Chapter 1 — The Insomnia Song for My Ex

Chapter 1 — The Insomnia Song for My Ex

Week 1 · March 8–14, 2026 · Bushwick, Brooklyn · Suno · 3:14 AM · The First Stupid Thing

The Couch

Here is the couch.

It is a sage-green velvet sectional that I bought off a woman named Patricia in Greenpoint in October 2022 for $180 cash. Patricia was moving to Maine to “open a small studio” which is the thing Brooklyn women in their late 30s say when they have given up on dating. I helped Patricia carry the couch down four flights of stairs in a building on Manhattan Avenue that did not have an elevator. I rented a U-Haul cargo van for $39 plus mileage. I drove the couch to Bushwick. I have lived with this couch for three and a half years. The couch has a small burn mark on the left arm from the time, in 2024, that I fell asleep with a candle. The couch is the most stable relationship I have ever had.

It is March 8, 2026. A Sunday. I have spent the day at Glaze, the coffee shop, working a 10 AM to 6 PM shift. I have made approximately 84 oat-milk lattes, 31 espressos, 12 matcha drinks, and 4 iced Americanos. I have been tipped $108. My feet hurt. My lower back hurts in the way it now always hurts after a Sunday shift, because Sunday is when the brunch crowd comes in and the brunch crowd does not understand the concept of forming a single line.

I get home at 6:42 PM. I take off my black non-slip work shoes, which I hate, and which I will not get rid of because the better shoes cost $140 and I cannot, currently, justify $140 on shoes. I take off my apron. I take a shower. I put on the same gray sweatpants I have been putting on every night since 2022. I order a $14 sushi set from the place on Wilson Avenue that is fine. I eat the sushi on the couch. I watch two episodes of a 2019 reality show about a woman who runs a flower shop in Charleston, which I have already seen. I watch them again because television is the only thing that turns my brain off and I am not going to apologize for it.

At 11:14 PM I get into bed. The bed is a queen-size mattress on a metal frame from Ikea that I assembled myself in 2017 and that I have moved between four apartments and that wobbles slightly when I roll over. The cat, Bartholomew, gets onto the bed and curls up against my left calf. The radiator clangs three times. I close my eyes.

I do not sleep.

This has been happening for forty-six nights in a row, give or take.

The breakup with Marcus was January 19, 2026. Marcus broke up with me by text message at 11:42 AM on a Monday while I was at Glaze making an iced matcha for an NYU film student named (I am almost certain) Dakota. The text message read, in full: “hey can we talk later. i don’t think this is working.” I read the text. I finished making the iced matcha. I handed it to Dakota. I went to the bathroom. I did not cry. I came back. I made eleven more drinks. I clocked out at 6:00 PM. I called Marcus. We talked for forty-three minutes. The breakup was real and final and conducted with the emotional fluency of a man who has, in his thirty-four years on Earth, never been to therapy.

The insomnia started on January 20, 2026. It is now March 8, 2026. The insomnia is forty-six nights old. It is older than my last serious haircut.

At 11:42 PM on March 8, I open Instagram. I should not open Instagram. I know I should not open Instagram. Opening Instagram at 11:42 PM is, statistically, the second-worst decision I make in any given day, after the decision to wear the non-slip work shoes for nine hours. I open Instagram anyway.

The first post on my feed is from Marcus. I have not unfollowed Marcus. I have not blocked Marcus. I have not done any of the things a healthy adult would do because I am not, currently, a healthy adult; I am a 32-year-old woman who has not slept eight straight hours since the Obama administration. The post on Marcus’s grid is a photo of Marcus’s new girlfriend, whose name is Gemma and who is 26 and a “creative director” at a brand consultancy I cannot name without becoming bitter. Gemma is wearing a hat. The hat is a wide-brimmed, taupe-colored, vaguely “rancher” style hat with a green feather tucked into the band. The hat is, by any objective measure, bad. The hat is the kind of hat that Anthropologie sold in fall 2024 to women who saw a photo of Phoebe Bridgers wearing a hat once. The hat does not match Gemma’s face. The hat does not match the rest of Gemma’s outfit, which is a slip dress and combat boots. The hat is a costume committed to by someone who has not yet decided who she is.

