The Cloud Room - “Hey Now Now”

From “The Smash That Wasn’t”:

In winter 2004, an aspiring New York singer-songwriter with the temerity to call himself simply “J” got a sore throat that proceeded to last unabated through the season and into spring. At the end of the fourth month, the spooked J got an HIV test. It came back positive. He tested again— at which point the doctor took a three-week Caribbean vacation, safely locking the new results (negative) out of J’s reach in her office. The basic tune for “Hey Now Now”, in all its fetal-position primality, came together during the wait (“I wasn’t sure where it came from— it sounded like a children’s song,” the author says). Conversely, the lyrics (“We’re going downtown! We’ll take the bus there! Pay the bus fare! And we’ll find a new reason, a new way of living”) tumbled out in the rush of joy that followed.

The ecstasy proved contagious. By July 2004, the rudimentary song had floored, in chronological order, J’s bandmates, family, friends, friends’ friends, and a modest Luna Lounge audience that included a woman named Polsia Ryder, who ran the music arm of a media mini-empire called Gigantic. “It was such a perfect song,” says Ryder when asked about her first exposure to “Hey Now Now”. “There was no doubt in my mind it was a hit.”