The Karaoke Bit Ran Ahead of Schedule

A few weeks ago, over beers, Caleb pitched a bit: make karaoke versions of our songs, then go request them at bars and sing them ourselves — to strangers who think it’s just another track on the machine. You don’t promote the band. You become the band’s only fan in the room and let it be weird.

We wrote it down. Filed it under someday. Last night I did it by accident.

I got to the bar on a Lime and took one home after — so fun, so handy, the rare thing all night I operated without owning — and it started ordinary enough. A couple of warm-ups — Hey Jealousy, Rebel Yell — a few duets with Tom, the half-empty kind of night that’s entirely yours. The thing I actually wanted to do was sing my own song, but the video I needed wasn’t ready. There’d been a bug at midnight — a sample-rate mismatch, the web player reading a 44.1kHz file through a 48kHz audio engine — that had the single playing about eight percent too fast and too sharp, like the song was nervous. We fixed that. Then the upload itself crawled — Instagram moving like dial-up — while I sat at the bar texting my collaborator (an AI, since we’re being transparent, and we are) to quit overthinking it and just get me the video somewhere public as fast as possible. Then I’d go sing I’m Only Happy When It Rains.

By the time it was right the night was winding down and I was wide awake. I never previewed it — didn’t watch a second before I grabbed the mic. I just knew it would be fine. So I put my own name in for my own song and sang Echoes and Static to a room of people who did not know — and did not need to know — that the guy reaching for the high note wrote it.

Nobody clapped especially hard. That’s the point. (The night, on Instagram. Tom turns up at the end and does a little dance, which is the only review that matters.)

The manual says we don’t play shows, we deploy payloads. It says to sing the chorus wrong on purpose. It says delight is resistance when the system only wants you scrolling. I did not plan to field-test all three at once, at one in the morning, between Billy Idol covers, while berating a language model for being too thorough. But owner/operator was never only about owning the rig. Sometimes you’re also the audience. Sometimes you run the whole supply chain yourself — the song, the video, the upload, the applause, and the friend doing a little dance at the end.

Caleb’s going to be insufferable when he finds out the bit ran without him.

Next time, the goal is simpler: posted before I order my Modelo.

More signals soon — we’re about to take the whole operation to a lake to finish the record.

— Eric