I ’ve been a fan of Chicago emo hero Bob Nanna since 2003, when I was in high school and downloaded “The New Nathan Detroits” by his band Braid via a crappy dial-up Internet connection. My friend Matt, who I got to know after a 2009 Lincoln Hall show by Milwaukee post-emo outfit Maritime, is also a huge fan of Braid. So when I decided to do a story about Downwrite, a songwriting service that Nanna and former Spitalfield front man Mark Rose launched in February 2013, I got an idea. Last year Matt and his girlfriend, Anne, gave me a pair of tickets to The Book of Mormon on Valentine’s Day to thank me for cat-sitting for them. I could return their generosity—and get in on the Valentine’s issue my Reader colleagues were plotting—by paying for a Bob Nanna song from Downwrite that Anne would secretly commission for Matt. From the minute I set this plan in motion, I was looking forward to seeing his face when he heard it for the first time.

Of course, the service Downwrite offers is commonplace, and has been for decades. Especially in the 60s and 70s, you could reliably find ads in magazines asking readers to send in lyrics to be set to music—you’d pay your money, a group of anonymous studio jobbers would throw together a track, and you’d get a few copies of the finished product so you could try to break into the music biz. (The ads’ promises of big bucks were, to put it charitably, optimistic.) If it sounds a bit shady, that’s because it was, but some of these so-called song-poems have a bizarre charm that’s kept them in circulation—PBS produced a documentary on the phenomenon in 2003, and there have been dozens of compilations released over the years.

Nanna always writes songs by starting with the music, not the lyrics. “I’ll read through everything, but the part I’ll really pay attention to is the second question, which is the feel of the song,” he says. “I saw that Anne wanted something with pep.” Nanna says he spent an hour or so psyching himself up to start the tune, thinking about it while he was doing other stuff. After he set up to start recording (he used the new practice space for his fourth-wave emo band, Lifted Bells), it took about an hour for the music to take shape. “Once I can start working on something and can devote time to it it happens pretty quickly,” he says. He used his laptop’s Photo Booth program to record himself playing different parts of the song (verse, chorus, bridge) on acoustic guitar, then began piecing them together in GarageBand.

After that first listen—especially once I’d explained who’d written the song and why—Matt seemed out of sorts and overwhelmed, and Anne teared up a bit watching him. A couple hours and few listens later, he was better able to wrap his head around the fact that a musician who’d helped soundtrack his teenage years had written a song for and about him. “To have a gift that feels timeless, something that’s only going to appreciate with every listen, is not something I can really say I’ve felt before,” Matt says. “And to have different eras of my life kind of summarized in a song—it’s pretty great.”