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People ask me all the time how I discovered Jada Rivers.
I tell them the truth. I didn’t discover her. She discovered me. Through an open window, on the hottest day of the summer, while I was throwing my headphones across the room.
My name is Marcus Delaney. That summer I was forty-six years old, and I had been making records for twenty years out of a two-room studio above Lucky’s Laundromat on Germantown Avenue in North Philadelphia. Egg-crate foam on the walls. A secondhand mixing desk with three dead channels. A window air conditioner that rattled like a shopping cart full of cans. I did local artists, wedding singers, gospel choirs, a couple of radio spots for a car dealership on Broad Street. I knew what I was doing. I paid my rent. But I was never going to be anybody, and somewhere around forty, I had made my peace with that.
I’d seen her before that day, of course. Everybody on the block had.
She worked downstairs at Lucky’s, folding towels. Eighteen, fresh out of high school. And every afternoon, the minute her shift ended, she’d come out the side door and sit down on the concrete with her back against the laundromat wall. Same spot every time. Right in front of this big old faded orange circle somebody had painted on the yellow brick decades ago, back when Lucky’s had a sign shaped like a setting sun. With her sitting in front of it, that orange circle looked like a halo.
You noticed her. You couldn’t help it. She had a head full of locs, black at the roots and fading to a sandy gold at the ends, tied back off her face with a black bandana knotted on top. Freckles across her nose. Little silver hoops in both ears and a tangle of thin silver chains around her neck, each with some small charm on it. She always wore the same oversized cream-colored track jacket, way too big for her, covered in black patches she’d sewn on herself, sleeves shoved up to the elbows, over an orange T-shirt and baggy cream pants. White high-top sneakers, laces never tied right. Rings on half her fingers. Ink on the back of one hand.
And she wore two watches. One on each wrist.
That was the thing I noticed first, honestly. I’m a producer. I notice timing. I asked her about them, much later. She told me the one on her left wrist ran perfectly. The one on her right ran a few seconds slow, and she’d never fixed it, because when she held both wrists up to her ears, the two second hands ticked just slightly out of step with each other. Tick-tick. Tick-tick. Like a little shuffle.
“It’s a groove,” she told me. “It’s the best groove I own.”
That’s Jada. That’s her whole story right there, if you understand it.
She’d sit against that wall with her knees up, her arms folded across them, one pair of beat-up earbuds held together with electrical tape. And she’d tip her head back against the bricks and close her eyes and just… listen. Not like a teenager listens to music. Like a person listens to someone they love talking in the next room. Her whole face would go still. Sometimes her lips would move. Sometimes one finger would tap against her knee, keeping time with something.
She listened to everything. I’d hear it leaking out of those earbuds when I walked past. Gospel one day. Old soul the next. Jazz. Salsa. Something with a full orchestra. Something that sounded like a car alarm. Later I learned she listened in bed at night with a radio under her pillow, and walking to work, and sitting in the park, and on the curb outside the bodega for an hour at a time just to hear what Mr. Ortiz was playing inside.
She couldn’t read a note of music. Her high school had cut its music program when she was a freshman. Nobody had ever taught her anything. But I found out later that when she was fourteen, she walked into the choir room, put down her bag, and told the teacher from across the room that the G on the piano was flat.
It was. By about four cents.
Now. That summer, I had landed the biggest job of my career.
A young soul singer named Tamsin Gray had just signed with a major label, and somehow, through a cousin of a friend of a guy who used to sing at my church, they’d heard of me. They needed a debut single. They gave me three weeks. And they gave me one instruction, which they repeated on every phone call like a prayer.
Something new. Something different. Something with life in it.
I tried. Lord, I tried. I built that track fifteen different ways in nineteen days. I slept on the studio floor. I lived on coffee and gas station sandwiches. And every single version I made was… fine. Clean. Professional. Every sound exactly where it was supposed to be.
And dead. Just lying there on the table like a fish.
