Roxanne, Rhiannon, Eileen & Jolene… How AI Translates Song Lyrics Dedicated to Singer-Songwriters’ Loved Ones (and a Couple of Mistresses)

By creammagazine, August 27, 2025

The mark of a good song is if it can hit at the heart and mind of the listener. It’s a bonus if the listener can conjure images akin to those the songwriter intended. But what if it was artificial intelligence taking in the song words?

Cream wondered how songs dedicated to loved ones by the artists who sang them would translate visually when fed through AI software. The songs chosen each had a name in their title, such as Dolly Parton’s Jolene or Madonna’s Dear Jessie – the name of someone that meant something special to the singer or songwriter.

Sometimes the artist/author was in love or infatuated with the titular protagonist, and in rare cases that love turned into something sour (thank you, Rod Stewart, Run DMC and Erykah Badu).

The lyrics to 17 songs were cut and pasted into a hyper-realistic template using the DaVinci image generator app. No song title was given and no artist name, so it was really up to AI to ‘read’ the lyrics and come up with an image envisioned by canvassing the entire song. All lyrics were lifted from Lyrics.com.

The results show the AI is very good at ‘reading’ songs and therefore interpreting them, to the point of presenting a pretty good picture of their main characters, with the exception of a couple of odd cases.

It’s interesting to note the difference in sentiment and temperament when two songs from vastly different genres are fed through the software. Take the song Mary, Mary by The Monkees versus Mary, Mary by Run DMC. Both are very different in lyric, and their dissonant styles seep through the final images churned out for each.

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While current software could do with some tweaking,and a bigger injection of images to draw from and blend, the offerings so far are fairly smooth. Had the software been around decades ago, some of these artworks would have made great record sleeves.

Check out 17 other songs that paint a pretty picture…

Story by Antonino Tati

The Beatles – Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds

According to John Lennon, this song’s origins lay in a drawing his three-year old son Julian created at school, inspired by his friend Lucy O’Donnell who in the picture was floating in the sky surrounded by sparkling jewels and diamonds. Yes, the kid probably had a crush on her, given his artistic tribute to Lucy. Artificial intelligence paints her all grown up, on a boat on a river, still thinking of tangerine trees and marmalade skies.

Sample lyric: “Cellophane flowers of yellow and green / Towering over your head / Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone.” (Note: While sample lyrics are shown in this article, AI was given the entire lyrics to each song).

The Kinks – Lola

This tune is supposedly about a romantic encounter between a young man and a possible cross-dresser or trans woman he meets in a Soho, London nightclub in 1970. AI captures the subtle androgyny and look of the day perfectly.

Sample lyric: “I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said Lola.”

Dolly Parton – Jolene

With her lyrics describing an intensely good-looking rival, if Dolly didn’t stop Jolene from taking her man, she might mistakenly have turned her man further on to the competition. AI does a wonderful job in putting a face to the competition in question.

Sample lyric: “Your beauty is beyond compare / With flaming locks of auburn hair / With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green / Your smile is like a breath of Spring.”

The Police – Roxanne

Sting wrote this song from the point of view of a man who falls in love with a prostitute. The lyric “Roxanne, put on the red light” appears no less than 24 times in the song. That was enough for AI to paint the protagonist as a wayward woman in red – complete with red light district in the background.

Sample lyric: “Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light / Those days are over / You don’t have to sell your body to the night.”

The Rolling Stones – Angie

While legend has it this is about Angie Bowie who was supposedly in the middle of Mick Jagger and David Bowie’s swinging shenanigans, Stones guitarist (and writer of the song) Keith Richards insists “it was not about any particular person”. Spookily enough, AI comes up with a portrait that looks very similar to Angie Bowie at her glamorous peak in the ’70s.

Sample lyric: “Angie, Angie, when will those clouds all disappear? / Angie, Angie, where will it lead us from here?”

Fleetwood Mac – Rhiannon

While no band name was fed into the generator, the AI software appears to have a decent amount of intelligence on who sang what and how. This interpretation of Rhiannon looks just like Stevie Nicks in the midst of one of her witchy-poo dances.

Sample lyric: “Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night / And wouldn’t you love to love her? / Takes to the sky like a bird in flight / And who will be her lover?”

Michael Jackson – Billie Jean

The lyrics describe a woman who claims that the narrator (MJ) is the father of her newborn son, which he denies. As is the case with much of Michael’s real-life controversies, all the dodgy stuff is moved to the background while the sharp dance moves win our attention instead.

