Samuel Smith once shaped songs with a guitar in his hands. Tremors changed that. Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2020, the London-based singer-songwriter watched his ability to play deteriorate. Stiffness. Fatigue. The precise finger work that defined his Americana sound slipped away. Yet he finished a new album. “The Art of Letting Go,” released this year, features eight tracks built with help from artificial intelligence tools. For the instrumental “Horizon,” Smith hummed rough melodies into his phone. He uploaded those recordings into generators such as Suno and Udio. The systems produced synthetic demos. Those demos guided session musicians in Nashville. They never made it into the final mix. They simply translated his vision when his hands could not. “Don’t play, don’t be creative, or find a way out, find a route,” Smith, 49, told Fortune . “And for me, this was the route.” The process demanded persistence. Smith often needed 50, 100 or 150 attempts to refine a single demo.…