What it had been doing was living. The ordinary particular living that a person does when they are not performing the public version of themselves — when they are the father, the partner, the person in the kitchen, the driver on the school run, the amateur musician in the home studio following his own curiosity rather than a producer’s brief. This is not the part of the Rick Astley story that generates YouTube views. But it is, by his own account, the part that made everything else possible.
The link leads you to a song. The song was made by a person. The person had a life that was not the song. That life is what makes the song mean something beyond the three minutes and thirty seconds of its playing time — the evidence that the voice behind it belongs to someone who knew, when it mattered, what to do with what it had earned him.