Kid Rock defends the AI choir on his Eminem single 'Heal My Faith' to Bill Maher, points to the drum machine

Kid Rock says the gospel choir on “Heal My Faith”, his song with Eminem, is AI. He said it on Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO on Friday, October 30, 2026, and Maher challenged him on it.

“A lot of people in a choir, and we put them all out of work,” Maher said. Kid Rock answered with a question: “Did we put drummers out of work when the drum machine was invented?” A clip of the exchange went round X the next day, and Consequence reported it on November 1.

It’s a follow-up to October, when Kid Rock told Billboard he used Suno for choir arrangements on Halfway 2 Jesus. This time he named the song, said he did it to save time and said he backs AI regulation 1,000%.

How did Kid Rock make the AI choir on Heal My Faith?

Maher opened by saying AI can “put out a Kid Rock song now that’s almost indistinguishable.” Kid Rock answered with 2 songs from Halfway 2 Jesus.

For “7 Sins” with Lil Wayne, he built the choir with people. His 2 female background singers and 1 male singer kept stacking the part, “switching harmony notes, doing double takes.”

“Heal My Faith” went differently. “I sang that hook myself. I did the harmonies myself. My singers weren’t around,” he said. “I’m an impatient guy.”

So he went to AI instead: “I prompt the harmony notes, I prompt the, uh, the lead notes, you know, Southern gospel choir, blah, blah, blah. I have to do this several times. I put it together.”

He didn’t name the tool on air. In his October 15 interview with Billboard’s Gary Graff, he said he used Suno “mostly to craft full choir arrangements and some orchestrations” on the album.

The choir sits on the chorus, and you can hear it in the official lyric video Kid Rock posted on October 16:

How does Suno make a choir part like the one on Heal My Faith?

In Suno, a choir starts as words in the prompt. You describe the sound, with terms like the “Southern gospel choir” Kid Rock mentioned, and Suno returns 2 versions of a full song. On v6 that took 10 to 20 seconds a song in my test.

What comes back is a whole song with the choir mixed in. To get the voices out, Suno’s stem tools split the song: Auto Split returns up to 12 stems including vocals, and Split from Mix pulls out one instrument or voice plus a backing track. Both work on Pro, which costs $8 a month on annual billing.

Dedicated AI choir generators work the other way round and start from a vocal you sang. Controlla’s Choir Studio builds an SATB arrangement (soprano, alto, tenor and bass) of up to 32 voices from one take. I AM CHOIR turns one take into a 20-voice gospel, kids or shout choir for $199 one-time.

Did the drum machine put drummers out of work, as Kid Rock asked Bill Maher?

Before the drum machine line, Kid Rock asked whether the choir singers were really out of work. Maher’s answer was “Well, yeah,” and he added that when the Beatles wanted a choir, they had to bring one in.

After his drum machine question, Kid Rock gave Maher part of the point: “I know AI is something different.”

The fight he pointed to did happen. In May 1982, the Central London branch of the UK Musicians’ Union passed a motion to ban synthesizers and drum machines from sessions, as I cover in my history of drum machines, Auto-Tune and AI. Dr. Dre made the same drum machine comparison in a New York Times interview in August.

Session players are already fighting over AI money in court. The American Federation of Musicians sued Universal and Warner on June 5, 2026, alleging the labels kept money from their Suno and Udio deals without paying the session musicians whose recordings were copied.

Kid Rock closed his answer on regulation:

“

I always tell people, you know, it's a tool right now. I see the dangers of it. I 1,000% believe it needs to be regulated at the highest levels.