A&b
Page 12
She goes silent because of course she does, because those words were a stinkbomb of a first draft with maybe a whiff of potential. She doesn’t snark this time, though. She doesn’t tease me, even though I have reeked out loud in front of her. She’s working now, same as I am, and the only thing she’s focused on is where we go next.
“Melody’s good, especially the last line,” she says. “Those words, though.”
“What, you don’t like the blah dee blah blah part?”
“It’s bad grammar, first of all.”
“Yes, I think technically, a dee should never split two blahs.”
She snort-laughs. “Seriously, though.”
“I know.”
“This can’t just be woohoo, hey hey, I’m in love.”
“Right.” I cock my head. “Why not?”
“We need drama.”
“Isn’t love dramatic enough?”
“Not if it’s generic with no sense of story.” She thinks for a second and snaps her fingers. “FARG. What if it’s the last day of summer?”
“It’s supposed to be happy!”
“Calm your tits. It can be. Say it’s a ‘better late than never’ song.” She slings Fernando on her knee. She shifts the key from my rough draft, swinging it down to suit her voice better, and sings: “We got the flames raging, hearts changing just in time…”
Rosalinda and I jump in: “Last day of summer and now you’re mine…”
“Like the bus home I almost missed you…”
“Then I…grew some balls and I campfire-kissed you.”
“Haa!” She plays a joyous galloping G chord that charges through my insides and I let out a wild laugh, because how the holy heck did I rhyme that fast with another human being? For one hot second I’m like is this what sex feels like and then Evil B’s like WATCH YOURSELF, and I tell her it was a metaphor because yes, this is fun, but I’m not even into Ava that way.
“Sorry. That last line was silly,” I say.
“Nuh-uh. I mean, I can’t say ‘balls’ on TV, but I liked it.” She shows off this dazzlingly casual chord progression that dances up four frets. “I could hear it in a Transitive Properties song, you know?”
“Totally.” I have never heard of Transitive Properties.
“Let’s work it over more. Got time?”
“I’ve got all day.” I stow the whiteboard under the table.
“Hey.”
“Yes?”
“I usurped your chorus process, didn’t I?”
I give her a devious grin. “It’s all good,” I say. “Wait till we get to your verses.”
***
She hangs upside down on a couch with a blue and green swirly design. Her ankles are crossed in her skinny jeans and her hair spills over the cushions like a—hair waterfall? (Note to self: having partial baldness apparently makes you terrible at hair metaphors.)
“Can you see me?” Ava calls.
“Yes. Where are you?” I squint at my phone.
“One of those private soundproofed cabins I told you about.” She makes a behold-the-grandeur gesture. “This one’s my favorite. Ocean theme. I stake it out whenever I can. Where are you?”
“St. C’s.”
“In your cabaret room?”
“No, the lost and found.”
“Ha! Why?”
I shrug. I walked up here because I thought it would be good for creativity, collaborating on verses in the Church of Abandon, but instead it felt blasphemous to Evil B. So now I’m in a closet that used to be one of those face-to-face confessionals, legs crossed on a molded plastic chair.
“Okay, word girl.” I take a deep breath. “Show me your stuff.”
“Yeah. So first I close my eyes and clear my mind of junk. Like this.” She shuts her eyes and makes a low keening sound that’s like if whales did yoga and it’s so hippy-dippy I have to giggle.
“HEY.” She folds her arms. “Was that process snark?”
“Not at all.” I clear my throat. “Did you do that during Sudden Death, too?”
“I did. While you were crumpling up words and working on your pit stains.”
“What’s next? After the keening.”
“Uh…” She rights herself on the couch. “See, my process is, I don’t have a process. Honestly. I get in a zone, lock into a feeling, and then it’s like taking dictation.”
I roll my eyes. “So you don’t actively think about things like meter, alliteration, rhyme…”
“I…no. I let it happen naturally. Words, melody…they come out tangled together. Fully born.”
There’s a Nerf gun in the lost and found box and I really want to shoot her with it. “So go ahead.” I spread my hands. “Birth your words before me.”
She gives me a warning eyebrow. Then she puts her legs in a knot, rests a notebook in her lap, and starts muttering snippets of poetry and humming vague melodies. She logs words with care as they come to her: no cross-outs, no agonized pencil-nibbling. I catch a word now and then as she murmurs—dragonfly, Santa Fe, fortress—and I wonder what they have to do with each other, and how this will all come together.
Twelve minutes later, she’s done. She snaps a photo of the lyric page and texts it to me. I read along as she straps on Fernando and sings:
August narrows down to this
A pinprick pale in the sheltering sky
A dragonfly question, your patchwork cap, the faint metaphor of a s’more
I sipped a pale cup of adore and said
I’m the sum of all somedays and shoulds, but divided
Will I wake to find you dreamed my mind, should we hitch to Santa Fe?
My guitar shuts down its grammar
Walks the long taut string of say
The campfire flickers and feints in its fortress of stone
I know it’s kiss you now, or walk away alone
“What do you think?” she says.