I look at the hat for one minute and forty-eight seconds.

I close Instagram.

I open Suno.

The 2 AM Window

I had downloaded Suno on October 14, 2025. I know the date because I screenshot the receipt for a $24 charge that hit my Chase debit card and that I tried, briefly, to dispute thinking it was fraud, before I remembered I had clicked the Instagram ad while sitting on the toilet and entered my card information.

I had used Suno exactly twice between October 2025 and March 2026:

  1. Once, in October 2025, to make a song called “The Glaze Shift Song” that was a parody of “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton but about being a barista. It was bad. I texted it to my coworker Jules. Jules said “lol cute.” That was the entire life cycle of the song.

  2. Once, in December 2025, to make a song called “Christmas in Bushwick” because I was going to my mom’s in Cleveland for Christmas and felt I should write her something. I made the song. I did not send it to my mom because the song was, listening back, kind of mean about Bushwick. The song stayed in my Suno library.

The Suno library, on the night of March 8, 2026, contained two songs I had made and had told no one about except Jules.

I open the app at 11:51 PM. I tap “Create.” I tap “Custom Mode.” Custom Mode lets you write your own lyrics and pick your own genre. I had used Inspired Mode for the two prior songs, which is the thing where Suno writes the lyrics for you and you are not really making anything, you are commissioning it. I do not want to commission tonight’s song. I want to write tonight’s song. This distinction will become important later.

I type the lyrics in the lyrics box. I type them straight out, with no edits, the way I would write a poem at 2 AM in college which is to say badly:

"Marcus, I saw your new girl’s hat It looks like the kind of hat that A girl wears when she’s trying too hard To be the girl on a song on a Spotify playlist called Sad Indie Yard Marcus, I saw your new girl’s hat And I want you to know I’m okay with that I’m okay with the hat and I’m okay with you I’m okay with everything Brooklyn boys do To 32-year-old women in March In Bushwick In sweatpants In bed Marcus, your new girlfriend’s hat is bad."

I read the lyrics back. They are bad. Strategically bad. Bad in the way that a song called “Marcus, Your New Girlfriend’s Hat Is Bad” should be bad, which is to say, on purpose, in a register that signals “I am too tired to be sad about this, please laugh with me, also I am not actually okay.”

I click on the “Style of Music” box. I type:

“Female vocals, indie folk, mid-tempo, 2014 Mitski-adjacent, slight reverb on vocals, fingerpicked acoustic guitar, sparse drums entering at the second verse, the kind of song a 32-year-old would put on a playlist titled ‘Songs for Crying in the Bathroom of a Wedding I Did Not Want to Attend.’”

I click “Create.”

Suno spins for forty-one seconds. The little progress bar is a slow blue line. I watch it. Bartholomew the cat watches me watch it. The radiator clangs.

The song generates. There are two versions, because Suno always gives you two. I tap version 1. The song begins.

A woman’s voice, breathy and slightly nasal in the exact way I would want it to be, sings:

“Marcus, I saw your new girl’s hat…”

I sit up in bed. I do not breathe for the entire two minutes and forty-seven seconds.

The song is good.

The song is not “lol cute” good. The song is actually good. The song sounds like a song that, if I had heard it on a Spotify playlist made by a friend, I would have asked who the artist was. The vocal melody on the line “Bushwick / In sweatpants / In bed” does a thing where it descends a third and then resolves up that I genuinely could not have written. The fingerpicked guitar comes in on the second verse exactly the way I wanted it to. The drums are a brushed snare and a soft kick that enter at 1:34 and that the song needed and that I had not specified in the prompt because Suno understood, without me telling it, that the song needed brushes at 1:34.

The song is so good that I, at 12:14 AM on March 9, 2026, in my bed in Bushwick, in the sweatpants, in the company of a cat, start crying.