On the nineteenth day, two days before the deadline, my air conditioner finally gave up and died, and I had to open the window. It was ninety-six degrees. I played the fifteenth version of that track one more time, all the way through, and something in me just snapped. I tore off my headphones and threw them across the room, and I shouted at the top of my lungs, at nobody, at God:
“WHY can’t I figure out what’s WRONG with this thing?”
And from down on the sidewalk, through the open window, a voice answered me.
A young woman’s voice. Real calm. Unbothered. Like she was telling me what time it was.
“Your kick drum’s sitting right on top of your bass line,” it said. “They’re fighting each other. Nobody can hear either one.”
I froze.
“And your hi-hats are too perfect,” the voice went on. “You’ve got them locked on the grid. Real people don’t play like that. Let them drag a little. Let it breathe.”
A pause. Then:
“And your hook’s in the wrong place. The best part of that whole song is in your bridge. You buried it. Put it up front.”
I went to the window and looked down.
There she was, sitting against the yellow wall in front of the faded orange sun, in her big cream jacket, with her knees pulled up and her arms crossed over them, one earbud dangling. Her head was tipped back against the bricks and her eyes were still closed. She hadn’t even bothered to open them.
She’d been listening to me fail for nineteen days.
“Who are you?” I said.
She opened her eyes, finally, and looked straight up at me, squinting into the sun.
“Jada. I fold towels here,” she said.
I invited her up. To this day I don’t fully know why. Desperation, mostly. And something about the way she’d said it, so sure, without even opening her eyes.
She came up my narrow stairs with the broken handrail, sat down in my chair like she’d been sitting in it for years, and asked me to play the track again. Then she asked me to play just the bridge. Then she leaned back, tipped her head up toward the ceiling, and closed her eyes, exactly the way she did against the wall downstairs.
She didn’t know what a single button on that desk did. Not one. She just told me what she heard, and I made it happen. Pull the kick back. No, further. Now drag those hats. Behind the beat, like somebody walking home tired. Now take the strings out completely, they’re smothering her. It was like she was describing a painting to me, and I was the one holding the brushes.
We worked for three hours. The track got better. A lot better. But around hour three, she went quiet. She sat there with her eyes shut and her head tilted, one finger tapping on the arm of the chair.
“It’s still missing something,” she said finally. “It needs a heartbeat. Something real.”
And then she tilted her head further, and I realized she was listening to the floor.
Up through the floorboards came the sound of Lucky’s Laundromat underneath us. I’d been hearing it for twenty years without hearing it. The low, steady thump… thump… thump of the big industrial dryer in the corner, the one that always had somebody’s sneakers tumbling around in it.
Her eyes opened. “Ninety-two,” she said.
“What?”
“That dryer. It’s running at ninety-two beats a minute. Same as your song.” She was already halfway out of the chair. “It’s been driving me crazy for two months.”
She ran downstairs. Ten minutes later she came back up with her phone and dust on the knees of her pants. She had been lying flat on the laundromat floor with her phone pressed against the side of that dryer, recording it for five straight minutes. Then she went back out and stood at the bus stop until the number 23 came wheezing in, and recorded the long hiss of its air brakes. Then she went into the bodega and talked old Mr. Ortiz into tapping a wooden spoon on his counter in a pattern she hummed for him.
She came back up the stairs breathless, eyes shining, and dropped her phone on my desk.
“There,” she said. “There’s your life.”
That dryer became the backbone of the whole song. Underneath everything, steady as a heart. That bus brake became the cymbal swell going into the chorus. Mr. Ortiz and his spoon became the clave. And the hook she’d pulled out of my bridge, the one I’d buried, opened the song, and it hit you like sunlight through a window.
At eleven o’clock that night, I played the finished track from start to finish.
I’d been making records for twenty years. And I sat in my chair, in my hot little studio above a laundromat, and cried like a child. Because it was alive. You could hear the whole block breathing in it. It sounded like a summer night on Germantown Avenue. Like somebody’s grandmother cooking with the windows open. Like being eighteen years old and not knowing what happens next.
Jada just sat there, with her knees up in my spare chair and her arms folded across them, both watches ticking, and smiled.
