She emails Jack Fleischer, a stranger, to say she is writing an essay about Donnie and Joe Emerson’s song “Baby.” There are contradictory facts online, and she wants the truth. What specifically happened when Fleischer discovered Dreamin’ Wild at an antique store in Spokane? Did he write about the record online to a following that championed it, via which Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti subsequently discovered “Baby” and covered it? Or did Light in the Attic contract the re-issue before that took place? (“I noticed on your website and AllMusic you’ve written liner notes for them—for an assortment of such wonderfully strange records, no less.”) This story is one of a failed record’s resurrection from the dead, and she is eager to understand the timeline of events.

She first encounters Donnie and Joe Emerson’s “Baby” in a wine shop after watching Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman alone at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “Baby” was recorded in 1979 by the aforementioned brothers, who grew up in rural Fruitland, Washington and whose father provided them with a $100,000 recording studio where records could be self-produced and released. The Emersons took out a second mortgage to subsidize the studio, a fact that strikes her as—extravagant? Irresponsible? Belligerently American? “We spent a lot of money; probably we shouldn’t have,” Donnie and Joe Emerson’s father says. “[But] they practiced all the time. That was their love.”

In 1979, “Baby” was released on Dreamin’ Wild, the brothers’ first record, of which 2,000 copies were pressed. Only a handful sold. As the Emerson family struggled with finances^[1], the remaindered copies became cellar ghosts. In a Spokane antique shop, Jack Fleischer—then a student and record digger, now a writer and producer—purchased Dreamin’ Wild for $5. Upon hearing “Baby,” he contacted the Emersons, purchased a box of the records, and subsequently mailed copies to friends. By 2012, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti’s cover of “Baby” was playing on college radio stations, and Light in the Attic’s reissue of the record sold out.

She is trying to write not only about Donnie and Joe Emerson’s “Baby,” but also about a particular conception of closeness that may be unattainable. In this projection, intimacy is a form of light atop shadows that becomes absorbed into a person’s loneliness, temporarily vanquishing death. Its architecture is akin to a cellar—“the dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces,” per Gaston Bachelard. “When we dream there, we are in harmony with the irrationality of the depths.”

She moves into the projection while standing outside of it, protected by an enclosure resembling an abandoned fish tank resembling a swimming pool sans...