by Vivek Shraya
“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.
No one has time for that shit, Sumi had texted her as Rukmini waited in the venue for the opening acts, her ritual Sumi wanted no part of.
You’re just gonna have another deadline tomorrow, D1! Just come!
LOL I bet you don’t even know who the opening acts are, Sumi teased.
I don’t, but who cares! What’s with this city needing everyone to be vetted?
If Rukmini was going to a show, she wanted to have the beginning-to-end experience, no matter how boring the openers were likely to be, and not just to ensure a return on her investment. She found the whole concert hierarchy distressing, and if she didn’t attend the entire show, she felt she was only contributing to it.
In between texts, Rukmini glanced in the direction of the door, hoping Sumi — or anyone — would show up and help fill out the sparse room. She fretted about low turnout at every show she attended, which her therapist would probably attribute to her fear of abandonment. This is why she could never perform live.
Vetting is my job brown queen emoji. I don’t even want to see The Turn Arounds.
Neither do I. I’m doing this for you!
Very collegial of you, Sumi responded.
Rukmini took off her leather jacket, tying it around her waist. Do you think Marcus will take his shirt off? Rukmini asked, referencing his notorious abs display.
Fuck I hope not. Skinless chicken is not good for my *vegetarian lifestyle*
LOL!
Rukmini headed to the bar and ordered a beer, wishing she had brought one of Puna’s quiche tarts that had been sitting on the kitchen table. But as the first few sips of beer settled inside her, her nerves and hunger settled too. She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and tweeted:
friends don’t make friends see opening acts by themselves
Would Sumi be offended? It wasn’t really a subtweet. They were besties. She put her phone in her plaid shirt pocket. From her new perspective at the back of the room, a healthy crowd had gathered, though she now, thanks to Sumi, pictured everyone as skinless chickens cloaked in winter jackets.
At 9 p.m. sharp, a statuesque brown woman glided onto the stage. Rukmini gasped, recognizing her immediately. She had heard of Neela Devaki and seen photos of her online but hadn’t read any commentary about her music in Toronto Tops or anywhere else. She seemed to be more of a local fixture, a name and a face, than a musician, which was likely why Rukmini hadn’t thought to look up her work.
Neela was wearing a black dress with gold trim that tied around her neck. A train that had to be at least two metres long slithered behind her. With her emerald electric guitar in her hands, she reminded Rukmini of Versace-era Courtney Love. She shook her head, annoyed that this was one of the only references she had for a female frontwoman. The audience applauded mechanically and then resumed their chatter, but Rukmini’s hands were still, clasped in prayer.
Neela stared at the crowd, silent. A minute passed, then another. The crowd began to hush and shift uncomfortably. Rukmini felt certain that Neela was clairvoyant and, like a teacher, was determining her lesson plan according to what she read in the minds of the audience members. Rukmini ducked behind a tall white man, worried that if Neela locked eyes with her, she would know that she had never given her enough attention.
When Neela finally broke her silence, Rukmini gasped again, unprepared for t
he bass of her vocals. Neela’s voice was neither sweet nor raspy, tender nor sensual. Rukmini was reminded of her grandfather’s death, and the two weeks her family had spent beside his hospital bed, waiting for him to pass. His room had smelled sour, despite the growing number of bouquets of not-quite-white-but-not-quite-pink carnations fighting with the boxes of Timbits for table space. Listening to the sound of his laboured breathing and coughing fits made her wish she too would escape her own body. When she later described Neela’s voice to Puna, she said that it sounded like the feeling of watching someone die, like witnessing every leaf on a deciduous tree change colour and fall as autumn transitioned into winter.
Rukmini wept for the duration of Neela’s thirty-minute set that seemed to render the entire stage aglow. Tall Man turned around mid-show and offered her his checkered handkerchief. Given her state, she wasn’t able to refuse it, despite its revolting aftershave scent.
As Neela strode offstage, Rukmini rushed out of the bar, still clutching the soggy handkerchief. She forgot about The Turn Arounds. She forgot about Sumi. She drifted through Chinatown, kicking the fresh snow and humming the melody of Neela’s closing number.
Every song’s about falling in love or breaking up
Nobody’s singing to me
* * *
When Neela learned from her Twitter feed that RUK-MINI had covered her song, she rolled her eyes and ignored the cover. Until she saw she was tagged in a write-up by Sheep & Goat.
Underground Canadian jazz singer @NeelaDevaki’s Every Song reshaped into breathtaking classic by cover singer @RUKMINI
Her spine straightened. Although she rarely agreed with their reviews, even a mention on this music blog could boost a musician’s career. She wasn’t sure if she was more vexed that she was finally being featured because of a cover or that the blog covered covers. She also wished the word “jazz” came with a trigger warning. While her music featured the occasional horn or upright bass, and she did revel in Ella and Nina on rained-in weekends, decoded, “jazz” always read to her as “we aren’t sure how to describe your music because it doesn’t sound white.”
And the word “breathtaking.” When she had released her debut album eight years ago, she had almost forgotten to put on her shoes before she hastened to the indigo Toronto Tops box by her bus stop, straps still unbuckled. She opened the rusted box and breathed in the smell of freshly inked words. After grabbing the third copy from the top, to avoid the ones that had already been flipped through, she knelt and spread the paper out on the sidewalk. When she reached the new releases page, she scanned for her name above the paragraph-long reviews. She almost didn’t see it in the bottom right corner.
Neela Devaki (self-titled) 3.5/5
An interesting combination of sounds shows Neela Devaki is not just a pretty face (as featured on her breathtaking album cover), but a musician to watch.
As she reread the review, she noticed that her fingernails were digging into her cheek. She hadn’t spent four years painstakingly writing songs and saving up to record them to be watched. She then scratched her nails into the paper until there was a hole where her review had been. When she finally stood up, she chucked the paper in the recycling bin on the other side of the bus stop.
Since then, equally vague and inappropriate comments about her appearance coupled with occasionally polite comments about her music had been published, but she dreamed of being known for writing a classic, timeless song. Reading the Sheep & Goat headline, she reminded herself that some musicians — or rather wannabe musicians like cover singers (who were basically karaoke singers) — were more attached to being timely and an immediate sense of connection. But she wanted everlasting. She wanted to write songs that burrowed so innocuously into a listener’s psyche until the melody became not familiar, but family. Blood.
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 mistak
e 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