Ottawa-area residents in Smiths Falls, about an hour southwest of the capital, are finding an unusual way to process a tragedy: a tribute song written with the help of artificial intelligence.
Three men found dead
Robbie Thomson, 34, and two more men, Robert Lambert, 75, and Lawrence Bertrim, 42, went missing and were later found dead on the same property near Smiths Falls. The deaths prompted a wave of grief in the small eastern Ontario community, and residents have been looking for ways to honour the three men.
A Brockville metalworker turns to AI
One of those ways came from Rob Carr, who has lived in Smiths Falls for 15 years and makes his living running a cold saw at a metal works in nearby Brockville, Ontario. Carr wrote a tribute song for the men and turned to Suno, a popular web-based AI music generator, to produce it.
The result, titled "Kelly-Jordan Road," leans heavily on local detail. Its lyrics name specific places that would be familiar to anyone from the area, including Lanark, Montague, Church Street, and the Rideau River, grounding the tribute firmly in the geography the three men called home.
"Many tears have been shed"
The song has resonated widely in the community. Tabatha Thomson, Robbie Thomson's sister, said the tribute has moved people deeply. "This has touched many of us," she said, adding that "many tears have been shed over this beautiful tribute."
A fourth name gets added
The song's first version did not mention a fourth man connected to the case, 34-year-old Steven Tate, who died under suspicious circumstances. When members of a local Facebook group pointed out the omission, Carr went back and created a new version of the song that included Tate, expanding the tribute to reflect the fuller scope of the community's loss.
Does it matter that it's AI?
The question hanging over all of this, and the one that gives the story its edge, is whether it matters that the song came out of an AI tool rather than a guitar and a notebook. So far, the answer from Smiths Falls appears to be no. The song's AI origins have made little difference in how it has been received or in its emotional impact on the people listening to it. For a community working through a heavy loss, the specificity of the lyrics and the willingness to revise them when a name was missing seem to have mattered more than how the music itself was made.
What led here
Smiths Falls has been a difficult place lately. Just days before this story, ottown's earlier report covered the local food bank being forced to cut off service to two seniors' residences amid a growing food insecurity crisis in the same community. The tribute song and the food bank strain both point to a small town leaning on itself, whether through grief or need, at a moment when it has little outside support to fall back on.
For Ottawa-area residents who may not have known Thomson, Lambert, Bertrim, or Tate personally, the story is a reminder of how close Smiths Falls sits to the capital, and how a tragedy there ripples through the wider region.
Sources: Ottawa Citizen (via Yahoo News Canada)
