I saw a YouTube video (YouTube had just been invented) of a bunch of kids (in 2006 these were people my age, ie, 16-18) really enthusiastically busking in a mall and drawing a huge crowd. The performance went lightly viral (before viral meant 'being on the regular TV news that evening'), to the extent that they ended up releasing a little self-produced album. I found the youtube performance charming enough and I had the spare change from my Wal-Mart job at the time and I also had enough experience supporting my friends' crackpot band projects so I was like "why not."
So I buy the album, it's all right but doesn't really match the magic of the YouTube clip, that's fine, whatever, the future is ahead of us, time passes. I never hear about the band again.
In late 2011 I am in my first semester of grad school and receive an unexpected email from a woman I've never heard of, addressed to me personally and with a little intro line (visible in the Gmail preview) that suggests some kind of past personal connection. I open it up, and this reveals the full subject line, which states that she was a musician in the band described above and she is insisting this is not spam.
However, it is very much spam, technically. It turns out she's now trying to make it as a solo musician and the email is clearly a kind of form thing plugging her upcoming album, her website, and socials, and an error in the HTML formatting makes it clear she used some sort of macro to personally address each email and vary the intro lines on send, and she's just mass-mailing this to everyone who purchased her high school band's album years before.
It's sort of annoying, sort of weird, but also at the time I'm just like "Well, work with what you got, best of luck" and I forget about it for a while.
In the summer of 2020 I have a lot of time to dig through massive mounds of detritus I have slowly collected throughout my life and choose some of it to throw away. In this process, I discover my old CD album from high school/college, and wistfully page through it, listening to "Kazaa Mix 7" and contemplating the vast and multifarious forces of cosmic billiards that were operating even back in the good old days of me putting Eminem next to Dire Straits next to a fucking chocobo song remix, forces that had inexorably worked to smash themselves together into the nightmare society and situation now before us.
And then I find that band's CD, and I remember that weird email, and I think, "You know, whatever happened to her? Did her solo career pan out?" So I check the liner notes and get her name, pull up Google, type her name in and discovered that
