The Saturday morning buskers on the Columbus Circle platform are out in force. A guy with a keyboard in hand walks by playing a few notes; a man with bongo drums sets up nearby.
But one performer stands out: A 27-year-old with dark hair and friendly eyes is playing a keyboard; a case filled with a handful of dollar bills lies beside her. The money is not why she’s there.
Her songs are soulful ballads, not the typical underground playlist. “Today’s song is about getting an STD,” says the singer, Kelly Bazely. “That’s a tough one.”
Bazely is on Day 36 of her project Fifty Days Underground, which has found her at a handful of platforms since January. At least three days a week she’s singing original songs about heartbreak stories, submitted by friends and strangers through her site, fiftydaysunderground.com. She posts a sign on the front of her keyboard to let passersby know about the site and spreads the word through social media.
The project grew out of the ashes of her first real heartbreak. She was in love with a finance worker, whom she dated for a year and a half and lived with in Park Slope. In October, they realized they wanted different things and decided mutually to end it.
That didn’t make the sadness sting any less. So she decided to collect others’ tales of heartbreak and turn them into songs.
“I wanted to do something I was really, really afraid of,” says Bazely, who still lives in Park Slope. “I was always an extreme introvert, really shy. I wanted to face my fears: ‘Oh, I know, I’ll just perform in front of all these commuters.’”
She chose the subway to highlight the inherent intimacy of crowded city transit. During her breakup, she’d ride the train a few times a week on the way to her job as a freelance photo editor and would absorb a rush of human emotions. “I would look at all these people — sometimes I would see someone crying,” she says. “[The project] was a way to heal my own heart, to grieve and not feel alone. And it was a way to make other people not feel alone.”
A song takes between 30 minutes and five hours to write. She plays the song of the day and a few others from her repertoire and posts a video of each day’s performance on the site. At the end of the run, she’ll use the money she’s collected to throw a show with some of her favorite songs.
She isn’t set on being a performer for life, but she’d love to be a successful songwriter. She’s still single and enjoying it, though plenty of boys have asked her out on the platform. On Day 50, she’ll sing her own story.
Stephanie Zavala, 33, was never able to properly tell her tale of being a hard-partying 20-something who wound up as a single mother in her own writing. So she submitted it to Bazely, whose Day 6 song, “Cry,” showed she understood her struggle, with lyrics such as “I have no regrets because my mistakes brought me to you,” addressed to Zavala’s daughter.
“It was almost like a dream come true that I could have someone put an experience I had gone through to music,” says Zavala, who lives in Fort Worth, Texas. “Even if it is as small as somebody singing it at a subway platform, when else are you going to get someone to express yourself in that artistic way?”
The submissions brought in a cross section of heartbreak: Cheating was common, but Bazely also received stories about loved ones who died, physical abuse and a miscarriage.
“Most people will write and then at the very end of the e-mail, say ‘I feel so great now that I let this out,’ ” she says. “There’s something to be said for writing to a stranger.”