I am not crying about Marcus. I want to be clear about this. I am not crying about Marcus. I am crying because there is a song in the world about my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend’s bad hat and the song is good and the song was not in the world six minutes ago and the song was made by a piece of software that I paid $24 for while I was on the toilet. I am crying about the speed of the song coming into existence. I am crying about the fact that, on every prior night for forty-six nights of insomnia, the songs in my head had stayed in my head, and that tonight, the song in my head got out. I am crying because something inside me that had been stuck moved.

I listen to the song eight more times.

At 12:42 AM I text the song to Joanna.

Stevie: “joanna i think i made a thing” [audio file: Marcus_New_Girlfriends_Hat.mp3]

Joanna: “stevie what is this” Joanna: “who is singing” Joanna: “is this you” Joanna: “stevie ANSWER ME”

Stevie: “it’s an AI. i made it on my phone” Stevie: “in like ten minutes”

Joanna: “stevie it’s almost 1 am” Joanna: “this is unwell” Joanna: “go to sleep”

Stevie: “no but is it good”

Joanna: “it’s good stevie” Joanna: “go to sleep”

I do not go to sleep.

The Stupid Decision That Made the Whole Book Possible

At 1:12 AM I am still on the couch. I have moved from bed to couch because Bartholomew was, in his judgment, taking up too much of my legs. I am holding my phone six inches from my face. I have listened to “Marcus, Your New Girlfriend’s Hat Is Bad” thirty-one times. The song is, against all prior expectation, getting better with each listen, which I am told is the diagnostic criterion for whether a song is actually any good.

I am scrolling, idly, through the Suno app. I see, at the bottom of the screen, a button that says “Distribute.” I tap the button. The button takes me to a screen that says “Release this song to Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, and 200+ other platforms via DistroKid. 7-day free trial. $22.99/year after.”

I do not know, at 1:12 AM on March 9, 2026, what DistroKid is.

I learn, in the next four minutes, what DistroKid is.

DistroKid is the company that 90% of independent musicians use to put their music on Spotify. DistroKid takes a song from you and puts it on Spotify and Apple Music and Tidal and Amazon Music and Bandcamp and 200 other places, and Spotify pays DistroKid pennies per stream, and DistroKid pays you the pennies, and the pennies, sometimes, add up. DistroKid does not require you to be a “real” musician. DistroKid does not require you to have ever played a live show. DistroKid does not require you to have a “band.” DistroKid requires you to have a song, a credit card for the $22.99/year, and a name to release the song under.

I have a song. I have a credit card. I do not have a name to release the song under.

At 1:16 AM I tap “Start Release.”

DistroKid asks me to enter the artist name. There is a text box and a cursor. The cursor blinks at me. I think.

The thing I cannot release the song under is my own name, because if I release a song called “Marcus, Your New Girlfriend’s Hat Is Bad” under my actual name and Marcus, somehow, finds the song, Marcus will know I made the song, and Marcus, who is a coward, will tell Gemma, and Gemma, who I have never met, will spend the rest of her time in Bushwick believing that there is a 32-year-old barista somewhere in the neighborhood who has written a song about her hat, which is, even by Brooklyn standards, a lot of psychic energy to put on a 26-year-old creative director who has done nothing wrong except date a man with bad timing.

So I cannot use my name.

I think for ninety seconds. I think about names a band would have. The bands I loved in 2017 had names like:

  • Slow Pulp
  • Big Thief
  • Soccer Mommy
  • Phoebe Bridgers
  • Snail Mail
  • Adrianne Lenker
  • Lucy Dacus
  • Japanese Breakfast

The bands I loved had names that suggested softness and specificity and a small nameable thing that mattered to a small number of people. The bands had names you could write on a tote bag.

I look around my apartment. The apartment is dark except for the lamp by the couch. The lamp is from Ikea. The lamp is $19. There is a small wooden cross hanging on the wall above the bookshelf that my grandma Marcellina, who died in 2019, gave me for my college graduation. The cross is the only religious object in my apartment. Grandma Marcellina was, in the way of Italian-American grandmothers from Cleveland, devout in a Tuesday-Mass kind of way. Tuesday Mass. Grandma Marcellina went to Mass on Tuesdays at St. Anthony’s in Collinwood. She did not go on Sundays because she said Sundays were too crowded.

