We developed a (metaphorical) rhythm that worked for us over the next week or two. I’d work on music production on my days off and after work, and Naya would practice singing and dancing when I was at work. I managed to write new lyrics, somehow. And I think they might have been better than my old lyrics.

When Naya read them over, she asked, in a slow and deliberate cadence clearly intended to keep me from getting pissed off at her, “when I’m trying to learn something new, I take in a lot of input related to what I’m attempting to do. Have you considered reading more poetry and studying the lyrics of other writers to try and improve your lyrics?”

“You could’ve just told me I suck,” I grumbled. I fought the urge to throw the lyrics notebook directly out of my bedroom window and onto the pavement eleven stories below.

“You don’t suck,” Naya said patiently. “But you may improve if you increase your input.”

So I sucked it up and increased my dang input. I went back to the dang library, which I haven’t been to since their rental Syren disappointed me so deeply a million years ago, and checked out a bunch of random books that seemed like they might help me on my songwriting journey. Some printed collections of famous musician’s lyrics, but also their poems that were never turned into songs. Poems of other writers I’d vaguely heard of or remembered not hating in high school. A nonfiction book on marine life, and one on oceanography that was mostly pictures because I wasn’t sure I would understand the fancy scientific terminology but I could probably use it for song titles. I put a book in my backpack every day I went to work and read it during slow periods on register and on my break. I hadn’t read this many books since I was in school. I probably didn’t even read this many books when I was in school, honestly.

I listened to a lot of musicians whose lyrics I personally liked, and thought about how they came up with them. I even tried going back to the Russian and Ukrainian music my parents played at home when I was growing up, and translating those words in my head to English to figure out how I could write something like that. I got really into old musicians from before my mom was born who died when they were barely my age, like Yanka and Viktor Tsoi. I wondered how they got to be so good so fast, and why it seemed so much harder for me to do the same.

And I went back into my own past, too. Journaling. Trying to remember what I was thinking about when I made my instrumental songs way back when. What even inspired “After Rain, The Wet Leaves”? Why on Earth did I call it that? Probably because I thought it sounded deep or something. Although it did kind of sound like an empty night street after a big rain storm. In my opinion.

To Naya’s probable annoyance, my next song turned out to be totally unrelated to Ocean: an RnB-influenced kind of club banger where she only had two lines that I looped four or five times. It sounded really good, but was not the direction my Syren/talent manager was apparently hoping I’d go into. She didn’t say anything about it and sang those two lines as perfectly as always, but I could tell she wasn’t pleased with it. Unless I was just anthropomorphizing her reactions again.

“Is there anything I can do to help you?” Naya asked one morning, all bright and hopeful. “I can try posting on social media for you. To help promote our songs.”

“Uh. I don’t think that’s a good idea.” I wasn’t sure Naya could imitate my posting style convincingly, and since most Syrens did not run their own social media people would assume I was pretending to post as her, like people who ran PicShare profiles for their pets.

It had become increasingly clear to both of us that Naya, despite being more intelligent than most other Syrens, was still designed for the narrow purposes of a Syren, and thus incapable of many things that humans took for granted. Deliberately so. If I wanted someone who could help out around the house or make dinner occasionally, I would have to purchase a Hudson, or one of the cheaper Helper bots with less functionality.

With nothing else to do while waiting for me to produce lyrics for her to sing (since the Cupid disguise bits I finally got around to ordering were taking forever to ship), Naya started borrowing my library books and trying to read them “the human way”, by holding them in her hands and scanning the text with her eyes instead of downloading the information from the cloud. I wondered if it was more fun for her that way. I tried talking about the contents with her, but it was difficult. I think she might have been programmed not to disagree with me. I remembered our conversation when she’d just arrived, how carefully she’d worded her opinion on the album.

“What was your favorite song in this lyric collection?” I asked once. I was lying on my bed, reading. The closet door was open, waiting for me to step into it and get to work for real. But my lyrics notebook still didn’t have anything promising in it.

She tilted her head to one side. “They were all great! What was your favorite?”

“You go first.”

She tilted her head to the other side. “I don’t know how to rank them. I did look up recordings of this singer performing the songs live, however, and the one song I wanted to listen to a second time was ‘Loving You In The Spring.’ I think... I found the melody pleasing, when performed.”

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“Oh. I haven’t listened to that one yet, I’ve only heard the most popular songs from this singer before.”

“I can sing it for you!” Naya said eagerly, and opened her mouth.

“Volume below 30%,” I said quickly, glancing around. “We don’t want a noise complaint.”

She sang it, presumably repeating each note exactly how she heard it in the video. It was an old, old song, and sounded like it too, a crackling effect coming over Naya’s usually clean high notes. Like something from a black and white movie I haven’t watched. Naya performed it while strolling around my bedroom, despite the minimal amount of strolling space it offered. I guess that was how the singer performed it in that video.

