Predicament Omnimedia will release its first full-length album, Songs for the Season, Vol. 1 by Lee Streby's Amazing & Imaginary Band on Friday, November 7, 2025. The album may be the first mainstream holiday project created largely by generative AI production. The 9-track collection features three timeless classics and five new holiday songs, all the latter set written by R. Lee Streby (who is the owner and CEO of Predicament Omnimedia and its parent label, Afinat Records), but also a classically trained violinist, former orchestra executive, opera director, writer, board chair, arts consultant and founder, fundraiser, and all-around creative impresario.
Three years in the making, this album is a goal post in a creative challenge Mr. Streby gave himself back in 2023 as he was introduced to the first AI tools in the generative music sphere: create a personal, mainstream holiday album using his own songs as well as a few classics, produced almost entirely via generative AI tools. Indeed, this project is a combination of human creativity, 21st century invention, and a healthy dose of old fashioned, fictional, fun. It is equally infused with his lyrical voice in its words, production styling, and it is tempered with limitations of his choice of technical tools. Still, the album showcases ample evidence of being Lee’s personal holiday memoir, a legacy item to leave his present and future family descendants, and a small yet deeply personal holiday treasure to share with friends and the world.
The inspiration for creating a holiday album originated with its first lyric to a song that Lee had started writing back in 2022, about missing his friends that reside in several cities where he's lived different chapters of his life. The song became Wish You Well in this collection.
He says, “In particular, I was thinking about my core group of five friends from NYU in New York City, where I attended graduate school for two years. It was four women and myself, from all over the world: Australia, Europe, east and west coast USA. I wrote that song after we had planned to do a 20-year reunion in 2021. We planned to meet again that November, for what we always called ‘Orphans Thanksgiving’ at school in the city.” The reunion never happened because the pandemic shut everything down, and in the year that followed, one of those four ladies had tragically passed away. The song was Streby's first holiday song he’d written.
"I’ve always been a writer, I write a lot for a living, albeit not so much from my creative or musical brain,” Lee says. “This project was a big challenge and lots of fun— but also it’s like a lifelong music memoir for me, every lyric represents different pieces of my personality, my thoughts, feelings, relationships, my history, my love of laughter, my need to snotty cry over sappy holiday movies! It’s all in the album in some way,” he says, and continues, “And critics be damned, it doesn't need to sound like it came from Nashville, New York, or Hollywood for my own aesthetic happiness - maybe for theirs, maybe for others. This came from my corner studio in a small apartment, and AI music generation tools can be a beast to work with, it is not as easy as it sounds. I spent almost three years making these nine tracks. Mostly on an iPhone and iPad Pro. That fact alone sounds surreal to my mind when I think of my relationship with music over my lifetime.”
Lee believes and acknowledges that AI is a cultural and technical disruption that society maybe isn’t quite ready for, but it is happening and in Lee’s mind, a disruption badly needed to help revive some new aspect of equity and evolution into the shattered former music industry. In some ways, Lee believes, “AI is going to enable personal music making that is accessible to the masses, like nothing imaginable in music history. I think it's only going to get faster, easier, higher in quality, and like the online video revolution, this is going to be like TikTok and YouTube: allowing creator-based music to be made openly by anyone just to express themselves, and share their music with their circle and with the masses if they choose. I may have rushed this project out a little too quickly, but I’m not getting any younger,” he laughs.
“I know there are many people out there who just hate AI. I know there’s a lot about it that is scary, and that’s where a lot of the hatred comes from — it is the fear. People are going to lose livelihoods. Industries and jobs are going to be completely obliterated. But it’s not stopping so I believe getting in front of it is best. I’m not afraid to take creative risks. I wanted this to be among the first, if not THE first, mainstream AI-and-human created Christmas album, by a non-singing, non-playing, unsigned artist, who is just a simple citizen songwriter: passionate about music, YES, knowledgeable about music, YES, and willing show this work as it stands, absolutely. This is my best work, at this time, in this medium.”
Lee continued the thought. “There is so much of me in the album, that I believe it is authentic as it can be, and that’s where I think the bottom line will be, no matter how music is made in this new paradigm. Music with authenticity of the human behind it, prompting it, will be what people gravitate toward, like any era in history.”