I crack my knuckles. I think the same thing I thought about her Sudden Death song: lovely words but too many of them, stuffed in a wan little wandering melody. It’s a private mysterious incantation, not a proper pop verse.
This right here, this is what I was worried about. That awful moment where you have to say it’s a good start or you have some great ideas, but… I know the dread of impending revision too well, and it stinks to inflict it on someone else (even Ava). Poor Tera; I don’t know how she does this all the time.
“You hate it, don’t you?” says Ava.
“What? No!”
“FARG. I’m a blunt person, right?”
“Uh, yes.”
“I’m not a hypocrite. I like bluntness in others, too.”
“Look, whatever you do is working. You’ve been Top 3 for weeks.”
“Pfft, I’ve been coasting. I’m not the writer I could be. Not yet.”
“I’m probably not qualified to—”
“Don’t even with that bullshit.”
“I think it needs work,” I blurt.
“Yeah. Tera wasn’t thrilled with the practice verse I wrote in our session, either.” She blows out a breath that lifts a curl off her face. “Tell me what’s wrong. I want to win this.”
She wrote with Tera. I will not allow myself to think about that until cabaret day, when I can properly stew.
“Did, ah…Tera give you feedback?” I bite my lip hard.
“She said pop lyrics aren’t poetry and my biggest flaw is that I’m ‘willfully obscure.’ I mean—what? Why can’t it be poetry because you sing it to millions of people instead of writing it in a book no one buys? Joni Mitchell was a poet. Dylan—”
“Hang on.” I prop a snow-shovel handle under the doorknob for privacy, because this is becoming a bracingly intellectual creative conversation and also I have to stall to come up with an answer.
“I think maybe she means you’re like…retreating instead of revealing.” I thumbs-up myself subtly, because tha
t sounded smart. “Like, you’re hiding the meaning on purpose so we’ll have to work at it.”
“I’m not hiding anything! Those were my true, honest words. If anything I’m un-hiding.”
“Okay, but like, you did it in a way that was super-mysterious, and also very specific to you.”
“Everyone’s voice is specific to them. I can’t not draw on my own experience.”
“Right, but I mean…” I pause to gather good words. This is thrilling—an actual serious talk about songwriting, with someone whose eyes aren’t three seconds from glazing over. “I mean that people want to see themselves in pop songs, not just you. That’s why I shoot for universal sentiments.”
“What’s wrong with songs that make you work? They’re my favorite.”
“They totally have their place. But if you want mainstream success, most pop fans don’t want a puzzle to work out. They want fun or release or connection. They want to crank it up and sing along.”
“See, all I’m hearing is ‘dumb it down.’”
“That’s the cynical view.”
“What’s the non-cynical view?”
“That you’re trying to talk to as many people as possible, in language they’ll relate to. That it’s beautiful and noble to reach across the airwaves with simple, clean words that say you’re not alone. I feel it too.” My voice wobbles and whoo, that’s embarrassing, but I’m proud of myself for saying what I mean.
“I still think more mystery in music is good,” says Ava.
“Maybe. But honestly? Tera’s going to want less. So if you’re dead set on winning like you say you are…”
I trail off. She’s quiet. Thinking.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Yeah.”
“Why did you want to be on the show? It doesn’t seem like you.”
She lifts a shoulder, cuts her eyes to the right. “I’m just a competitive asshole, I guess.”
“Really, though.”
“What? I am competitive.” She keeps her eyes off me. “But also, it’s a chance to start a life. A real life. For me, and for—”
“Danny?” I say.
“Let’s…leave it there.”
As soon as she shuts down questions, I want to ask them all.
“Well, your last line is great,” I tell Ava. “The kiss you now or walk away alone line. That’s where the real emotion is. What if you scaled back some of the other words?”
“I don’t want to overthink this,” she says. “Lose my voice.”
“Don’t! Don’t lose your voice. Just…clear it up. Un-fancy it a little.” I grab the Nerf gun and aim it at the single bare bulb that lights the closet. “Like that pinprick line—what was it?”
“A pinprick pale in the sheltering sky.”
“The pinprick is a star, right?”
“Star is a boring word.”
“Star is an amazing word! Are you kidding? Four simple letters full of glitter and glamour and hope and wishes—”
“A star in the sheltering sky…” She strums an F chord, tests it out. A smile ghosts across her face. “Flows better. Fuck you.”
“Back atcha.” I grin.
Fifteen minutes later, she’s test-driving our revision, wrapping the words in a jaunty new rhythm I love:
August narrows down to this
A star in the sheltering sky
A question quivering on my lips, the last of the summer s’mores, and I
Am stuck in shoulds and somedays with nothing left to say
As the campfire flickers away
in its fortress of stone
I know it’s kiss you now, or walk away alone
“Ava. Ava.”
“Whaaat.” She’s smiling.
“It’s so much better.” I twirl around and knock into the lost and found box. “Look what we did!”
“No celebrating. We’re miles from perfect.”
I zing a Tera quote at her: “No song worth anything is perfect.”
“Yeah, okay, I’d love to systematically dismantle that concept, but we’ve got a Chevy commercial to wrap.”
