A Drink with a Coconut I

The Vibe Patrol single started with a rap beat

My wife and I once took a vacation in the Bahamas. As we were surveying the options available at the tiki bar, my wife saw that they were offering drinks that were served inside a coconut that also had a sparkler attached.

“I want a drink with a coconut,” she told me. “Something on fire with a coconut.”

Decades later, I was experimenting with what was then the new Suno 3.5. I was curious to see how well it could do a rap groove, so I prompted an instrumental for “a funky 90's rap song, African vibe, Heavy bass.” I called it Coconut Grove after a dimly misremembered song from the 1980s called Nubian Nut by George Clinton; the actual line from the song is “coconuts grow” not “coconut grove”, but that’s really neither here nor there.

The basic groove was pretty good, as you can hear, but it didn’t strike me as much of a rap beat, but rather, as more of an EDM club track.

For some reason, the reference to coconuts reminded me of that Bahamian vacation, and so I put some lyrics together, then extended the instrumental with the following prompt: “Female singer, a funky 90's sound, African vibe, Heavy bass.” And while the song wasn’t anywhere nearly complete, it did have that certain je ne sais pas that all good songs possess to greater or lesser degrees. At this point, the song was already called A Drink with a Coconut. Note that this version was also created with Suno 3.5.

And that was the basis for one of Vibe Patrol’s more successful singles, which has three different mixes, including the rock-based Spring Break mix which can be heard on iTunes, Spotify, or Youtube, among other places, in addition to the more club-based Spring Break Extended mix, all three of which were produced with Suno 4.0, then automastered with BandLab prior to release.