THE REAL STORY
I co-wrote "Smooth" in a weekend.
The riff Carlos Santana plays on the record is the one I wrote at the keys; Rob Thomas rewrote my melody and lyrics and sang lead. It spent twelve weeks at number one and became one of the biggest songs in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 — the last number-one of the 1990s and the first of the 2000s, the only song ever to land on two decade-end charts.
Before it, I co-wrote "Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder)" with Maxwell — one of the songs that opened the door for neo-soul. After it, "Más y Más" with Draco Rosa, later remade with Ricky Martin. I produced records in Brazil, scored a documentary that premiered at Sundance, and founded the acid jazz group Groove Collective.
Then my mother had a stroke. I stopped almost everything to take care of her — years of it. The family house had to be sold. And by then the writing was on the wall anyway: everyone was selling their catalogs — Springsteen, Dylan, Queen, Ryan Tedder, Mark Ronson — because we all knew what AI was about to do, and the smart move was to take the money, invest it, and build a good life. So in 2019 I sold mine: 209 songs, including "Smooth" and "Ascension," to Hipgnosis. I was ready for the next chapter.
Three years later, something unexpected happened.
Because I was nomadic at the time, I'd moved my proceeds into crypto, and it was doing very well. Early on I stored the passkey in LastPass — a password manager, software that locks all your logins and secret keys behind one master password, encrypted so tightly it's supposed to be hack-proof. LastPass was one of the biggest.
Then I thought I'd deleted that passkey. I hadn't. A second copy was still sitting in there, and I never caught it. You should never keep crypto keys in a vault like that, because a password manager is exactly the kind of single, high-value target attackers go after — one breach, and everything inside is exposed at once. I knew better. Didn't matter.
In 2022, LastPass was breached — one of the most far-reaching cyberattacks in recent history, an unprecedented event now tied to an estimated $250 million in stolen crypto and a massive class-action suit still moving through the courts. I was one of the people caught in it. The hack took most of what I had. A small mistake, a catastrophic outcome — and the whole next stage of my life, the new industries and the new financial future I'd been building toward, stopped before it ever started.
But I'm in good company. Willie Nelson lost everything to the IRS and toured his way back. Billy Joel found out his manager had quietly walked off with tens of millions. Leonard Cohen came down from a monastery to discover his accounts emptied, then went back on the road at 73 and made the best work of his late career. Tom Petty's house burned to the ground with nearly everything he owned inside. Losing the fortune, it turns out, is practically a rite of passage in this business. They all kept writing. They all kept playing. The work was what survived, because the work was who they were.
It's in the DNA. My father, Bonia Shur, survived the Nazi invasion of Latvia and fought them on the front lines as a soldier in the Russian army, then found refuge in Israel and spent his life writing liturgical music now sung in synagogues worldwide. My mother, Fanchon Shur — Ohio Women's Hall of Fame, movement artist and choreographer — has spent hers turning rage, loss, and trauma into something liberating. I'm the son of a man who survived and a woman who makes art out of suffering.
I got into other things — trading, investing — and I still do them. I'm good at them. But they're not me. I'm a music man, true and true.
That's who I am.
AI is going to generate a tremendous amount of audio in the years ahead. Most of it will be fine. None of it will write the next "Smooth," because the next "Smooth" comes from a person in a room with something to say and the craft to make it sound inevitable twenty-five years later. If music is in your DNA — if it's who you are — then no matter what AI does, real music will still have a place in this world.