"It Was Like a Time Machine": How Utah Carol Used LALAL.AI to Finally Get Their Locked Instrumental Stems

For over two decades, Chicago indie duo Utah Carol sat on one of their most beloved albums with no way to release instrumentals, until stem separation changed everything. We talked to Grant and JinJa about rediscovering their music, their long journey with home recording, and how LALAL.AI became an unexpected key to both their past and future.

A Band Built from the Ground Up

JinJa Birkenbeuel, one half of Chicago indie duo Utah Carol, hadn't checked in with her audience for a while. But when she did, she had something to share:

"Last night, an AI saved my life. I am stunned and blown away. I never, ever thought I would ever use AI for anything I have created musically. I'm generally against using AI to create things. But, for so long, the master tapes for my debut album 'Wonderwheel' were gone, lost, unavailable. And all I can say is that this technology has been completely transformative for my husband Grant and I. The tech is giving us a new lease on life, as clichéd as it sounds. We found buried treasure."

The backstory behind that post is worth telling in full.

Grant Birkenbeuel and JinJa Davis have been making music together since the late 1990s, entirely on their own terms. Their origin story is as DIY as it gets: a songwriting class at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago and a nervous first performance sparked the beginning of Utah Carol.

Both JinJa and Grant went to the same college. Initially, Grant had no intention of moving beyond what they were doing; he treated music more like a hobby. 

“JinJa took a songwriting class created by songwriter Ralph Covert at the Old Town School Folk Music. At the end of the semester, you were to get up on stage and perform your song. JinJa said ‘Can you come up and play with me?’ I have stage fright, and I've never done this before! But we got up together and performed an original song JinJa had recorded. I think that was the catapult,” Grant says.

“That was how we started writing songs. I had some demos, so we started collaborating musically and lyrically. Put out a small little cassette tape that I had recorded all myself, mastered myself, got it duplicated, sent it out to a bunch of bars and we got a lot of gigs. We were both working in corporate jobs at the time.” 

Later, the duo decided to move beyond just a few songs. Utah Carol eventually moved beyond the four-track and jumped into the Digital Performer program, recording their first full album, Wonderwheel, in a loft in Chicago. Mojo Magazine even named it Americana Album of the Month. 

In the meantime, Amazon, which has just been founded, was developing an initiative called Amazon Advantage program. The initiative allowed independent musicians to actually sell their music directly on Amazon. The duo didn’t miss the opportunity, either. 

“You had to submit your music to get in. We got in, and our record was available on Amazon! Then Mojo wrote about us, and we sold a bunch of records. It was crazy!”

Four songs ended up licensing to a major national advertising campaign, and another was placed in a film at the Sundance Film Festival, All The Real Girls — a song they still earn royalties on today.

“Do you have instrumentals?”

This album, Wonderwheel, is the one that put Utah Carol on the map and created their signature sound. But they've always had ad agencies asking them, “Do you have instrumentals?”

“When the advertising company called us, I thought it was a joke. Eventually, we got two contracts; it was rolled into two because they renewed the license and they were asking us, ‘Do you have these as instrumentals, by any chance?’ We said we didn't. I even thought they were probably not going to use it now,” JinJa says. “But they ended up finding snippets that made sense and used four songs from Wonderwheel that took place over a two-year campaign. The money we made on Wondewheel from that one deal partially funded our second album, Comfort for the Traveler. Besides this ad campaign, we licensed a Wonderwheel song to a really big film at Sundance Film Festival, called All The Real Girls, which we still make royalties on.”

Mable Custer featured in All The Real Girls (LALAL.AI instrumentals only):

“Part of our sound is a lot of really layered vocals. The studio that did our Americana record was run by a big-time studio guy who did Janet Jackson, Ye, Destiny’s Child, Lupe Fiasco — all the big R&B and Hip Hop stars were in there. We happened to be there at the same time. And he said he was going to help us with those instrumentals but it would cost us,” JinJa says. “It was such an incredible amount of money to pull those tracks up that I thought we're never going to have this happen.”

“I don't even think that back in 1999, I would have to talk to some other engineers to actually ask them if they could give the artists individual tracks so they could use them someday in the future. I don't even know if that was a conversation. I used AI to ask the question that’s been a monkey on my back for decades — Wonderwheel not having instrumentals,” JinJa shares.

JinJa, who runs a marketing and advertising company and works regularly in tech, eventually decided to tackle the problem methodically, and eventually came across LALAL.AI. 

