Still Into Jesus: Cliff Potts and the AI Rebellion Release a Spiritual Autobiography in Song

By Cliff Potts, CSO, and Editor-in-Chief of WPS News

Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — June 7, 2026 — 12:35 PHST

Independent writer and WPS News editor Cliff Potts has released a new music project titled Still Into Jesus, a reflective eleven-track album combining folk rock, heartland rock, Celtic ballad traditions, atmospheric late-night radio influences, and autobiographical storytelling into what may best be described as a spiritual memoir set to music.

Released under the name Cliff Potts and the AI Rebellion, the album was created using a combination of traditional songwriting, archival memory, conversational development, and AI-assisted music-generation tools. The result is not a conventional praise-and-worship album, nor an attempt to imitate commercial Christian music trends. Instead, Still Into Jesus documents a long personal journey through faith, disillusionment, wandering, grief, aging, and eventual return.

The project arrives during a deeply personal week. The album’s release falls near the first anniversary of the death of Potts’ wife, Luz, whose memory and influence appear repeatedly throughout the record, especially in the closing track, Philippines with Love.

A Different Kind of Christian Album

Rather than presenting certainty or institutional triumph, Still Into Jesus focuses on survival, questioning, and persistence.

The album traces a rough chronological path through Potts’ life: youth-group Christianity in Chicago, work with Jews for Jesus in San Francisco during the early 1980s, disillusionment and separation from organized religion in Texas, years spent exploring alternative spiritual traditions, fascination with late-night paranormal radio culture, eventual return to Catholicism, and finally old age and grief in the Philippines.

Tracks such as Jesus’ Commandos revisit teenage evangelism and working-class youth-group culture in late-1970s Chicago. Broadsides from Haight Street shifts into San Francisco counterculture imagery mixed with evangelical outreach work. I Can’t Play Church Anymore explores religious exhaustion and institutional disappointment through a darker Texas-influenced heartland-rock sound.

Meanwhile, Coast to Coast at Night moves into stranger territory, drawing inspiration from late-night AM radio, paranormal discussion programs, desert highways, metaphysical bookstores, and spiritual wandering during the early 2000s.

The album’s final sequence gradually narrows back toward historical Christianity and sacramental tradition through songs such as Dark Churches, St. Patrick’s in Cedar Rapids, and Faith Without Works.

Old Churches, Old Questions

One of the recurring themes throughout the album is continuity.

Potts, who spent years outside organized religion after leaving evangelical circles, eventually returned to Catholicism after concluding that historical continuity mattered more to him than modern religious branding or denominational fragmentation.

That return is explored most directly in St. Patrick’s in Cedar Rapids, an Irish-influenced folk ballad centered on St. Patrick’s Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The song combines the historical story of St. Patrick himself with Potts’ own return to the Catholic Church after more than five decades away.

Another recurring motif is physical church space itself: candles, rain, stained glass, stone architecture, silence, and old liturgical environments.

In Dark Churches, Potts describes preferring old stone churches precisely because they allow people to sit quietly with grief, doubt, and memory without performance.

AI Tools and Independent Creation

The album also reflects a broader shift in independent media production.

Using AI-assisted music-generation systems, Potts was able to experiment with styles and arrangements that would normally require large production budgets or full bands. The project moves freely between psychedelic folk, heartland rock, southern hymnal folk, atmospheric noir rock, and Celtic ballad traditions.

Rather than replacing songwriting, the AI systems functioned more like collaborative arrangement engines, allowing rapid experimentation with instrumentation, tone, pacing, and emotional atmosphere.

For independent creators working outside commercial systems, the technology represents a significant change. A writer operating from a small home office in the Philippines can now produce complex multi-genre music projects that would previously have required studio infrastructure and professional production teams.

“Jesus Is Still Alright By Me”

The title Still Into Jesus intentionally avoids polished religious language.

It sounds casual, almost humorous, but that is part of the point.

The album does not present faith as perfection or certainty. Instead, it presents Christianity as something that survived years of wandering, anger, grief, and questioning.

That emotional tone reaches its clearest expression in the final moments of Philippines with Love, where the record ends not with a sermon, but with a relaxed musical outro built around a simple closing line:

“Jesus is just alright by me…”

The ending functions less as doctrine than as resolution.

After decades of movement across cities, churches, ideologies, and countries, the album ultimately lands in a quieter place: older, wounded, imperfect, but still believing.

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For more from Cliff Potts, see https://cliffpotts.org