Dylan Rodrigue Debuts New Song 'Goodbye'

Rising L.A. artist Dylan Rodrigue unveils a new song, "Goodbye," today with an AI video directed by Dillon Moore. The track is out today on Pizzaslime Records / Mad Decent.

"The song, to me, feels like a brief snapshot of the grieving process," says Rodrigue. "My father died in 2019 and I was thinking about the many ways in which we cope with loss: indulging in vices, acting irrationally and feeling a general lack of purpose in life. Strangely, it's the act of creating the music that seems to regain that sense of purpose for myself. Pain and suffering are inevitable, yet it's possible to transform all of that garbage into something new; something that transcends the negativity it was derived from."

The video was conceptualized and filmed in just a few weeks with a limited budget, with Moore combining a mix of AI and real footage and filming the resulting video on a VHS camera. The process began with Moore inputting photos of Rodrigue into Midjourney, a generative AI program and image creator, to design a life-like puppet of the artist.

He then performance-captured his own face lip-syncing the song to animate the puppet using his iPhone. Finally, Moore used DALL-E to set backgrounds behind the puppet, placing real footage in key places-scenes behind the car window, the roach crossing the AI-generated bar, the roller coaster footage inside the AI-generated TV-in order to make the world feel more cohesive.

"Being able to come up with a concept and actualize it in a couple weeks was pretty mind blowing, there was never a moment where I had to wait for something to happen" says Moore. "We were able to have the focus solely on the creative side of things and get near instant gratification, being able to react and interact with the AI to help shape something we love in a short amount of time on our own without a budget."

Watch the new music video here: