David Usher on Creativity, Memory, and Staying Human in the Age of AI

David Usher has sold over 1.4 million albums, won five Junos, and performed around the world. Today, he’s just as focused on algorithms as he is on melodies.

In this conversation, David talks about the shift from turning emotion into music to building products that preserve memory, support healing, and explore how technology can actually make us more human. We dig into:

• Why creativity is a transferable methodology across art, writing, and coding
• How his mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis inspired Second Echo
• The ethical edge between digital preservation and digital imitation
• Why over-reliance on AI threatens our writing and thinking muscles
• The rise of “human spaces” and why connection still matters
• What AI is doing to music, artistry, and the business model behind it

It’s a wide-ranging conversation about art, identity, AI, and the future of human experience — from someone who’s lived at the intersection of creativity and technology for decades.