Rukmini jumped from YouTube to Twitter and refreshed five times. When no new tweets appeared in her feed, she inhaled and opened Ableton. Listening to her most recent loop, an arpeggiated beat that she had built to hit progressively harder as it reached the eighth bar, it still sounded too stark. The water whirling through the pipes gave her the idea to add a tremolo effect on every other snare hit to generate a more aqueous flow, but this only enhanced the loop’s hollowness. After adding two shaker sounds and tweaking the compression settings on both, she closed the file and headed upstairs, wistfully humming the song that had been in her head for weeks.
Serenading herself with Lykke Li’s “Sadness Is a Blessing” had become a coping strategy to weather her annual winter depression. At the grocery store earlier that week, the song had echoed in her mind as she had sorted through the selection of pruned fruit. In frustration, she had picked up a bruised banana and whisper-sung to it, Sadness is my boyfriend. She closed her eyes and waited for her words to transform the produce section into a flash mob like the ones she had seen in YouTube videos, where shoppers ripped off their parkas, kicked off their boots and burst through the doors of the store to discover that their dancing had wondrously spawned summer. Instead, a man had tapped her shoulder, pulling her out of her reverie, and offered, “I could be your boyfriend?”
She paused at the top stair and turned around. At her desk, she opened her drawer, pushed aside the spare cables and pulled out the mic she had purchased to record live snaps and claps. After she set up the mic stand and adjusted it to her height, she put on the headphones Puna had gifted her and spoke into the mic. “Testing, testing” felt like posturing, so instead she talked about what she had eaten for breakfast — “Puna’s lemon ricotta pancakes, maple syrup, peppermint tea.” Once she saw the green levels in Ableton oscillate in response to her voice, she stopped talking and replayed the drum loop she had been working on. Then she hit record and belted my wounded rhymes make silent cries tonight like she had wanted to in the grocery store. Less than an hour later, she finished a rough mix.
“Is that you?”
“Oh my god, Puna! You scared the shit out of me! How long have you been standing there?” Rukmini quickly turned off the Lykke Li cover, regretting that she had played it through her monitors instead of listening on her headphones.
“I didn’t know you could sing like that!” Puna exclaimed.
“I can’t sing.”
“What do you call that then?” Puna pointed at the computer, as though Rukmini’s vocals had emerged from the machine. An accurate assessment.
“Filler? The drums needed something.”
“Your voice is something. People need to hear this.” Puna sat down on the green wooden chair that had been left in the basement by the previous tenant and swayed.
“You think?” Rukmini was distracted by the chair, which was squeaking in time with Puna’s giddy rocking.
“Definitely! Upload it to YouTube right now!”
“Stop it. Aren’t I too old to be a YouTube cover singer?” Puna had previously made fun of her late discovery of and obsession with YouTube.
“Oh, whatever. I think Susan Boyle pretty much destroyed the idea that anyone is too old to sing.”
“Hey! My name is not Susan,” Rukmini joked.
After Puna went back upstairs, Rukmini took a sip of her beer and opened up Photo Booth. She recorded a dimly lit video of her lip syncing her cover, rejecting the high production values of other split-screen cover videos she had seen. She made eye contact with the camera to prevent herself from looking at her reflection onscreen and laughing and didn’t watch the video after she finished recording the song.
“Fuck it,” she shrugged, and clicked Upload.
* * *
Neela loathed cover songs. She was an artist, not a parrot. Why would she hide behind someone else’s lyrics when she could sing her own? She had also never heard a cover that sounded better than the original. Covers only made her crave the original. Was there a word for art that made her long for that which came before — besides “remake,” “throwback” or “sequel”?
When “Paper Planes” had been ubiquitous in 2007, a drunk man had yelled, “Do you know any M.I.A.?” in the middle of her set at the Horseshoe Tavern.
“Someone get that jerk out of here,” she had commanded.
Her words had silenced the crowd — an applause-worthy feat in any bar. Some of the audience members left, but as she picked up her song, she was pleased to have weeded out anyone who thought she should stoop so low as to sing someone else’s song. They didn’t deserve her.
Two weeks after North by Northeast, Neela logged into Twitter to post her daily dream recap:
I dreamt I was a serif font running away from someone trying to cut off my serifs. It was Wes Anderson #FantasticMrFont #Futura
Then she noticed the glowing number twenty-two beside the bell icon and muttered, “Really?”
Most of her tweets didn’t make it to double digit recognition. Her most popular tweet had been a photo of her eating lasagna onstage at a show at the Rivoli. The day after her birthday, her keyboard player Kasi had pulled a slice of lasagna out from behind her setup and lit the candle she had jammed into it.
After whispering, “I know you hate cake. Happy birthday, Neels,” in her ear, Kasi had grabbed Neela’s mic and sung “Happy Birthday,” encouraging the audience to join in by waving her free hand from side to side like a conductor. Being celebrated with cold but glowing pasta had made agreeing to opening for The Turn Arounds worthwhile, even though she didn’t care for their merry folk rock (how many songs with “na na na” or “oh oh oh” choruses could one band get away with?) or for their ostentatious lead singer, Marcus Young.
She clicked on the bell and scrolled through the latest tweets she had been tagged in:
Love this cover! @RUKMINI & @NeelaDevaki #DreamTeam
can’t stop listening this song is literally #EverySong #OnRepeat @rukmini @NeelaDevaki
Apparently, the woman from the panel had covered Neela’s song.
* * *
The first time Rukmini saw Neela perform live, she had been opening for The Turn Arounds at the Rivoli, a few months before North by Northeast. Tucked behind a restaurant, the venue was a generic music bar, save for the exposed brick walls: a narrow hall that smelled like prom, leading to an anti-climactic black block for a stage. Why was it never a red or fire-orange stage? Why was there never a dramatic backdrop with painted cheetahs or robots or even a floral mural? Maybe Torontonians would be more likely to check out live music if some effort was invested in creating ambience.