“Loving you in winter is as easy as the snow... Loving you in summer, well, the heat is sure to grow... Loving you in autumn is refreshing like the breeze, and loving you in spring... is... just as spring should be.”

We were well into the height of summer, by this point in the year. But something about the way Naya sang it made it feel true.

“What if we record a cover of that and put it up online?” It really was a good rendition.

“Hm,” Naya said. “It seems pretty different from the kind of music you make...”

“I can remix it to make it sound more modern. Come on, it’ll be fun!” Maybe that was what I needed to get out of my slump. “Maybe I need to explore a new direction for a bit. I could have an electroswing phase. Many respectable artists have electroswing phases.”

Naya gave me a very human look of exasperation. “You don’t even like electroswing.”

“Okay, no electroswing. But I want to try doing a cover.” I stepped closer to her to try and be more convincing. “I want to hear you sing it again.”

Naya then... Well, she didn’t blush, but I could hear the soft whirring of the ventilators under her arms, like when she was performing under hot stage lights. Huh.

She says, in a voice still at 30% volume as instructed, “If that’s what you want, then we can try it.”

The whirring got louder. Maybe I should turn my thermostat lower. I kept it at 76 in the summer, but computers prefer colder temperatures, right? There was a box fan in my studio-closet to keep my production stuff from melting down, but I didn’t realize Naya might also need that. “Do you want me to turn the air conditioner up for you?”

She blinked. The whirring slowed. “That might actually be helpful, yes. The temperature inside here isn’t high enough to damage me, but I do function better between 65 and 72 degrees Fahrenheit.”

“Gotcha, I’ll keep that in mind.” And start wearing a hoodie around the house, I guess.

So I recorded Naya singing Loving You In Spring, the way she wanted to sing it, and then arranged instrumentals around her voice. Which was the opposite of my usual process of doing the instrumentals first and then slapping the voice on top after. I kept it pretty spare, to let her shine. Some piano, a bassline, both dropping out on the bridge and the lead-in to the final chorus before coming back with an extra flourish.

It was a lot easier to cover a song that already existed than to make up a totally new song from scratch, to the surprise of probably nobody. We had it uploaded on SoundShare as a cover the next day, and then I took one of the photos of Naya behind the curtain from the Sparkplug and made a simple video of it to crosspost on VidShare too. I was not much of a video editor, but even I could use the basic cut and clip tools in the VidShare app.

Most of the popular Syren producers that uploaded music videos worked with visual artists and animators to create unique and distinctive videos for their songs. If I had the money, I’d commission someone to draw music videos for me. But it would be really lucky if my songs just happened to move a talented illustrator enough that they’d illustrate for me for free… Someone who happened to perfectly see my visions… If only…

Anyway, since I didn’t have one of those, I cut some stock footage of English gardens together with random screensaver shapes and called it a day.

The cover did better than my original music, which was a bit of a surprise since the original song was older than both of my parents and not even the most popular number in its creator’s catalog. But I saw Mixera, those two people I met at the afterparty, shared it on their feeds, and that gave it a boost.

I sent them a DM. “Hey! Thanks for sharing my new cover.”

“Oh ya ofc!- Sera” I got back. “What a fun way to modernize something so classic!”

I stared at the blinking DM window, realizing something obvious.

If I’m having trouble making music… I should ask other musicians for advice.

So I sent another DM. “I’ve been having a hard time coming up with lyrics for original songs recently, so I’ve been doing more research into old music and stuff like that haha”

“Oh omg that happens to EVERYONE - mx”

“Especially like right after you finish A Song, you gotta have a regeneration period for a bit before you can make new songs! - mx”

“For us, I write the lyrics and Sera does the mixing, partly bc that’s what each of our strengths are and partly bc it’s funnier that way lol - mx”

“You live in town, right? Do you want to get coffee and chat about this in person? Jenni’s Joe downtown is really good -mx”

My heart pounded excitedly. Yes. This will definitely solve literally every problem I have ever had in my life. “Absolutely! I’m free on Tuesdays!”

We made plans to meet on Tuesday afternoon. According to Maps, Jenni’s Joe was an hour and half on the subway from my place uptown. But it was a small price to pay for a constructive coffee chat that would fix everything wrong with me and my ability to write a goddamn song.

“I’m going out on Tuesday,” I announced to my robots. “And I’m not going to come back until I have a new song written.”

My robots stared back at me with mild concern. “Good luck,” said Naya.

“Even if you don't have a new song written by the end of the day, can you still come back here to sleep Tuesday night?” Angie asked. “You have work on Wednesday.”