Tuesday Saints. The Tuesday Saints.

I type “The Tuesday Saints” into the DistroKid artist name box at 1:18 AM on March 9, 2026.

I read the name back. The name is good. The name suggests a band that would have been on a 2019 NPR Tiny Desk Concert. The name suggests a band whose merch I would have bought. The name suggests a band that does not exist but should.

I tap “Continue.”

DistroKid asks for the song title. I type “Marcus, Your New Girlfriend’s Hat Is Bad.” DistroKid asks for genre. I select “Indie Folk.” DistroKid asks for the cover art. I do not have cover art. DistroKid offers to generate a “starter” cover. I tap yes. DistroKid generates a generic image of a window with rain on it. The image is fine. The image is not the point. DistroKid asks me to confirm the AI-Assistance Disclosure (a checkbox that has been required for all DistroKid releases since the January 2026 platform-wide policy). I check the box. DistroKid asks me to confirm the release date. I select March 11, 2026, which is the soonest the platform will allow. DistroKid asks me to confirm the $22.99 charge after the 7-day trial. I tap yes. DistroKid asks me to confirm everything one more time. I tap yes. DistroKid says: “Your release is in review. You will receive an email when it is live on Spotify and Apple Music. Thank you for using DistroKid.”

I close the app. It is 1:34 AM.

I do not sleep until 4:14 AM. When I do sleep, I sleep for nine hours, which is the longest I have slept in forty-six days. I dream of Grandma Marcellina at the kitchen table in Cleveland. She is asking me if I have eaten. I tell her yes, even though I have not.

What Came Out

What came out:

  • One song, 2:47, indie folk, female vocals, brushes at 1:34, titled “Marcus, Your New Girlfriend’s Hat Is Bad.”
  • Released March 11, 2026, two days after upload, on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music, Bandcamp, and 200 other DSPs, under the artist name The Tuesday Saints.
  • Cover art: a generic AI-generated rainy-window image. (I would replace this in Week 5.)
  • Total elapsed time from “I should sleep” to “song is on Spotify”: approximately fourteen days, which is mostly DistroKid’s review queue.
  • Total active work time: about thirty-eight minutes (lyrics + Suno generation + DistroKid form).

What It Paid (or Cost)

Cost in Week 1:

  • Suno Pro subscription (recurring): $24/month
  • DistroKid: $0 (free 7-day trial; charged $22.99 on March 16)
  • $14 sushi from the place on Wilson Avenue: not band-related, but contextually relevant
  • Sleep loss: forty-three minutes lost between 11:51 PM and 4:14 AM, partially recovered by morning

Revenue in Week 1: $0. The song was not yet live until day 14.

Listeners in Week 1: 0. The song did not exist on any platform.

Total Week 1 P&L: -$24 + change.

Future revenue from this song over the 12 weeks of this book: approximately $612 (Spotify streams + Bandcamp digital sales + cassette sales + the song being played live at the May 22 show). This is the highest-earning song in the catalog, accounting for roughly 33% of all Tuesday Saints revenue between March and May 2026.

The lesson, I will tell you here for free without making you wait until Chapter 12: the highest-earning song in your catalog will be the song you wrote in 38 minutes at 11:51 PM about something so specific that nobody else would have written it. This is a real pattern, and it is the one I would bet money on if I were betting money, which I am not, because I am still a barista.

The “Wait, Is This Real Now?” Moment

There was no “wait, is this real now?” moment in Week 1. That is the entire point of Week 1. Week 1 felt, the entire time, like a joke. The song was a joke. The band name was a joke. The DistroKid upload was a joke. The cover art was a joke. The 1:18 AM decision to type “The Tuesday Saints” into a text box was, in my own head, a joke I was playing on myself in the dark.

The “wait, is this real now?” moment does not arrive until Week 2. It arrives in the form of an email from a 16-year-old in Trondheim, Norway, on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at 4:42 AM Eastern Time. You will meet her in the next chapter.

