For Vanessa
A friend from the old internet, an electronic composer who wrote hundreds of songs before she turned twenty-one, and the archive I built so her music wouldn't disappear.
I knew Vanessa from the early-2000s internet, back in the Eiffel 65 and Bliss Corporation fan corners where a bunch of us traded music and talked on AIM at all hours. She went by VTM, Vanessa The Musician, a name she gave herself at eleven. She had been composing since she was seven. By the time she was sixteen she had written almost seven hundred songs and was working on her thirty-second album. Self-taught, impossibly prolific, and kind.
She passed away in August of 2007. She was twenty.
Here is the part that still gets me. In 2018, MySpace lost everything anyone had uploaded before 2016 in a server migration, and just like that, most of her music was gone from the internet. The places she had posted, MySpace, LiveJournal, the old forums, went quiet or empty. If you searched her name, you found almost nothing. A whole catalog, a whole person’s life’s work, nearly erased by a database migration.
What saved it was the most old-internet thing imaginable: the CDs she burned for people. Back then, if Vanessa liked you, you got a disc with her songs on it, and those discs sat in closets and laptops and storage boxes for twenty years. I had some. So late in 2025 I finally did the thing I had been meaning to do forever. I built an archive of her music and put everything I had onto it.
And then other people showed up. A friend named John, who used to write lyrics with her, started sending me mp3s a batch at a time. Then Amanda emailed twenty-six songs off a USB drive she had quietly kept safe since around the time Vanessa got sick, just so something would survive. The archive doubled in a single afternoon. The rule is simple: preservation, not curation. Every track goes up, finished song or thirty-second sketch, because the rough vocals are her voice, and there is never going to be any more of it.
She told an interviewer once that she hoped to take the ball and run with it, maybe even start her own label someday. She didn’t get the time. But people are listening to her songs again, twenty years later, which is the entire point of finishing a song in the first place. She would have loved that.
Nessa, this one is for you.