of having one dangle from the handlebars of a BMX bike, I want to assure you that in that one act alone I’ve paid part of my dues to get some slack from all of the musicians out there. Yes, I said bassoon.

“Hey, where’s the brother?” Hang in there, I’m getting to that part. It’s awesome.

Now, fast forward a few years to High School. It’s the 80’s and I am beginning to grow emotionally as well as physically and spiritually. I was a couple of years away from Football when I began writing poetry. No, not lyrics or anything super cool, just poetry. I was rather shy and heavily lacking in confidence as a boy and a young man. My family and my two best friends encouraged me endlessly, but I wouldn’t listen. Poetry, however, became my outlet. In addition to my wide ranging musical tastes, I developed an interest in history and the glory, both real and exaggerated, of historical figures and common mythologies. In particular, I became a huge fan of knights and warriors across all cultures and civilizations. I would read about samurai, medieval knights, Zulu warriors, you name it. The “ideals” of honor and sacrifice appealed to me greatly. But ultimately, much of that early poetry was focused on the thing most young men are consumed with, chicks. I don’t think it was truly love at that stage, but we can call it love or romantic poetry. A sprinkle of the dramatic and some hopes and wishes; you got yourself a poem. I suppose I should clarify that I always had a passion for words. It helps with the entire story. Mom would tell me that when I was learning to speak and read I would climb up in her lap and put my hands out and say “words mama”. I wanted her to teach me words. She said that I would chide her for using small words. I wanted big words like rhinoceros. I love that story.

Now in all of this there is an important thread missing. Our family were all musical except mom. Now she has always been the dancer, wordsmith, and philosopher of the bunch. Dad, however, played guitar and sang. We would sit around as kids on a Friday night or weekend and dad would play guitar and we would sing along. If you have never spent time with your family singing “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly” or “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea” then you just haven’t lived. But dad loved country and bluegrass and he particularly like Jimmie Rodgers. He would play old Jimmie Rodgers songs and sing them along with Jimmie’s famous yodel. Keep that one in your mind, it’s an important piece later on.

Now, while I was in high school my brother Sean had hit middle school. His musical journey was more enjoyable than mine and a good deal more successful I might add. Sean also joined the band in middle school. Oddly enough, the band leader wrangled him into something other than drums as well. He did not, however, have to lug a bassoon around on his bike. No, Sean got pushed into the clarinet which he dutifully played that first year. After that, however, he decided that the transition to saxophone was much more appealing to him and the chicks. Oh, before we continue with his musical journey I have to tell this one little tidbit about him. While he was in elementary our church had a talent contest one year. Sean sings “Come Sail Away” by Styx. Now, if you remember anything about the late 70s and early 80s, you know that the church and rock groups were not exactly simpatico on the issues and thoughts of the day. In my mind it was a great juxtaposition and I still grin to this day at all of the members in the auditorium that night cheering on our little cherub singing about how “I thought that they were angles, but to my surprise we climbed aboard their starship we headed for the skies”. In fairness, they just loved the adorable little monster singing period. I’m not entirely certain that any of them actually paid any attention at all to the lyrics.

So, Mr. Saxophone proceeded to outperform most of his buddies in the band and played alto, tenor, and even soprano sax over the years. He was a performer in Jazz Band in high school and second chair All State in Florida. Sean always had a musical flair and innate ability that I lacked. But, he also always has been a person of boundless charisma and easy charm. Don’t let it fool you though, he’s got Rankin temper to match the best of them and the Rankins are not a people to be trifled with when it comes to their anger. That’s a story for another time though.

Where I was Mr. eclectic, Sean was pretty solidly a rock guy. He absorbed all that the 80s had to offer. Concerts were a regular event for him and our parents indulged his love of the culture from those days. Mohawks, ripped jeans, the disaffected teenager persona, you name it. It was clear, however, that the one thing that was really awesome was our shared love of music, lyrics, messaging, and entertainment. When he and I reminisce about music it’s about the message and the culture that it drives. We love the fun of the 80s and the picture that music paints of different periods. While he dominated the football scene and the social scene at our high school in Fort Lauderdale, I went off to college in New York.

