There is a shoebox in Zoya Rahman's dressing room, and inside it are forty-one rejection emails, printed out, folded in half, and kept.
"Not for revenge," she says, two hours before the biggest set of her life. "For calibration. When I start believing my own hype, I read one. When I stop believing anything good, I read one. They work both ways."
She is twenty-three. Until recently she was known, if she was known at all, as the voice on a track that did the rounds on playlists while she served coffee four days a week in De Pijp. Her boss let her leave early for studio sessions. Her mother kept the rent conversation gentle. The emails kept arriving.
"Lovely voice, not for us." "Great demo, no budget." "We'd like to hear more in a year." She printed that one too.
What changed was not luck, though there was some of that. What changed was a Sunday-night livestream from her box room in Slotervaart, phone propped on a stack of books, radiator rattling in the background, where she played a song she had written about her father learning to dance again after his stroke. Ninety people watched. One of them ran a label. The song did what songs occasionally still do.
Backstage tonight there is none of the armour you expect. Her band is three friends from the neighbourhood. Her stage outfit came from a kilo sale. When the festival booker walks past and calls her "the headliner" she laughs, actually laughs, and says the word still sounds like it belongs to somebody else.
Here is the part that matters, and it is not the fame part. Every Thursday she is back in Slotervaart, in a borrowed community centre room, running a free session for kids who want to record something and have nowhere to do it. Twelve of them are on the guest list tonight. She arranged the minibus herself.
"The emails taught me the system is just people," she says, closing the shoebox. "And people can be reached. Sometimes it takes forty-one tries. The kids should know the real number. Not the poster version."
At 22.50 she walks out into the Alpha tent and the noise is the kind you feel in your ribs. Somewhere down the front, twelve kids from Slotervaart are shouting her name at a volume that suggests they have already decided their own number of tries.
She counts the band in. The radiator in the box room is a long way away, and not far at all.