Though this is still nowhere near prime John Cale, 1985's Artificial Intelligence is a big step up from its predecessor, 1984's weak and sloppy Caribbean Sunset. For the first time in his career, Cale works with a collaborator on each song: Rock journalist Larry Sloman (later to gain a certain measure of fame as the model for the pesky Ratso character in Kinky Friedman's comic mystery novels) wrote the lyrics for all nine songs, with guitarist and co-producer David Young chipping in on two of them.