My Friend BJ

Here’s a story about my friend BJ, which I’ll call:

Fifteen years later, BJ is still a musician, as well as a professional-Internet-person living in [what I’ll call] The Greater New Je/rk Area.

For many years, up until 2012, he was part of a Brooklyn-based band called Parts and Labor. Parts and Labor released eight albums on five different record labels, toured the country and the world many times over, and even had a song on a Starbucks music sampler. To date, “Nowhere’s Nigh,” the single from their most successful (sales-wise) album and penultimate release, 2008’s “Receivers,” has 15,359 plays on SoundCloud.

Toward the end of Parts and Labor and into the post-P&L years, BJ wrote songs and released his own music under the name Shooting Spires.

Years later, and multiple solo tours into his solo-music career, in February of 2015 — specifically, this past Wednesday — BJ took roughly seven hours to create a mash-up of Beck’s “Loser” and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” called “Single Loser (Put a Beck On It)” which you can take a listen to here:

Since its release via Soundcloud yesterday morning, and as of this post, it has racked-up 446,595 listens and has been written up in NME, MTV.com, Jezebel, Vulture, Time, Mashable, Billboard, Buzzffeed, Cosmoplitan and many, many other media outlets all over the world.

Isn’t that how life works sometimes?