The novelist Alexander Chee recently wrote “the only place I experience grief lately is at karaoke. The song someone else is singing that catches me off guard and all of the losses of the last few years sneak in to say hi.” When I read his words, months after a weeklong workshop of Backing Track, my play on falling in love while grieving, gentrification, and karaoke, I had to catch my breath. It was as if he and I, though strangers, were suddenly in the same dark bar, lit only by a bright monitor with words crawling up the screen. Or, as Roberta Flack sings, like he was “singing my life with his words.” The same feeling--intimacy, surprise, the mix of laughter and loss--waits for readers and audience members in Backing Track.