“Ooh, cool! What’s the theme?”
“You’re such a dork. It’s a futuristic Jetsons thing.”
“What’re you wearing?”
“Robot costume.”
“Haa!”
“It was that or a holographic minidress.”
I would be all about rocking a holographic minidress in a Chevy commercial, but I hold my tongue. “Reconvene after?”
“What’s left?”
“Prechorus. Bridge.”
“Gross.”
“What?”
“A bridge?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“They’re sooooo old-fashioned.”
“They are not!”
“Yeah like, why don’t we stick in a sax solo, too?”
“ARGHHHH.”
“Just saying. Transitive Properties made three albums, and not a single song has a bridge.”
“But the middle eight is your goldmine of emotion! Your surprise. Your twist. Your YES moment. It’s when you collect all the feeling in your verses and chorus and say it in a whole new way that feels like…” I search for fresh metaphors. I fail. “Like a bird taking off.”
She performs deep thought for three seconds, her index finger tapping her chin. Then she rests Fernando on her knee and sings the following, in a breathy quavery sensitive-singer-songwriter voice: “You’re a goldmine of emotion/You’re a surprise/Ohhhh babe, my twist, my YES moment/A whole new way, that feels like a birrrrrrd taking offff….” She plucks a high A and makes a pop with her lips. “Done.”
“Jerkface.” I narrow my eyes.
“Hey now.” She gives me a smile that makes my toes wiggle. “I’m open to edits.”
Then she taps her END button, and she’s gone.
***
I leave the lost and found and reemerge in the real world. I am slightly dazed, like that time when Chelsie and I were in Wildwood and I made us ride the Music Express eight times in a row until we heard a Tera song. Abel is standing on the Captain James Cadmus Memorial Bar, hanging a giant new spaceship replica from an electric-blue exposed pipe.
“Babs! What were you doing in there?” he calls down to me.
“Writing a song.”
“You look shellshocked. The work getting to you?”
“No.” I study my phone, scrolling through the music store. “Not at all.”
I hit BUY on a Transitive Properties album called The Wreck of a Perfect Idea, and I stick my earbuds in.
***
For the rest of the day, in her spare between-session moments, we fight and compromise.
We work the lyrics to the bridge while I wig-browse at the beauty shop. She tells me we absolutely must strike my hearts-on-fire metaphor because “subtle is better.” I grumble. But I trust her.
We debate a final-chorus key change while I repair a hole in my cabaret jacket. I tell her that fans love the catharsis of a key change, they are not in fact “abominably cheesy,” and 91% of Pop U songs with final-chorus key changes have moved their contestants forward. She grumbles. But she trusts me.
We battle over a single word in the prechorus: “called” vs. “whispered.” No one wins. We hang up and don’t speak for forty-five minutes. When she calls me back, she’s replaced it with “breathed,” which works better than either word anyway.
We edit the melody till it’s two parts convention, one part surprise. We buff out syllables here and there until each line sings smooth and true.
We finish by 7 p.m.
“You ready?” whispers Ava. I’m in a glassed-in QUIET STUDY room at the public library; she’s in her Tiffany-blue Pop U bedroom.
“Are you alone?” I say.
“Yeah. Medora’s rehearsing down the hall with Nia.”
“Okay.” I close my eyes. “Let’s hear.”
Then she digs into the intro, and I know from chord one it’s a hit.
Before today I never enjoyed the phrase greater than the sum of their parts. When you’re a lone wolf in art and life, that whole concept taunts you, makes you feel like you’re somehow a lesser being if you haven’t experienced the transformative magic of partnership. Oh, whatever, you think. I can reach my full potential on my own. I don’t need another person to help me level up. But now it’s happened to me and I get what it means, the way people who fall in love for the first time suddenly feel every starry-eyed ballad was written for them.
“Verdict?” says Ava.
I’m afraid of the actual words on my tongue. So I’m like, “You kept the you dreamed my mind part.”
“You mad?”
“Not at all.”
“We took too much mystery out. I had to put some back in.”
“It’s good mystery,” I say. “I think it’s awesome, Ava.”
“Me too.”
We stare at each other through our phone screens. Smiles widen on our faces. Then someone on her end interrupts, and my screen goes black as she flips her phone over.
“Pasta’s almost done, Ava-girl,” Medora singsongs. “Are you coming down?”
“Nah, not tonight. I need to focus. This chorus is a bitch.”
“Oh, I hear that! Mine was absolutely tragic for days, but then I somehow managed an epiphany.” Medora’s chuckle is the kind you give kids after their fifth absurd knock-knock joke. “Well, good luck, sweetie.”
When she’s gone and Ava’s done rolling her eyes, I’m like, “Tera’s not taking you guys out tonight?”
“Nope. Saturdays are ‘forage for yourself’ nights. We go down to the kitchen, make food, talk about our songs.”
Envy pricks me. “Sounds great.”
She’s quiet.
“You should probably join them, right?” I say.
“I don’t want to.”
“Why not?”
“a.) I can’t stand at least three of them, b.) I hate eating in groups, and c.) …”