Wish on a Star

But my motives were different. I was not looking to be entertained, exactly. I was and am looking for the next big thing. I'm prowling the frontiers of disreputable homemade art, where commerce never goes, hoping to find the next YouTube phenomenon, the next kid who shreds Pachelbel's Canon at 200 mph on an electric guitar, the next Chad Vader, or the next time-wasting genius who re-creates the fountains at the Bellagio using liters of Diet Coke and Mentos. Believe me, it's a peculiar assignment, to survey the world's retail weirdness.

And there she was, singing Porter's "Night and Day" as if her desk lamp were a Copacabana spotlight. You may judge for yourself--she's easy to find--but do consider how all that bewitching energy, that poise and to-the-hilt allure, are being squeezed through the most meager medium available. What would this woman sound like with a real microphone?

And I had an eerie feeling. What if you had seen Cassius Clay wailing away on a speed bag in Louisville when he was 16 years old? What if you had wound up getting your butt kicked in chess by an 8-year-old Gary Kasparov in a city park in Baku, Azerbaijan? What if you had happened to be in a club in 1982, helping a grass-green REM set up their equipment (this happened to me). Would you have known that you were in the presence of something, someone extraordinary?

For all the Internet's open floodgates, and for all the uncountable homemade videos playing like audition pieces to infinite Chance, the star-finding record of the digital realm has been pretty unimpressive. Go ahead, name a big artist who broke out on YouTube or MySpace. You could point to OK Go, who were swept into the mainstream on the strength of their quirky white-boy yard-stomping, but there are actually only a handful of performers who have made the transition from small-screen volunteerism to actual paid artist.

So the odds against Ysabella are long. And yet, I feel like I'm onto something. She's lovely, with a pale, heart-shaped face and large and shimmering eyes she half-closes as the ecstasy of a well-turned lyric passes through her. She flirts with empty space. She's got the most amazing voice, mellow and perfect-pitched and smoky, the voice of a pack-a-day angel. She's sexy and chaste, a vampy Carmelite.

She's getting noticed. Ysabella was just signed to Cordless Recordings, an e-label division of Warner Music, though it's not clear if that means anything career-wise. She's had a little press, not much, and that's good for me. I want to be the first to declare her great.

This is my Jon Landau moment, when I say I've seen the future of the American songbook, and her name is Ysabella Brave. I could be wrong, but I'm not.