Before ‘Could Be You’ had a bass line, it had a scene. A girl from another world, newly arrived on Earth, stands in a karaoke bar and has to choose a song to sing in front of someone she barely knows. She picks one that simply feels right, and without realising it she tells him how she feels.
That scene belongs to ‘Futura’, the retro-futuristic synth-pop concept album from Rexxy, the independent project of Peruvian-born songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Monica Velasquez. The story came first. Velasquez then created individual musical moments to capture what Futura feels at each point, and ‘Could Be You’ was one of them. She mentally immersed herself in the character’s emotions for the scene and tried to translate them into music, working through around four different versions before settling on the one that appears on the album.
The setting shapes the sound. The voices that open the track are there to put you inside the bar, waiting for your turn at the microphone, so you share the moment with Futura rather than simply watching it.
The song has a second layer for anyone who has read the comic that accompanies the album. “Before coming to Earth, Futura learned about love through the movies she watched on her home planet,” Velasquez explains. Those films gave her an idea of what love was supposed to feel like, though she had never experienced it herself. Now, on Earth, she is searching for that feeling in real life, and Velasquez describes ‘Could Be You’ as the moment that search begins to become real.
The comic was created with her husband, illustrator Darby Kaighin-Shields, and opens up another dimension of the same world. The pairing is meant to be heard and read together. Velasquez has taken a grassroots approach, reaching out to independent comic book shops and getting the comic into local stores, and The Jersey Sound covered the project this year. Looking further ahead, she would love to see Futura become an animated or live-action short with a romantic comedy feel.
‘Could Be You’ is out now and stands on its own as dreamy, cinematic synth-wave. With the comic beside it, you get the full picture of a girl who has no words yet for what she feels, but knows exactly which song to choose.