Lee adds, “My parents are still alive in their 80’s. I am thrilled to create something that I am not ashamed to show them while they're still here! These songs all sound far, far better than any ukulele cover I may have recorded from my living room,” which that statement references his pandemic-era rediscovery of his first instrument as a child, and a still-current hobby strumming and recording as “UkuleLEE” on platforms like Acapella and Smule (ukulelee.com takes one to his YouTube channel). “I love playing music with real people, too. I‘m having a blast with music like never before in my life. I’ve worked in professional music circles for many years, still own a real label, but this project is for the sake of just making some music that I’m proud to share. And as for the largely fictional aspect beneath the production , my dear Mom especially knows the imagination this all comes from, for sure! My motivation was largely to just let go and create something my ears could stand by, proudly. And people that know me well know that my ears are extremely picky. I am my own worst critic. But I trust my ears here, like I trust my professional instincts in other aspects of my career. Whether it is commercially or popularly successful doesn’t matter, because I’ve won by just finishing it and releasing it, saying yes this is my work.”
For the opening and closing of his album’s set list, Lee went to the classics, back to the public domain catalogue, and chose two instrumental ‘bookends’ that he had always imagined playing as a violinist in a particular style. He produced O Little (Gypsy) Town and Silent Night Rhapsody. “I’m classically trained as a violinist (now retired, however) and I loved playing Christmas music. So I decided to open and close my collection with two personally-styled violin arrangements. I even fed the sound of my own instrument, and my own historical recitals, into an AI tool to create a voice for the generator to use. My instrument was an old 4th-generation family heirloom that I inherited by miracle, so this is meaningful to me, and I’m sure my folks will enjoy knowing my instrument and player’s voice is in the sound of these two fictional concoctions.”
O Little (Gypsy) Town, which opens the album, takes the classic song about Bethlehem into a Gypsy jazz club, honoring two of Lee’s idols, Stephane Grapelli and Mark O'Connor; while Silent Night Rhapsody closes the set simply, inspired by a fantasy Lee had, which was to play the song with a pianist friend in a cavernous gothic cathedral, freely, expressive, with an improvised or rhapsodic central section. “Lots of reverb in there,” Lee says.
Regarding the new, more pop-sounding songs, Streby says, "I really have a love of laughter, and I enjoy humor through parody, satire, and I love to watch people. During the pandemic and over the last few years, I've watched all these little videos of these awful, mostly female ‘Karens’ on social media. I started imagining a Pixar style Christmas movie plot. For fun, I started writing some lyrics about a Karen on the busiest, most frenzied shopping day of the year - Black Friday. The song includes a ukulele in it, which checks that recent bit of history about me off my list of elements to be represented on the record. The writing was the easy part. But the track (Oh, Karen) was the hardest, the biggest nightmare to produce in prompt engineering. It shifts from singing to speaking in sections, and it’s a fun story song with lots of transitions and imagery, but I knew what I wanted it to sound like.”
Also keeping things light in the spirit of campy fun is his sardonic, K-pop(ish) lyrics and melody for Christmas Is A Racket. "That was the last track I wrote for the album after a walk in my neighborhood. I had just watched K-Pop Demon Hunters and was thinking of that style of hip, fast, youthful take on life and that punchy sound. I had just finished my most personal, serious song called Christmas Through The Years, which is the true heart of the album. I needed to lighten up. So the phrase ‘Santa is suspicious’ popped in my head and I started thinking of these short verses with tight rhyming like 'malicious, Christmas, and dishes’ and the song just flew out of my hand when I went back in the house, in about 15 minutes! The melody was already singing itself as I wrote the words, and then, in one creative wave online with AI, it was pretty much done, with several renditions to choose from, in an hour, I think.” He could not choose just one mix in the end, so he decided to include one extra remix of 'Racket' as a 9th bonus track, “Not to mention, Beethoven and Mahler wrote nine symphonies, I wanted to have nine tracks.”
Voicing Racket is a female voice given the name Rebecca Potter. “This is where the album gets fun-as-work-of-music-fiction,” Lee says. Potter is the voice of an entirely fictional character he gave a back story to: an adopted adult daughter of Streby and his partner, Justin Robbins. “She’s an artist, classically trained but a bit of a rebel, she is now married to someone with the last name of another friend I am honoring.” Streby invented then preserved her voice print to reuse in multiple tracks. “Rebecca can sing the phone book through AI, and because she’s married with a couple grandkids, I gave myself room to use that story later. The grandchildren may grow up and drop into future projects. You could say I‘ll be giving Von Trapp syndrome.” Rebecca’s voice was born on his song entitled Tiny Tender Moments, “Then I took an earlier demo rendition of Wish You Well and reworked it with the same voice. The original vocal on that song sounded a little like Carly Rae Jepson, and I thought it was so giving some Jepson, I kind of wanted to try and send the song to her! I did not, but I really wanted the same female voice on these tracks for my album. Rebecca kills all three solo tracks with some vocal effect mixing variations.”
