Inside the Music Industry’s High-Stakes A.I. Experiments

Grainge lives and works in Los Angeles, but West Coast fitness culture has yet to make a convert of him. He neither skis nor golfs, although he sometimes drives the cart for other golfers, doing business between holes. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and, as for drugs, “I panic when I have to take an aspirin,” he has said. He is a family man whose first wife, Samantha Berg, suffered complications while giving birth to their son, Elliot, in 1993, and spent the remaining years of her life in a coma—a profound loss that has colored his world view as much as any professional experience. In March, 2020, Grainge was among the first wave of people in L.A. to contract COVID, and he nearly died, spending eighteen days on a ventilator. After recovering, he told me in his office last November, he had survivor’s guilt. “Why me?” he kept asking himself.