My sophomore year dad showed me few chords on his old acoustic guitar, taught me how to play Country Roads, and sent me back to college with my new love. We had a group of guys that got together on weekends at the park near school with lots of adult beverages and sat around playing and sharing songs. It was a wonderful jam session. Despite my earlier lessons, I didn’t read music as a practice, but show me some chords and give me a little time and I could “fake book” it with the best of ’em. I was playing Guns and Roses, Gordon Lightfoot, Johnny Cash and lots of others during that time period. It was truly all for fun. I wasn’t really learning anything as a real musician, but I enjoyed it.

In the ensuing years our musical interests grew and expanded. Christian rock in the 90s, Metal, Hair Metal, Classic Rock. In high school I had become an instant, lifetime fan of Rush. I love the lyrical complexity and the music of the trio and I do to this day. I really miss Neil though.

The point of this entire story is that we are well aware of the fact that we are not “serious musicians”. I will fight anybody who wants to tell me that I know nothing about music or lyrics or making either of them. I don’t read music, though I could do so in a fairly short time with a little study. I don’t “really” know how to play guitar, but I can create a melody and I have enough history and reference in my head to know what kind of time and pace I like in the music that I create.

In the 90s I learn ed that ll of that poetry I had been writing since high school was just a time signature and a melody away from becoming a song. So, I started writing lyrics and poetry. I picked up my Fender and started creating stories with it. Some real stories, some just pure fiction based on emotions. I wrote songs for friend’s weddings, songs for my circle of friends, and songs for my private moments of pain and triumph. I wrote country, christian, rock, and pop. I wrote whatever came into my head at a given moment.

Sean took that same path and began to write down his moments. He poured out his pain through emotional tragedy and personal triumph. Hurt songs, power songs, love songs, thoughts, and ideas. He learned he could sing rock and he was good at it. I’m more of a country and folk guy on the vocal scale.

Then something very cool happened. About a 18 months ago I found something called Suno on the web. I tinkered with it and took songs that my best friends had digitized off of some old cassette tapes that I had used to record some of my music for them over thirty years ago. I took those tracks, which I recorded in a garage on a Radio Shack cassette recorder, much like the one I first heard Hells Bells on, and I started by feeding one of them into Suno as a reference track. I hit create and it took my melody and my lyrics and spit out a fairly well produced version of my song with drums, bass, guitar and backing vocals. I was blown away and excited. The thing I didn’t like, of course, is that it wasn’t my voice and I saw no way to do that. So, I created copies of some of my songs and kept them on my phone to listen to for myself and shared them with my friends. Then I found another tool named Kits AI. This allowed me to record my voice and create a clone. Not bad, but still didn’t seem to be what I wanted. Recently, however, Suno added a feature to record your voice sample and then attach your voice to the songs you were creating. My brother took one of his songs and added his voice to the track when he created it in Suno. The output was nothing short of super cool. There was his rock song with as close as we had come to his voice. The first one I tried, spit out my melody, my lyrics and the closest thing I’ve heard yet to my voice. I was ecstatic.

So, we began preparations for putting out our music. Now, I want to be clear, I’m too stinking old and too busy to put together a band and pay all of the ridiculous fees for studio time, mastering, and “Professional” musicians to really turn my material into what I want it to be. The hacks who want to glare down their nose at us and ridicule what we’re doing because “they are the gatekeepers of music” can go take a leap.

Empty the Silence is not an AI Persona. This is two brothers who have a love of music and words; a passion for messages, if you will. I’ve checked the definitions on Spotify and other platforms as well as clarifying definitions from the various AI systems.

We are not trying to impersonate anyone and we are working to be sure that our music is as clearly us and our message as possible. The lyrics are written by my brother and I from start to finish. The melodies are created by us and then we let Suno produce the track. We run that through the studio, sometimes Audacity, and we are going to start putting out tracks and EPs of “Our Music, Our Way”. Every song is copyrighted and created at its core by human beings. The performance is AI, we’re not trying to hide that. If your concern is human crafted and human performed then you may not like what we produce. If what you’re concerned about is the words, the message, and the delivery then we might be your groove.

The songs by Empty the Silence are rock songs. The voice is based on my brother’s voice and the lyrics are mostly his, though some are mine. There will be more in other genres later. For now we hope you enjoy what Empty the Silence has to offer.

God Bless!!!