We called it “Laundromat Heart.” Tamsin Gray sang it in a single take two days later. The label released it in September.
By November, it was the number one song in the country.
It stayed on the charts for thirty-seven weeks. It was played at weddings and barbecues and high school dances. It won Tamsin two Grammys. And on the back of the record, in small print, under my name, there was a second line. I insisted on it. The label fought me. I didn’t care.
Co-produced by Jada Rivers.
People told me I was crazy, giving a credit to a kid off the sidewalk. I told them she wasn’t a kid off the sidewalk. She was the reason there was a song. The morning after it went to number one, I walked downstairs into Lucky’s and offered her a partnership. Fifty-fifty. She was folding a bath towel at the time. She thought I was joking. She kept folding.
I wasn’t joking.
After that, the phone didn’t stop ringing. Everybody wanted to know who the mystery girl was who’d built a number one record out of a clothes dryer. Within two years, she was producing for some of the biggest names in music. Within three, she had her own label. She never did learn to read sheet music. She never needed to.
I sat in on a session once with a singer you would know, a legend, somebody I’d had on posters on my bedroom wall as a teenager. He played Jada his demo. She listened for maybe ten seconds, eyes closed, head tilted back. Then she opened them and said, “You wrote this when you were sad. But you’re singing it like you’re angry. Which one is it?”
He had to leave the room for twenty minutes. When he came back, he sang it again. Sad, this time. It’s the best thing he’s ever recorded.
She hears what nobody else can. She always did.
At twenty-four, Jada Rivers walked up onto a stage in Los Angeles in a borrowed dress, with her locs tied up in that same black bandana and both watches on her wrists, and became one of the youngest producers ever to win the Grammy for Producer of the Year. Her mother watched it on a little TV in the hospital break room during her night shift. When they called Jada’s name, she screamed so loud a patient on the fourth floor called security.
Jada didn’t write a speech. She thought she’d never win. She just stood up there, looked out at all those famous faces, and said: “This is for Lucky’s Laundromat. And for every kid sitting on a sidewalk somewhere right now, with taped-up earbuds, listening to the whole world. Keep listening. It’s talking to you.”
She’s thirty-one now. Eleven number one records. More album credits than almost anybody of her generation.
And her studio is still above Lucky’s Laundromat.
She bought the building. The whole thing. Lucky’s is still downstairs, same family running it. She made sure of that. The second floor is a real studio now, one of the most sought-after in the country, with a waiting list a year long. And in the corner of the main room, plugged in and still working, sits that old industrial dryer. She bought it off Lucky’s for one dollar when they finally replaced it. We still use it on records.
The ground floor, next to the laundromat, is a free music program for the neighborhood kids. Open every afternoon. No fees. No sheet music required. Her old choir teacher, Mr. Perkins, runs it. She called him up and asked him to. He said, “Jada, you’re the one who heard the flat G.” She said, “And you’re the one who believed me.”
She named it The Stoop.
Me? I’m still here. Still her partner, because she won’t hear of anything else. These days, mostly, I carry things, and make the coffee, and tell this story to every young musician who walks through the door. Best job I’ve ever had.
And every afternoon, when the work is done, I look out the same window I shouted out of all those years ago.
And there she is.
Sitting on the concrete with her back against the yellow wall, right in front of that big faded orange sun. Wearing a similar oversized cream jacket, patches and all, sleeves shoved up. A new pair of white high-tops. Knees up, arms folded across them, rings on her fingers and those same two watches, one still on each wrist. Her head tipped back against the bricks. Her eyes closed. Listening.
The bus pulls up to the stop with a hiss. The dryer thumps inside. Mr. Ortiz’s radio drifts out of the bodega. A kid laughs somewhere down the block.
And I can see her lips moving, just slightly. Counting.
She told me once that people think music is something you make. It isn’t, she said. It’s already here. It’s in everything. The bus. The dryer. Your mama laughing in the kitchen. Two old watches ticking out of step.
“Everybody’s got a beat, Marcus,” she said. “Most people just never sit still long enough to hear it.”
I’m glad I left that window open.
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