A cursory search for the phrase “from another room” reveals dozens of similar “remixes,” some with note counts approaching 100,000. The blog that posted it, From Another Room, was deleted in July 2017 by Tumblr staff for copyright violation, but in the few months during which it was active it amassed more than 60,000 followers it has since been revived with limited posts. To date, that particular edit of “ I’ll Be Seeing You” has more than four and a half thousand notes.

Still, the sound of the song, disembodied not only from the studio where Billie sang it but even from the recording itself, became a soundscape: I was there again, in the yellow room of a house sold to strangers years ago, only a flight of stairs away from a former life. When I snuck away from slicing apples or stirring soups, I’d scurry up to the yellow room and daydream, half-listening, as music floated up from the floor below.īack in my Berkeley bedroom, absent were the clink of table-setting and my grandmother’s Brooklyn accent sharp enough to carry up the stairs. Often, as Thanksgiving dinners or Passover Seders simmered in the kitchen, my family sang along to music played in my grandfather’s study - the swing classics of my grandparents’ 1940s youth sounding warm and lovely on a hi-fi system, which had been state of the art sometime in the late ’70s.

I spontaneously recalled the dim lamplight upstairs in my grandparents’ house in Laurel, Maryland, in what we called the yellow room, where two twin beds done up in identical mustard chiffon bedspreads gathered dust under the shadowy egg-yolk eaves, their yellow gingham pillows edged in white eyelet, waiting, scratchy and sad, until we arrived for the holidays. In the course of a recent evening scroll through Tumblr, sprawled in the gold light of my California bedroom with one window cracked and the cool rustle of wind in the leaves, I came across a nondescript audio post captioned “I’ll Be Seeing You playing from another room.” Billie Holiday crackled to life through my laptop speakers, but her gravelly timbre and the bright brass tones of the song were edited to sound muffled, as though emanating not from the computer resting in my lap but somewhere further off.

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