Two TikTok musicians went viral for doing duets with parakeets and remixing theme songs from 90s cartoons. Between them, they had five million followers and seventeen brand deals. After a while, the numbers stopped rising, and the comment sections filled with: “Cool but empty.” They didn’t know what to do next. They heard about an old composer/ engineer, living above Tim Hortons. He once mixed Ray Charles in a single night, then vanished. They found him tending to a tomato garden. He agreed to meet once a week but no cameras, no phones, no posts. The first session, he played them a recording of a faucet dripping. “Loop that,” he said, “and make it honest.” They blinked. “Honest?” The weeks that followed were stranger: record silence until it breaks something inside you, sing into a pillow and try feeling it in your feet, spend an hour trying to not play anything catchy. One of them rolled his eyes. “This is performance art for morons.” He ceased coming. He released a new track: 600,000 views and forgotten by morning. The other stayed. After months, the mentor handed him a cassette and said, “This was my best work. Never released. Just hold onto it.” He took it home, listened once late at night, no lights on. He didn’t know what to make of it. But something about the gesture stayed with him more than the music. Years later, he made a track using washing machine hum, tape hiss, and a single note stretched like taffy. No hashtags. No hooks. Just something that felt like a question with no need for an answer. It didn’t go viral. One afternoon, after a small show in a bookstore basement, a nervous teenager came up and said, “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I have to try.” He reached into his bag and gave them the cassette. “This might help, might not.” He never saw them again but sometimes wonders if they ever pressed play.