"There were several options that were suggested. I asked Grant to look at them so I put a dossier together with all the pros and cons, advantages, disadvantages, cost — that kind of thing. I asked him to go through all these apps and try them, and he did. I remember the day, I was in the kitchen, and Grant was on the couch with just his laptop, when I was hearing the results of some of the tools that we tried. I was like, ‘Oh, that one is not going to work. That one sounds terrible. On one of the AI tools, it completely dropped one of Grant’s guitars instead of the vocals. Mostly, we just heard a lot of artifacts. But then on LALAL.AI, I said, ‘Wait a minute.’ I stopped what I was doing and you should have seen Grant’s face. I must say we have really good ears! How often do you have a surprising, mind blowing experience in life these days? But that was it. That was how we decided that LALAL.AI was the tool we were going to use for Wonderwheel. And we did. We released a brand new album “Wonderwheel The Instrumentals” which is available to download, buy and stream everywhere including all social media platforms. It’s a miracle and a dream come true. I can move on to other creative work now."

“Now I like using LALAL.AI to take up a Neil Young track from the 70s and listen to his isolated vocals. It just gives me chills.” 

Over the last few days, Grant started digging a little bit deeper with their own songs, isolating even guitar or the piano tracks, just playing around with them. He also tried the tool on tracks from their second album, Comfort for the Traveler, the album that gave the duo an opportunity to get a record deal and go to Europe with a few gigs and tours.

“When I was splitting these tracks, it was like it was going back into a time machine listening to our vocals from years and years ago, where we were different people, listening to our tracks isolated," Grant says. “We've heard these songs millions of times, but listening to it isolated and bringing us back to places where we recorded this piece, it brought back a lot of great memories. Now I like using LALAL.AI to take up a Neil Young track from the 70s and listen to his isolated vocals and it just gives me chills.”

“When we were able to isolate the tracks, looking back, it's not the kind of thing where you’d say, ‘Look, listen! I could have done that better.’ It was nostalgic, but it was good.” 

A Tool for Creativity, Not a Replacement for It

JinJa is clear about how LALAL.AI fits into their workflow: it's an instrument, not a shortcut.

“I have multiple AI tools I use because I have a marketing and advertising company. I do a lot of work in tech and the creative space but I don't use AI tools for creativity; I use them for research, sometimes editing. Same with LALAL.AI: it's a tool to help us get to a different place, not necessarily as a creation experience.”

She also experimented with Voice Changer, trying to hear what a well-known artist might sound like on one of their songs. “Grant and I have always dreamed that one of our songs would get picked up by someone famous, like when Nirvana chose to cover 'Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam' by The Vaselines. It was a life changing experience for the previously unknown band. So I took one of our vocal stems and added singer-songwriter-vocalist SZA to see what would happen. It didn’t exactly work perfectly, and I thought, ‘No, the AI SZA cannot do this particular Utah Carol song.’ But I knew what I could do next. I'd try Voice Changer again when we release one of our newer, more traditional, straight-ahead songs and try again, SZA and one of the many other famous AI voices LALAL.AI has available. I could put that together and use it as a pitch opportunity: Here's our song, here's your voice, see if you'd like to cover it. We could blow up that way, right?”

The New Record and What's Next

Utah Carol's fourth album is nearly finished, the duo plans it to be an at least 10-song record, most of which will be, just like Wonderwheel, recorded in house. 

“Grant is a guitar player, so there's 50,000 more guitars on this record than we've ever had on any other record,” JinJa notes. 

Their son, Dexter Birk, a jazz pianist graduating from Manhattan School of Music in NY, has been weighing in too, in very Gen Z fashion:

“He's that generation where he says, ‘I don't know what you're putting a whole album out for. Release one at a time.’ Get your work out Dad, make-release, make-release, make-release. We took his advice and released three new singles that will be on the album, Ride Lonesome, Sugar Cane and Pretty Black Dress. We put our music out through TuneCore. Everything is within our own ecosystem; we have our own publishing company. We set up our band like a business back in 1999,” the duo says.

While we’re waiting for Utah Carol’s fourth record, we can be sure that it won’t have the same struggles Wonderwheel did, which, 25 years later, finally has its instrumentals.

“When Amazon had it available, our album Wonderwheel was shipping all over the world. That was a big deal. That was the time when independent musicians had more opportunity, which is why I'm really excited about LALAL.AI. My advice for musicians and songwriters who are reticent about using any type of AI for their music or audio—you really have to try LALAL.AI.” JinJa says. “Well, I would personally not use it to replace a professional recording engineer, there are so many other uses for this tool for small businesses and entrepreneurs that could change your workflow significantly. For example, I use LALAL.AI at my podcast studio for my show The Honest Field Guide when I have recorded a guest virtually and they are not in the best quality room environment for the recording. I can quickly eliminate room sound and other background issues that distract from my conversations. LALAL.AI is fast and frees up my time to do other things in my podcast studio and my business.”

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