Sample lyric: “She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene / I said don’t mind, but what do you mean, I am the one / Who will dance on the floor in the round?”

Ram Jam – Black Betty

There’s a rather sinister connotation to this song. Despite the lyrics alluding to a two-timing woman, a “black Betty” was the name given to a whip once used in Southern US prisons to keep inmates in line. Astonishingly, AI focuses on the ‘black’ part and depicts an Aretha-type beauty playing electric guitar. It appears technology can be racist, too.

Sample lyric: “She’s always ready, bam-ba-lam / She’s all rock steady, bam-ba-lam / Whoa Black Betty, bam-ba-lam…”

Rod Stewart – Maggie May

This song is about the conflicted emotions of a boy involved in a relationship with an older woman, written from Stewart’s own experience. She was the first person he’d had sex with, and he was just 16. In this pic, she does look kinda suspect.

Sample lyric: “You turned into a lover, and mother, what a lover / You wore me out / All you did was wreck my bed, and in the morning, kick me in the head.”

Tom Jones – Delilah

Even if AI had lifted just the first two lines of this song, it pictures Delilah just as we imagined.

Sample lyric: “I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window / I saw the flickering shadows of love on her blind.”

Neil Diamond – Sweet Caroline

For years the myth was that Diamond’s 1969 song was an ode to the young daughter of late president John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline – and AI keeps this maternal image in mind. That the song was actually about Diamond’s wife at the time – named Marsha (but he couldn’t get Marsha to rhyme) makes you wonder if the software sometimes veers towards fake news.

Sample lyric: “Hands, touching hands / Reaching out, touching me, touching you / Sweet Caroline.”

The Beatles – Hey Jude

Hey Jude was one of the few Beatles compositions written directly about, and for, a personal associate. Paul McCartney wrote the song to John Lennon’s son, Julian (whom he nicknamed ‘Jude’) when John was about to divorce his first wife (and Julian’s mother), Cynthia. That’s where the sad sentiment comes into it, and AI picks up on this bittersweetness.

Sample lyric: “Hey Jude, don’t make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better / Remember to let her under your skin / Then you’ll begin to make it better.”

Madonna – Dear Jessie

Written as a children’s lullaby, albeit with a psychedelic bent, Dear Jessie makes mention of pink elephants several times. AI has obviously latched on to this.

Sample lyric: “Pink elephants and lemonade / Dear Jessie, hear the laughter running through the love parade / Candy kisses and a sunny day / Dear Jessie, see the roses raining on the love parade.”

Lady Gaga – Alejandro

With several male names bandied about in this song, Gaga explained it is about the “purity of my friendships with my gay friends, and how I’ve been unable to find that with a straight man in my life”. AI had a somewhat more traditional narrative in mind.

Sample lyric: “You know that I love you boy / Hot like Mexico, rejoice / At this point I gotta choose / Nothing to lose.”

Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Come On Eileen

Although once believed to have been inspired by a childhood friend with whom singer Kevin Rowland had a romantic – and later sexual – relationship in his teens, there was actually no real Eileen. “In fact she was composite, to make a point about Catholic repression,” said Rowland years later. Either way, AI’s interpretation proves there’s no accounting for taste and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, even in the digital realm.

Sample lyric: “You in that dress / My thoughts, I confess / Verge on dirty.”

Erykah Badu – Tyrone

This was a break-up jam written by Badu based on a punchline about a boyfriend who needs to “call his buddy Tyrone” to help him move out. Suffice to say, love turns to contempt quicker than you can say ‘U-Haul’. AI certainly picks up on the ugly side of the domestic drama.

Sample lyric: “I’m gettin’ tired of your shit / You don’t never buy me nothin’ / See every time you come around / You got to bring Jim, James, Paul, and Tyrone.”

Taylor Swift – Dear John

It is widely assumed (and actually correct) that ‘Dear John’ was written about Taylor’s former flame, musician John Mayer. In response to the song, Mayer said: “I will say as a songwriter that I think it’s kind of cheap songwriting.” Cheap, yes, but it made Swift millions. As for AI’s translation of the song? Perfectly pictured.

Sample lyric: “You paint me a blue sky / And go back and turn it to rain / And I lived in your chess game / But you changed the rules every day.”