As her eyes skimmed over the article, she shuddered at the words “electro treatment.” If anything, she had intended for “Every Song” to have a country sound and still regretted not searching for a pedal steel guitarist because she had assumed she wouldn’t be able to find a female musician. Imagining her lyrics washed over with predictable synths, she refused to click Play. When would musicians get tired of referencing the eighties? What had happened from 2000 onward to instill an insecurity so insurmountable that it halted the exploration of new sounds? Why had nostalgia become a genre in and of itself?
Neela had laboured to create a body of work that was singular. When listeners heard a Neela Devaki album, they would think, This sounds like nothing I have heard before. She recalled lying on the discoloured carpet of the basement apartment she had been sharing in Kensington, gripping her electric guitar with pride when she had finished composing “Every Song.” She knew she had just written one of her best songs.
I got your hair caught in my teeth again
I don’t want to spit it out
The reviews she imagined would declare:
These opening lines are Devaki’s finest lyrics yet, not just because of their physicality and sensuality, but because of their repulsiveness.
This is the closest Neela Devaki has come to expressing love in a song, that feeling of urgent and ugly desire.
But there was a price to pay for being distinct in a field named popular. She understood that her job was to write songs that hooked, that transformed listeners into addicts, and she defied her duties at her own peril. So when no such insightful reviews were ever written, she managed her disappointment in her usual manner: she wrote another song.
Now, eight years later, journalists were finally emailing her questions about “Every Song” — RUK-MINI’s cover of it.
What did you think when you heard the track?
How do you feel about the enormous response the cover has received?
She wasn’t sure how to answer these questions diplomatically and deleted the messages. The song was hers, and these reporters had the audacity to ask her to comment on a rendering. Would a painter be expected to comment enthusiastically on a forgery? She opened a blank Word document and compiled a list of questions she would prefer to be asked:
What part of “Every Song” did you write first — the verses, the chorus or the bridge?
How did you get your guitar tone?
Why was the song never released as a single?
She wished she could as easily delete the pressure that she felt to retweet RUK-MINI’s cover, or one of the many music blog posts that had preceded this Sheep & Goat review. As her mouse hovered over the retweet symbol, she was pained by how similar it was to the recycle symbol. She wondered if “Every Song” had been better off being mostly undiscovered, discarded in the vast landfill of songs that were never heard, instead of being mined for its parts. She wanted a way to click on just half of the button, the part with the arrow going down, to somehow suppress the circulation of the cover. A detweet.
Instead, she grudgingly typed RUK-MINI in the Twitter search box. 34K followers. She swallowed and opened her own profile in a new tab. 2,487 followers. She examined her recent tweets — had she been using the platform wrong?
What is the word for the feeling of dipping your feet in a body of water?
Was the standardization of pitch to A440 just another form of white supremacy?
Hot date with Martin Goodman trail tomorrow morning.
Had she not tweeted enough memes or travel photos? Was her grammar too precise? Did she not use caps lock enough? She composed a tweet — u suck lol stop trying to be me LMAO — smirked, then deleted it.
She looked out her window, admiring the patches of white daisies shooting out around the edges of the front lawn. She had always wanted to live on a street where the trees on either side of the road reached for each other and touched in the middle, creating a bridge of leaves and branches that she sometimes imagined crossing from her top-floor apartment like a high-wire artist. She also appreciated that her banana-coloured house stood out on the street like a mistake that no one had bothered to correct.
Now calmer, she flipped back to RUK-MINI’s Twitter page. Her bio read, covers culture and songs but never my eyes. In her profile photo, her eyelids were kohl-smudged and her left eyebrow was cocked. Then Neela noted the light-grey declaration: Follows you.
Below this, the pinned tweet:
was so inspired after meeting my fave @NeelaDevaki last week. had to cover “every song.” this song is every thing xoxo
How had Neela not seen this tweet before? Her throat relaxed and so did her fingers on her mouse. She clicked the retweet symbol to prove she could be equally generous.
Then the cursor continued to move on its own and clicked Follow.
* * *
Neela hoped that Rukmini would cancel.
As she travelled west on the lethargic Queen streetcar, Neela repeatedly checked Twitter, awaiting a last-minute message. She intermittently checked the time on her phone and eventually tweeted:
“Apathy”: the Queen streetcar’s relationship to your schedule.
When she had clicked on the envelope icon at the top of her Twitter page the week before, she was surprised to discover Rukmini had sent her a direct message and suggested meeting up. Then she remembered that asking someone out for coffee in this city was the equivalent to asking, “How are you?” in passing, never waiting for the response. No one was actually interested in sitting across from a relative stranger, squirming through the awkward process of getting to know a new adult. She had replied plainly, “We should,” assuming Rukmini wouldn’t respond, but she promptly did with several dates and times when she was available, closing her message with
love Rukmini
Rukmini’s use of the unstylized version of her name puzzled Neela. It seemed informal, like they were already friends. But she was more disturbed by Rukmini’s use of “love,” her ability to grant this word, saturated with monumental meaning, to a stranger.
Regretting her decision to meet Rukmini and irritated by the irreverence of twenty-somethings, she considered not showing up. She pictured Rukmini waiting for her at Grapefruit Moon, the café on Bathurst she had suggested. Rukmini would look at her phone, avoiding her server’s pitying look and refreshing her inbox, checking for a message that would not arrive. At first, Rukmini would worry, wondering if something dreadful had happened to Neela. Eventually Rukmini’s paranoia would turn on her, and she would fret that she had somehow been offensive or too forward, that maybe she should have used the word “dear” as a greeting rather than “hey” and definitely should not have signed off with “love.”
When Neela arrived at Grapefruit Moon on time, she felt claustrophobic from its congested layout of rustic tables crammed together. If she left immediately, Rukmini would never know she had been there. As she backed towards the door, she heard, “Fuck!” She had stepped on someone.