He started with a notebook he found in one of his three cardboard boxes — a Moleskine he'd bought during his PhD years, mostly blank now except for some early thesis notes and a grocery list from 2021.
He found a pen. He sat on the pallet mattress with his back against the basement wall, the folding screen pushed open so he could see more of the room, and he began to write.
The Beatles — active approximately 1960–1970. Core members: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starr. Studio albums: Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, Beatles for Sale, Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's, Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album, Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, Let It Be. Singles...
He wrote for forty minutes without stopping.
Then he turned the page and started on the Rolling Stones.
Then the Kinks. Then the Who. Then Jimi Hendrix. Then he moved to the seventies: Bowie, Queen, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, Pink Floyd. He wrote song titles, album names, release years when he could remember them, chart positions when he could remember those, the key signatures of songs he knew by heart, snatches of lyrics that came up unbidden and wanted to be written down before he forgot. Though he knew, in a solid and certain way, that he would not forget. He was cataloguing not out of insecurity but out of a need to do something with his hands while his brain processed what it was processing.
The eighties took almost an hour. Michael Jackson alone took fifteen minutes.
By the time he got to the nineties — Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, R.E.M., TLC, Tupac, Biggie, Jay-Z — he had filled thirty-four pages and his hand was cramping. He set the pen down and shook it out and looked at what he'd written.
Thirty-four pages. Single-spaced. Both sides.
And he hadn't touched literature. Or film. Or visual art, philosophy, science, mathematics, architecture. He hadn't touched the ancient Greeks, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment. He hadn't touched Beethoven. He hadn't touched Shakespeare.
He was one person who'd spent three years studying memory.
He had everything.
He sat for a long time without moving, which was unusual for him. He was a person who had always dealt with anxiety through motion — pacing, fidgeting, rearranging things. But right now his body didn't want to move, because his mind was doing something enormous and needed the blood.
The thing he'd always been — the person who remembered too much, who could recite papers and reproduce songs and reconstruct arguments verbatim — that thing, the thing that had made him odd in classrooms and difficult at parties and prone to staying up too late with no productive reason, that thing was the only thing that mattered now.
For the first time in his adult life, his particular kind of mind was not a mild curiosity. It was the difference between everything and nothing.
He thought about what to do with this.
He was not, by nature, a schemer. He was not strategic in the way that people who get rich are strategic. His failed startups could be traced, in part, to a kind of creative impatience — the inability to sit on an idea long enough to plan its execution properly. He wanted to build the thing before he'd thought through why people would use it.
But this was different. This wasn't an idea. This was a library that only he could enter, and the library was on fire — no, wait. The library was not on fire. The library was the only building left standing. Everything else had burned.
What did you do with the only building left standing?
He thought: You open the doors.
He picked up the guitar.
He didn't start with something safe. He thought about starting with something safe — a folk song, something gentle, something that would ease people into the idea of him. But when he sat down with the guitar he felt something shift in his hands, the way a musician does when the right song finds the body before the mind has caught up, and what came out was "Hey Jude."
He played it the way McCartney had written it, which was the way it lived in him: simple at first, just the voice and the chord, building slowly, the harmonics coming in around the third verse, the key change into that final coda that went on for four minutes and felt, if you let it, like being lifted somewhere. He played it in the kitchen, because the kitchen had better acoustics than the basement — the tile backsplash gave the room a slight natural reverb — and he played it twice through, alone, before he picked up his phone.
He had, he estimated, one advantage: the recording on most modern phones was genuinely excellent if you knew what you were doing with it. He propped the phone against the fruit bowl. He angled it so you could see his face and most of the guitar. He fixed his hair in the darkened screen — it needed cutting but there was nothing to be done about that right now. He was wearing a gray t-shirt and the pair of jeans he wore most days.
He sat down with the guitar.
He looked at the camera for a moment. He thought about saying something first — introducing himself, explaining what he was doing, giving people context. He decided against it. The song didn't need biography in front of it.
He started to play.
The first verse landed the way it always did — quietly, almost tentatively, like an invitation that wasn't sure it was welcome. His voice was not a trained voice, but it was a good one: warm in the middle register, honest, the kind of voice that sounded like it was singing specifically to you. When he hit the chorus — take a sad song and make it better — he felt the shift, the way the music was no longer something he was playing but something that was moving through him.
The coda built. He leaned into it. By the end he was nearly shouting, the joyful reckless shouting that the song demanded, the na na na na that repeated and repeated because it was the kind of music that didn't want to stop, that kept finding more.
When he finished, the kitchen was quiet.
He sat for a moment. Then he reached forward and stopped the recording.
He watched it back once, volume low. It was good. Better than he expected, actually — the phone had captured the room's natural warmth, and the performance had a loose, unselfconscious quality that you couldn't plan for; it was just there or it wasn't.
He typed a title in the upload field: Hey Jude.
He typed a description: An old song I found.
He pressed upload.
He put the phone in his pocket and sat at Marcus's kitchen table, watching the view count.
For the first forty minutes, it read: 3 views. Which was him watching it back twice, and one other person who had clicked and immediately left.
Then a comment appeared. The username was @bassheadkyle99 and it read: _nice karaoke bro.
Then: sounds like something my grandpa would hum. hard pass.
Then, from someone called @realtalkmusic — who had, Adrian checked, 4,200 subscribers and a banner that read HONEST MUSIC REVIEWS FOR PEOPLE WITH TASTE — a longer comment: Nothing new here. Generic folk-pop chord progression, serviceable but deeply unexceptional vocals, and the kind of 'raw and honest' kitchen-table aesthetic that ten thousand YouTube musicians use to disguise the total absence of an original idea. If you think this is moving, that says more about how low the bar has gotten than about this video. This is fine background noise. It is not interesting. Next.
And then, beneath it, a reply from @realtalkmusic himself, responding to someone who had already pushed back: I'm not being mean, I'm being honest, which is harder. This guy has been posting for years. This video is his best, apparently. Sometimes the kind thing is to say: find something else.
Adrian read them. He read them carefully, the way he'd learned to read rejection emails: completely, without flinching, because flinching only made it worse.
The view count read: 7.
He put the phone in his pocket.
He went back downstairs. He changed into the other pair of jeans. He lay on the mattress.
He thought about @realtalkmusic with his 4,200 subscribers and his banner that said PEOPLE WITH TASTE.
He thought about the fifty-three Beatles songs sitting in his head. Then the hundreds after that. Then Queen. Bowie. The Stones. Springsteen. Every song that had ever mattered, intact and waiting, the whole cathedral of it.
He thought: Seven views today.
He thought: Just wait.
He fell asleep smiling for the first time in months.