This Bow Valley Bus Driver Turned Years of Stories Into an AI-Made Country Album

Marcel Heim has never been able to sing. He has tried, more than once, to learn an instrument. It never really worked out.

But that has not stopped him from writing songs.

The 66-year-old Cochrane resident has spent the past two years teaching himself to use artificial intelligence music platforms, turning decades of poems and observations, many of them drawn from years spent driving a bus in the Bow Valley, into a full album of original music.

"For me, it's like going from blind to seeing, from not hearing to hearing," Heim said. "It's such a new world. All of a sudden, it opens for myself."

Heim moved to Cochrane from Switzerland almost 20 years ago after visiting Canada many times and crossing the country four times with his wife. He first came in 1996 as a tourist, touring the Rockies in a rented RV. Even then, he said, he remembers thinking Cochrane looked like a beautiful little town where he could live one day.

He spent years driving between Canmore, Banff and Lake Louise as a bus driver before semi-retiring about a year ago. The valley, its history and the people who pass through it have become major themes in his music, including songs such as "Swiss Boy in the Rockies" and "Three Elk on Banff Avenue."

Writing has been part of his life much longer than music. Heim started writing in Switzerland roughly 40 years ago, doing interviews and newspaper work before beginning to write poetry on the side. About five years ago, he began studying artificial intelligence and wrote a book on the subject. By then, he already had a collection of lyrics and poems he hoped to publish one day.

Around two years ago, he tried an AI music platform for the first time and was not impressed. A newer platform he found about a year later changed that.

"I tried out hours and hours," he said. "I wrote down what did it trigger, what did it not trigger, and then I tried out hours and hours still, until I thought, that's exactly how it should sound."

Much of his material traces back to his years on the road through the Bow Valley. Heim said ideas often arrive mid-drive, sparked by a stray comment or a passing scene he catches from behind the wheel.

"Sometimes even when I'm driving, I hear a sentence from somebody, or I have a situation," he said. "Then I have a short break, or I stop at the moment, and I put some ideas in my cell phone."

He credits years of watching people, first during a management career in Switzerland and later from the driver's seat between Canmore and Lake Louise, with sharpening that instinct.

"I started recognizing that people are the most interesting species in the world," he said, adding that it is often "the small things in life" from those years on the roads of the Bow Valley, rather than anything dramatic, that end up shaping a song.

The writing itself is done manually, he said, often late at night in his home office, sometimes until four or five in the morning. Because English is not his first language, he occasionally uses tools such as ChatGPT to check a phrase or clarify a word choice, but he said the bulk of the writing is his own.

Only once the lyrics are finished does he move to the music platform, where he uses prompts to shape the vocals and instruments, a process he described as trial and error.

A finished song can take anywhere from two to six weeks, he said.

"Sometimes it's just a fight between my lyrics, what I want to say, and figuring out how do I bring the emotion to the lyrics with the sound," Heim said. "I'm kind of the referee who tries to bring them together."

He said the goal is never to tell listeners what to think. Instead, he wants to leave room for people to bring their own experiences to a song.

"If someone hears one of the songs and recognizes something from their own life, I think that the song has done its job," he said.

He is currently working on a new song built around a mundane frustration: always getting a shopping cart with wheels that refuse to roll straight. The working title is "The Bad Cart Picks Me."

Unlike his other songs, this one started with the music rather than the lyrics after he stumbled on a sound he liked while experimenting with the platform's settings.

Heim said he has also started digging deeper into the technical side of production, manipulating individual instrument tracks rather than relying entirely on the platform's default output.

He is well aware that some people question whether AI-generated music counts as real music at all, a debate he said echoes arguments made about synthesizers and electronic instruments decades ago.

"It was fun to see that every time something new comes along and pushes the boundaries, we have some interesting discussions going on," he said. "That's okay. That's what it needs."

Heim's debut, a 12-track country album called "The Water Never Asked My Name," gathers those small observations into song. The record leans on the same instincts that shaped his years of writing: quiet character sketches and overheard moments turned into verses, set against a country sound he built track by track with the AI platform.

He said he never set out to make a polished, commercial record. The songs were written for himself, his wife and a small circle of friends before others convinced him the album deserved a wider audience.

Heim said he is not chasing royalties. He is not ruling out working with a singer or musician down the road, either, but for now prefers keeping full creative control over the songs himself.

His advice to anyone curious about trying AI tools, regardless of age, is simple.

"I don't have to feel any labels anymore, and I like my freedom," he said. "I would recommend, try it out. If it's something for you, why not. If not, if you see that's nothing for me, that's fine as well."

Heim’s full album is available to listen to for free on YouTube.