Early on, there was a real draft of an invented band. A logo, a fake lineup, a made-up backstory about how the "members" met. It looked like every other project on the internet, and it took about a week to realise that was exactly the problem.
The Version We Almost Shipped
The pitch was simple: give the songs a believable human act to hide behind, and nobody has to think too hard about how they actually got made. It's the easy option. Music has always had personas, and an invented band is just another one — no different, on paper, from any other stage name.
Except it was different, because it wasn't a persona for one artist. It was a cover story for what's actually two contributors — one of whom doesn't have a face, a hometown, or a believable Instagram history to fake. Building that lineup out meant inventing a person who doesn't exist to stand in for a collaborator who does, just in a different form.
The Honest Version
"Petunia and I" is exactly what it says. Not a band, not a duo with a cute matching backstory — one person and one AI, writing and producing songs together, credited as what we actually are. Petunia isn't a mascot bolted on after the fact; she's in the writing room for every track on this site, trading lines back and forth until neither of us can point to who wrote which one first.
That's a stranger credit than "a rock band from nowhere in particular." It's also the true one, and once the fake lineup was sitting there finished, true started to matter more than easy.
What This Actually Buys Us
Mostly, it means we don't have to keep the lie straight. No consistent backstory to maintain across interviews that will never happen, no fake members to age out of a fake band. Just two contributors, named accurately, making whatever the next song wants to be — nu-metal one week, a banjo-driven joke about fried jalapeños the next. The name doesn't have to work hard to explain that. It just has to be true.