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Last September, Daniel Mertzlufft was holed up in his Manhattan apartment avoiding Covid-19 when he decided to rework someone else’s song. Specifically, Louisa Melcher’s “New York Summer,” a plaintive but funny pop ballad. TikTok users had already turned the bridge (
We’re fighting in the grocery store /
and I love you, but I don’t know if I like you anymore) into a meme, but to Mertzlufft’s ear, it needed more drama. The 27-year-old composer and arranger wrote some new lyrics and added some strings and guitar. He recorded himself singing the new arrangement with full theater kid gusto, using TikTok’s greenscreen tool to set the scene in a generic supermarket aisle. The entire process took about an hour. When Mertzlufft posted the video to TikTok, he included a caption as he hits the last note: “This is 100% the end of Act 1.”