They Stole My Songs

Chapter 13

Scarlett's pre-order launch for her new album was streamed from the Sterling Records lobby, in front of the fountain. I watched it from my kitchen table, my laptop propped against an empty mug. Two hundred thousand people waited in the chat. A countdown clock ticked down in the corner of the screen. A host in a grey suit introduced the broadcast with rehearsed cheer, gesturing toward Scarlett, who sat on a white stool with an acoustic guitarist beside her. The guitarist had clearly been told that whatever happened, he was not to stop smiling.

Behind the camera rig stood the teleprompter. It was supposed to keep the performance smooth and controlled. But some tired, underpaid assistant on Sterling's content team had loaded the wrong file into the system.

It was not the released lyric sheet for "Glass Halo." It was mine.

The prompter carried the original notebook version of "Glass Halo," the bridge as I had written it at 5:40 in the morning before Dylan's pencil got to it. That was before the second verse was scrubbed for radio and replaced with something safer and emptier. The released record says: and I let the light go out. Every copy on Earth says that. Streaming, the lyric sites, the tour book, the karaoke track in Nashville.

My notebook says: and I kept your coat in the hall closet all winter.

That line had never been released, never been printed, never been sung in public. It lived on page 214 of a notebook Sterling had pried out of my desk, on a dead phone in a safe-deposit box — and, since Burbank, in the slideshow of my pages that had been leaking out of that rehearsal hall one screenshot at a time.

Scarlett read what was put in front of her. That was her discipline: she read whatever text was placed before her, projecting each syllable clearly, without once asking whose work it was.

"and I kept your coat in the hall closet all winter"

She sang the line before her mind caught up with her mouth. The hitch arrived in the middle of the phrase: a half-second pause, followed by an involuntary turn of her head toward the edge of the frame. Dylan Cross stood just beyond the lighting rig, his posture locked, staring at the prompter screen. The acoustic guitarist never dropped the tempo, picking through the chords with his smile fixed in place.

On the right side of my display, the chat column surged into a blur:

THAT'S NOT THE LYRICS

that's not on the album??

WHERE IS THAT LINE FROM

she just sang the ORIGINAL

RECEPTIONIST'S VERSION. THAT'S THE NOTEBOOK LINE.

The internet already knew my notebooks by heart. The Silver Lake video, the demo session on the sponsor's screen in Burbank, and a hundred circulating freeze-frames of my dated pages had been studied online for days. Two hundred thousand people recognized an unreleased line instantly.

Dylan crossed into the shot. The wide lens caught the sleeve of his tailored jacket as his right arm reached behind the teleprompter stand. For a single second his fingers hovered over the connections, calculating the public view, compressing a whole career in one gesture.

He pulled the cable.

The video screen cut to black mid-chorus. On my kitchen table, the sound cut out. Pulling the cable in front of two hundred thousand witnesses did not take the words back. The screenshots were already taken, and the clip was circulating across social feeds before Dylan could leave the lobby floor.

The next morning, Elena Ruiz watched the captured recording on her desk monitor. She played the final twelve seconds eleven times in a row, watching Dylan's hand reach behind the rig each time. Her fingers rested flat against the edge of the mahogany desk. When the screen cut to black the eleventh time, she did not click replay.

"Now," I said.

Elena looked up from the monitor. "Now."

She slid a four-sentence press statement across her blotter. It contained no adjectives, no rhetoric, and no dramatic summaries. It stated my name, the nine disputed titles, and what we were about to file. I read each sentence, picked up her pen, and signed my approval at the bottom.

Three years earlier, I had signed a stack of papers for a woman in Sterling's human resources department whose name I never learned. Now a different stack was assembled on Elena's desk, with my name going on it the other way up.

Elena filed twice that Thursday. The complaint — Reed v. Sterling Records, et al. — went to federal court in Los Angeles. The second filing went to the United States Copyright Office: a formal objection to the registrations of nine songs, with a request for correction of authorship, supported by manuscript authentication (paper stock, ink dating, handwriting examination). Nine registrations, each reading some combination of S. Vale, D. Cross and Vireo Lane Publishing LLC.

Elena did not file quietly. On our first day, she told me she does not take settlement money in place of a name. The statement went out to the music trades the same day. By evening, the coverage had changed its terminology. I was no longer the receptionist from the video, a narrative problem, a stunt, or a fraud with tea-stained pages.

I was a plaintiff.

The formal legal caption appeared in print across the evening feeds: Reed v. Sterling Records, et al. My name occupied the primary position. A hospital bill from my mother's treatment still sat on my kitchen table, and a suspended employee's cardboard box stayed in my bedroom closet. But on a federal caption, my name was listed ahead of the company.

The reply from the Copyright Office arrived nine days later, two pages. The first page was procedural history, setting out administrative codes and the registrations from three years earlier.

The finding on page two was set out in flat administrative prose. The manuscripts and authentication report were received and noted. But correcting the register required the earliest evidence of the works' dissemination: proof of when, and to whom, the songs were first given out into the world, independent of the respondent's own records.

Fourteen days, the letter said, from the date of receipt.

Fourteen days to find the first time my songs ever left my hands — or the whole filing stalled where it stood, with my name first on a caption and nowhere at all on the songs.