It is a truth universally unacknowledged that a man in possession of great talent must be in want of neither fortune nor basic ambition. Basil Plimpton, however, was in want of both, and without the slightest inclination toward acquiring either.
He languished in genteel squalor above a vegan pet bakery in Cheltenham, in a flat so narrow it necessitated diagonal walking. Days were spent composing falsetto-heavy ballads on pirated software; nights, in the noble if fruitless pursuit of rhyming melancholia. He bore the expression of one perpetually dampened by rain that had not yet fallen, and spoke with such involuted elegance that baristas routinely interpreted “oat milk” as “goat’s silk.”
One evening, urged on by equal parts expired Shiraz and spiritual fatigue, he uploaded a song to YouTube under the alias The Weekdy—a typographical error which, upon reflection, he considered symbolically correct. The track, a breathy, minor-key seduction layered over a loop of lo-fi elevator jazz, bore…
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to King’s Ransom to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.