These strange steps

37

From the June 2020 issue of Rolling Stone:

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Half a Life: Songs for Lucy

**** out of *****

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It's hard not to be aware of Rachel Berry's story.

Broadway's enfant terrible crashed onto the scene as a fresh-faced, but-if legends are to be believed-incredibly entitled twenty-two year old, who then cleaned up the Tony and gained a reputation for being a superbitch. In the years that followed, she picked up two deserved guest star Emmy nominations for roles on Cardiac Arrest and everyone's favorite comedy, The Unbelievable Story of Us, while her private life-and her public relationship with the gorgeous Noah Puckerman-was subject of constant scrutiny by the press.

She was set to break through in Hollywood with a feature after a summer stint at Caesar's that sold out nightly and got overwhelmingly positive reviews, even from Berry's harshest critics. It's not a time in most people's careers when they'd take time off, but Berry did not only that; she also fired long-time friend and manager Kurt Hummel, and then disappeared off the face of the earth.

During Rachel's absence from public life, the music industry caught a buzz of some demos leaking on a website titled letterstolucy.com that weren't really like anything anyone had heard before. Acoustic guitar, mixed with electronic beats of the early 90s trip-hop variety; did we love it? Did we hate it? Was it progressive or reductive? Nobody could really decide, until the project in question, who by December had named themselves Half a Life released a cover of the Yeah Yeah Yeah's Hysteric, which spread through the blogosphere like it was leaked from the latest Beyonce album.

Who were these people? If pressed, I could've told you that the woman's voice sounded familiar, but other than a niggling feeling at the back of my mind, it never really connected to anyone I knew. The Letters to Lucy website was of no help whatsoever; with its sparse design and utter lack of personal information, displaying only two silhouettes of a man and a woman behind a guitar and a keyboard respectively, it could've been a joke project by She & Him or Mates of State as much as it could have been the serious work of two complete nobodies.

And then, right before New Year's Eve, Half a Life played a show; in a coffee house in Jersey, where nobody was expecting to see them, but the band themselves recorded the performance and put it up on Letters to Lucy and suddenly, it all made sense.

Except it didn't, at all.

Rachel Berry and Noah Puckerman, with new hair styles and completely casual clothing, jamming away in a Jersey coffee house with a custom Taylor guitar and a 3000 dollar keyboard that-and I'm not kidding-they then also themselves carried back out to a car. [Whoever filmed them caught that part, too, to my great enjoyment.]

So, let me dwell on that for another moment:

Rachel Berry, in jeans and a sweater, carrying a keyboard out of a coffee shop and laughing gloriously both at whoever was filming her lugging it back to the car.

My friend Zachary, over at Pitchfork, called the performance a Joaquin Phoenix moment. That's funny, but a little insulting, since what Half a Life are recording is actually music. There's craftsmanship behind it and a lot of feeling. So what brought this project on?

When I put this question to them, they exchange a look, and then Puckerman laughs and shakes his head. "All yours," he says, and after a moment Rachel-on her fifth coffee of the day, by her own admission-turns to me and smiles.