This is, I think, an important and underrated truth about how things become real: they are jokes, and then someone else takes the joke seriously, and then the joke is no longer a joke. The thing that makes a thing real is another person. You cannot make a thing real by yourself. You can only make it. You can only put it where another person might find it. The other person makes it real.

The Tuesday Saints, on March 11, 2026, the day the song went live on Spotify, were not a real band. The Tuesday Saints, on March 24, 2026, when Idun in Trondheim sat down at her desk and typed an email to a contact form on a Bandcamp page, became a real band. Not because anything about the band changed. Because someone else showed up.

This is the pattern that, if you read every chapter of this book and remember nothing else, I want you to remember.

What You Can Try This Weekend

(Each chapter ends with this section. The exercises are small. The exercises are the point. You are not reading this book to feel inspired. You are reading this book to do something embarrassing on your couch. That is the deal.)

Your Week 1 Assignment

  1. Pick the small specific thing. Not “I want to make music.” The specific song about the specific bad hat. The smaller and more specific, the better. The song “Marcus, Your New Girlfriend’s Hat Is Bad” worked because it was maximally specific. The song could not have been written by anybody else, because nobody else had been dumped by Marcus and had then seen the hat. Specificity is the only thing that travels. Your equivalent of the hat is in your head right now. Write it down on the back of a receipt.

  2. Open Suno (or its equivalent in whatever year you are reading this; the tool will keep changing names but the pattern will not). Subscribe. $24 will not break you. Skip three coffee orders this week and you have paid for it. This is not financial advice; this is just true.

  3. Write the actual lyrics yourself. Use Custom Mode, not Inspired Mode. The lyrics are the only part of the song that the AI cannot give you. The lyrics are the part where you are still the artist. If you let the AI write the lyrics, you have not made a song; you have commissioned a song. There is a real difference. The difference matters in Week 7 when you are answering 87 fan emails and need to know whether the songs are yours.

  4. Put the song somewhere strangers can find it. This is the brave part. Use DistroKid (or its equivalent) and pay the $22.99. Do not put the song on SoundCloud and tell yourself that counts. SoundCloud is the bedroom of distribution. Spotify is the front yard. The song needs to be on the front yard. Strangers need to be able to walk by.

  5. Pick a band name in under 90 seconds. Do not, under any circumstances, deliberate on the band name. The band name is a costume. You can change it later. The Tuesday Saints came from a wooden cross on my wall and a memory of my grandmother. Your band name is in the room you are sitting in right now. Look up. Look around. Pick the thing your eyes land on. Tap continue.

  6. Tell exactly one person who will tell you the truth. For me it was Joanna. For you it might be your sister, your best friend from high school, your one cool coworker, your therapist if your therapist is the kind of therapist who will listen to a song you made in a session. One person. Not your whole group chat. The whole group chat is too many opinions. One person who will tell you the song is good or that the song is bad and who will be right either way.

  7. Sleep when you can. This is, embarrassingly, also part of the assignment. The song will still be on Spotify in the morning. The song will, in fact, be on Spotify in the morning of every morning for the rest of your life, unless you take it down. Sleep is allowed.

That’s Week 1. You have, by the end of this week, made a song and put it where strangers can find it. You have, by Brooklyn’s standards, become a musician. Brooklyn has very low standards. Use them.

In Chapter 2, two things happen: the song gets fourteen streams in the first three days (eight from Joanna, four from me, one from my mom on speakerphone in Cleveland, one from Jules at Glaze), and on March 24 at 4:42 AM, an email arrives.

The email is from Norway.

The email changes everything.

I will see you in Chapter 2.

— Stevie, on the couch, Bushwick, March 14, 2026, the song just released, the band still a joke, the radiator clanging, the cat asleep, the bass player I will eventually hire on Craigslist still a stranger living somewhere in Ridgewood, the venue booker I will eventually email with still working a Friday night at Marcy’s not knowing my name yet, the 16-year-old in Trondheim already alive and already grieving and already, on March 14, 2026, ten days away from sitting down to write me her first email.