Rip Gerber: The AI Insider Making Deliberately Human Music

He spent his career working within the artificial intelligence industry. His debut album was made without any of it.

A Career on the Other Side of the Machine

Debut albums often come with an origin story, and Rip Gerber’s begins well before he released a note of music. Gerber spent three decades as a technology executive, serving as Chief Marketing Officer of C3.ai and Chief Innovation Officer of Vlocity, and becoming an early investor in Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models. He has seen, from the inside, exactly what machine intelligence can do.

One detail is central to his debut album, Old Piano, out August 7 on his own label, Secret Equations Records. According to Gerber, there is no AI on the album, and it contains no samples, loops, or generated parts. He says the performances were captured live: band and orchestra playing together, mixed on a vintage Neve console, and that the artwork was painted by hand. Gerber also says he served as art director for the entire package, painting both covers on 36-by 36-inch canvases by hand and designing the gatefold and inner sleeves himself.

“Not because I couldn’t have used it,” he says of the technology he knows so well. “This album is an homage to music before AI arrived, to rooms full of people listening to each other, to imperfection left in because it was honest.”

Starting Over at Sixty

Gerber’s route to a debut album was not a typical one. By his own account, his life came apart during COVID, and what pulled him through was an old piano. “I sat down at it the way you reach for a railing when the floor gives way,” he says. “The songs that came out weren’t written for an audience or an algorithm. They were written to survive.”

He released his first music at 62. Now 63, he has built an audience of roughly 140,000 monthly Spotify listeners, passed a million views on YouTube, and watched two earlier singles, “Three-Chord Town” and “Y Knot,” reach #1 on Amazon Music. His work has drawn coverage from a range of music, business and culture publications, with some outlets engaging the songs and others drawn to the unusual story of an AI insider making records without it.

“No label or A&R department is looking for a 62-year-old debut artist,” he says. “It freed me. Nothing on this record was optimized for income or engineered for a playlist.”

The Rooms Where It Was Made

For an independent debut, Old Piano was recorded in storied company. Sessions took place at Skywalker Sound and at Sausalito’s 2200 Studios, the former Record Plant where Fleetwood Mac made Rumours. Four tracks feature a live 30-piece orchestra arranged and conducted by Noah Luna, recorded on the Skywalker scoring stage.

The album was mixed by seven-time Grammy winner Jim Scott, whose credits include Tom Petty, Wilco and Sturgill Simpson, on his vintage Neve 8048 console, and mastered in Nashville by Grammy-winning engineer Pete Lyman. The session players, Gerber notes, have performed alongside some of the most recognisable names in rock, and the takes on the record are live rather than looped.

Gerber describes the day the orchestra first played his songs as the moment the project came into focus. “Hearing thirty musicians breathe at the same time, no click track in their souls, no grid, just people listening to each other, was the moment I understood what this album actually was,” he says. “I’d spent months telling people I was making a fully human record. That day I finally heard what that meant.”

A Sound Built Around an Old Piano

Sonically, the record sits in the heartland American tradition. Gerber names Billy Joel, Tom Petty, Springsteen and Jason Isbell as reference points, and the material deals in the subjects that lineage suggests: leaving, healing, growing older, holding on. The centre of the sound, fittingly, is a real piano, slightly imperfect, with a live band around it and, on the orchestral tracks, strings swelling underneath.

Because the album was recorded fully analog, Gerber argues the recordings retain a quality that is becoming less common. “You can hear the room. You can hear people,” he says. “Every note on this record was played by a human hand in real time, and I think you can feel that even if you can’t name it.”

“Tunnel Royale” and the Story Behind It

The album’s new single, “Tunnel Royale,” is one of the orchestral recordings from Skywalker. The song is a tribute to Princess Diana, tracing her final summer, from the Riviera to the Ritz to the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, alongside the moments that made her the People’s Princess, including touching an AIDS patient without gloves and walking Angola’s minefields. The final verse imagines a love that outlasts the tunnel, a nod to The Phantom of the Opera, her favourite musical.

The song has personal roots on two fronts. Gerber’s partner Holly lived in London for seven years and carried a lifelong admiration for Diana; her stories sparked the writing. But it also reaches back to 1998, when Gerber found himself in Paris with an infant son who could not sleep. He walked the city at midnight with a stroller, unknowingly tracing the route Diana had taken from the Ritz, past the flowers, candles and notes that still lined the path. “That walk stayed in me for over twenty-five years before it became this song,” he says.

The video pairs licensed archival footage of Diana with a live performance filmed on the Skywalker scoring stage during the recording sessions themselves, Gerber at the piano with the orchestra and Luna conducting. Cinematographer Alex da Silva led a three-camera shoot, with Roy Wanguhu and Dekeydrick Curry on second and third cameras, and Gerber produced and edited alongside Kyle Parker. What appears on screen is what was recorded in the room, with no lip-syncing or staged recreation.

Vinyl as the Native Format

For an album built on its analog premise, Gerber has treated vinyl as the primary format rather than an afterthought. A limited first edition of 500 LPs is being offered to fans ahead of general availability: a gatefold he designed himself, with the hand-painted cover art, full lyrics, personal photographs and inner sleeves he assembled by hand.

“Machines will make plenty of music from here on out,” he says. “Somebody has to keep the human thread unbroken. That’s what Old Piano is: a record of how we did it, made the way we did it, before we forget.”

Where to Find Rip Gerber

“Tunnel Royale” is out now, with Old Piano to follow on August 7 via Secret Equations Records. Gerber’s music is available on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube, where the “Tunnel Royale” video filmed at Skywalker Sound can be seen at youtu.be/j8rXKBscM2I. The limited edition vinyl is available at ripgerber.myshopify.com, and everything else lives at ripgerber.com. Find him on Instagram at @ripgerber. With a debut album arriving at 62 and a story that cuts across the music and technology worlds, his is a record worth hearing on its own terms.