Continuing his desire to make the project his own memoir, Streby's choice of lead vocal for Christmas Through The Years is a male voice named ‘Steven Streby.’ “Steven is a name I would’ve given to a male child—because I really wanted to call a son Stevie Streby! His younger brother is named in Lee’s fictional musical family, also, as ‘Ronnie Lee Robbins,’ combining my first names with my partner Justin’s last, and Ronnie Lee is already recording for Predicament as a country rocker.” (See the store for Ronnie Lee Robbins’ songs already released.)
"I gave the name Sam Ashton Brooks, also completely made up, to the voice generated and used on Oh, Karen, and I used his voice originally on another future song that will be released later.”
The true heart of the album is in two ballads, with the aforementioned Christmas Through The Years as the centerpiece. "My family takes tons of pictures, always has, and we have old home movies that are funny to watch on Super 8 film. But the song deals with the hard facts of life which is aging and losing those we love along the way. I dedicate the song to my dearest Aunt Sharon and my older sister, who we called "Sissy,” but her name was Traci, both who have passed on. I will leave it at that. It's my most personal, heart-felt lyric and it's a big 6-minute ballad. The song speaks for itself.”
The other ballad, sung by ‘Rebecca,’ entitled Tiny Tender Moments, comes from the lyrical references to “ritualistic moments,” or personally held “traditions” repeated every year on Christmas Day. Lee wrote it in memory of a former partner, ‘Buddy,’ who tragically passed away in his late 30’s, just a few months after entering the hospital days after Christmas, on Dec. 28. . “Buddy had all these personal traditions he had to do every Christmas, so it was really his habit that I started doing and wrote about.” Lee imagined the song as a beautiful vocal ballad sung in a slightly more theatrical style to honor singers whose voices he loves: from Barbra Streisand to Julie Andrews, Sarah Brightman, Lea Salonga, Celine Dion, Linda Eder, or Idina Menzel. “I love big bad diva-pop songs.”
A third classic track was chosen to lift the program out of the melancholy corners of the two ballads: Jingle Bells. Streby drew his style inspiration from the Big Band era of the 40's and the bold brassy arrangements behind the great songbook entertainers like Fred Astaire, Bing Crosby, or Gene Kelly. Streby brings together all three ‘sibling’ vocal characters, Ronnie Lee Robbins, Stevie Streby, and Rebecca Potter, on the jazzy showstopper rendition. Lee added a few new lyrics in a special second verse, to personalize the score. "Every Christmas album needs a big band number, in my opinion."
Silent Night Rhapsody closes a collection of songs that draw on this creators' life, that have formed part of his personal legacy. They are drawn from his memories, experiences, and borne from his amazing and imaginary world of unfulfilled musical fantasy, with hope, charm, laughter and tenderness, all woven together for what he hopes is a special amazing moment or two for listeners in years to come.
— Trish Andrews, Guest Blogger
CLICK HERE TO PREVIEW WISH YOU WELL (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO) ON YOUTUBE
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For information, contact:
predicamentomnimedia@gmail.com
Words and Melodies by R. Lee Streby
© 2023-2025 Murphenator Music, Ltd. (ASCAP)
Recording © 2025 Predicament Omnimedia Music, an Afinat LLC company.
All rights reserved. Used by permission
* DISCLAIMER: The audio and visual elements of this recording were created partially using AI technology as tools. This single utilizes 100% human written lyrics and a core melody. The visual and vocal performance personas of the artist were generated by AI from images and voice print training models originating from the creators, and parts of the studio recording were created by both generative AI and human performance elements, including tracking, mixing, and mastering tools. “Rebecca Potter, Steven Streby, Sam Ashton Brooks, and Ronnie Lee Robbins” are purely fictional characters, created by the author(s), and presented to consumers in this project and others entirely for entertainment purposes. The artist’s likeness, sound, photography, lyrics, melody, arrangements, and other creative elements are protected by US trademark and copyright protections to the extent allowed by current law, and belong exclusively to Afinat LLC and/or the individual creators whose work was used with permission, with all rights reserved.
For more information, contact the artist at LEE@THEUKULELEE.COM, and check back here for more information on this project coming soon…