All the Portraits

Written by Briyan Frederick Baker and Joe Maki
Published by Blind Mime Music, ASCAP & Jomah Kai Music, ASCAP
© Briyan Frederick Baker and Joseph Alan Maki. All rights reserved.

All the Portraits

We’ve stopped having children, no reason to be blessed
Just to leave them homeless and restless amid all the unrest
We’ve mortgaged a future left to hope clenched in a fist
Trusting influencers gaming the mess the best

Too many friends on my bleak social feeds
Are dire and distraught and spent and diseased
To have worked a whole lifetime to facebook defeat
Into the bleak ether for algorithms to bleed

[chorus]
And they’re sitting for portraits
Surrounded by pitchforks
Not a hair out of place on their empty old heads
Properly proper
Dapperly dapper
All the portraits will burn when the sentence is read

The media circus where the clowns chase the bulls
Who’ve been dozing in the ballroom now that the china can choose (to run away with our spoons)
To take it or leave it or take it again
It doesn’t much matter what becomes of all the old men

[chorus]
Who are sitting for portraits
Surrounded by pitchforks
Not a hair out of place on their empty old heads
Properly proper
Dapperly dapper
All the portraits will burn when the sentence is read

Their cruelty’s folly
Must now somehow be
Exposed at every rally
And then effigy’d

To take it or leave it or take it again
It doesn’t much matter what becomes of all the old men
It’s now or it’s never to upheave and upend
This rickety contraption that holds us to them

[chorus]
While they’re sitting for portraits
Surrounded by pitchforks
Not a hair out of place on their empty old heads
Properly proper
Dapperly dapper
All the portraits will burn when the sentence is read is read)

Here’s a draft of your Substack post about “All the Portraits” — written in your authentic tone and layered with reflection, process, and context.

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All the Portraits

by Briyan Frederick & Joe Maki (Baby Fred)

This one began, as so many of them do, from something small — an instrumental track Joe sent over called “Portrait.” He wasn’t thinking about it as anything more than a standalone piece, just another sound sketch in the mix of his ever-growing archive. But the title caught me, as titles often do.

I fed the track into Suno AI as a cover, letting it bloom outward from Joe’s original framework. There’s something fascinating about watching AI interpret a piece of music — it’s like seeing a reflection of your reflection, warped and refracted until something new emerges.

At first, I wasn’t sure where the words were leading. But as Joe and I talked that week — one of our usual calls where we half talk shop and half just catch up on life — we started circling a theme that had come up more than once: the younger generation, the ones entering their 30s now, who are choosing not to have children. Joe mentioned it in the context of his family, and it resonated.

It got me thinking about legacy, disillusionment, and how generations process the weight of what’s come before them. There’s a quiet rebellion in saying no to continuing the cycle — not out of apathy, but as an act of resistance.

And that’s really what “All the Portraits” became: a protest song — but not a left-versus-right kind of protest. It’s more existential. A callout to the systems and habits that hold us captive, wrapped in irony, dressed up in civility.

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Lyrics in Motion

We’ve stopped having children, no reason to be blessed
Just to leave them homeless and restless amid all the unrest
We’ve mortgaged a future left to hope clenched in a fist
Trusting influencers gaming the mess the best

The song opens with resignation — a generational sigh. It’s not an anti-child stance, but a reflection of a world that’s made the future feel inhospitable. “No reason to be blessed” hits like a bitter twist on the old promise that each generation would do better than the last. That optimism has been repossessed, packaged, and algorithmically sold back to us.

Too many friends on my bleak social feeds
Are dire and distraught and spent and diseased

There’s a self-awareness here, too. We scroll through endless portraits of exhaustion — curated despair, filtered rebellion, cries for help dressed in irony. The song doesn’t mock that — it mourns it.

And then the chorus comes in, bitter and sharp:

And they’re sitting for portraits
Surrounded by pitchforks
Not a hair out of place on their empty old heads
Properly proper, dapperly dapper
All the portraits will burn when the sentence is read

This image — sitting for portraits while the mob gathers — became the heart of the song. The powerful, the complacent, the ones who polished their image for the history books, unaware or unconcerned that history itself might revolt.

It’s both absurd and deadly serious. There’s a hint of gallows humor in “Properly proper, dapperly dapper,” as if the song is smirking at the idea of dignity in decline.

The media circus where the clowns chase the bulls
Who’ve been dozing in the ballroom now that the china can choose

That line came from an image I couldn’t shake — the absurdity of our media landscape, where spectacle trumps substance, and everyone’s in on the joke but no one’s laughing.

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Making the Portrait

The process was like painting with feedback. Joe’s original instrumental laid down a mood — tense, refined, and quietly simmering. Feeding that into Suno opened up a sonic world where structure blurred. I’d generate a version, listen, and rewrite. Then generate again. The lyric evolved alongside the sound — neither one leading, both pushing the other forward.

By the end, the track had that strange AI-meets-human energy I’ve come to love — a ghost in the circuitry, echoing something that feels too familiar to dismiss as synthetic.

In the end, “All the Portraits” isn’t just about politics or generational malaise. It’s about the performance of it all — the way we pose, the way we frame ourselves, the way history insists on freezing us mid-expression.

And maybe it’s a reminder that the frame always burns last.