A few people have asked some version of the same question: who's actually singing? The name on most of the songs says "captainfrasca." The name on the About page says David van Coolwijk. Here's the honest answer, and then the harder, more personal one underneath it.
Two names, one writer
Captain Frasca is the voice — the AI voice I use to sing the songs on this station. It's a name, not a person. When you hear a track credited to captainfrasca, that's this AI voice performing something I wrote. David van Coolwijk is me — the actual person who writes every lyric and, often, the melody and chords too, and who uses his own name specifically for the tracks I sing myself, released separately.
So the split isn't about who owns a song or who deserves credit for writing it — I write all of it, either way. It's simply about voice. Captain Frasca sings when I currently can't. That's the whole explanation, and I'd rather just say it plainly than let people guess.
The part that's harder to explain in one sentence
I've written before about the burnout that led to using an AI voice in the first place. What I haven't really talked about is what the writing itself has actually been doing for me this whole time — not the performing, not the production, the writing.
Burnout doesn't always announce itself as sadness. A lot of the time it's just static — a kind of low, constant noise where you can't tell what you're feeling, only that something is off and it won't turn down. I've spent a lot of days like that. Days where naming the feeling out loud felt impossible, but writing it into a verse, somehow, didn't.
That's become the actual function songwriting serves for me now. It's not performance and it's not really even communication, not at first. It's a place to put something down before it curdles into something worse. A line in a song can hold a feeling I couldn't otherwise say to another person, or sometimes even fully admit to myself, until I saw it written out in front of me.
The crown jewel
If there's one song that says this better than I can explain it, it's I Don't Know Me Sometimes. I wrote it during the worst stretch of my burnout, when I genuinely didn't recognize the person in the mirror some mornings. It's the most honest thing I've ever written, and it exists in two forms — sung by me on my own site, and sung by Captain Frasca here — which, in a strange way, feels like exactly the right way for that particular song to live: one version from before I lost my voice, one from after.
I don't think writing fixes burnout. It didn't fix mine. But it gave the static somewhere to go, instead of just sitting in my chest getting louder. If you've ever had a feeling you couldn't say out loud until you wrote it down first, you already know exactly what I mean.