“I don’t have a single yet,” Rail said, “and this studio is booked to someone else in just a few weeks. If Gravitas is going to pay for additional sessions at another studio, I need to have a single in my hands when we leave here. ‘Language of Love’ could be it, but I won’t know that until I hear you sing it like you mean it. I’m not going to piss away the day dressing up a song with guitar parts if the song might not even make the cut. Do you think I’m making a guitar record? I’m making a Billy Moon record. So get out there and sell me the song.”
Billy went to the kitchenette, lit a cigarette, and made himself a cup of Throat Coat tea. Jake was telling Ron which vocal mics to set up in the booth for Billy to try out.
“Billy, is there a favorite mic you’ve used in the past?” Jake asked.
“Not really. It always sounds like me no matter which mic. What’s the big black one that’s shaped like a gun?”
“An SM-7?”
“Yeah, I like that one.”
Jake called into the booth, “Put up an SM-7 too.”
A little while later Gribbens poked his head out of the control room and told Billy, “Ready when you are.”
Billy pulled a blue horse-blanket aside and stepped into the dead air of the booth, where he found his worn headphones hanging from a hook beside an assortment of expensive mics on stands. He put the cans on and looked through the window to the control room. Jake’s voice in his ears told him to sing through the song once, starting with the mic on the left and moving over to the next one for each new verse or chorus until he had tried them all.
Even in the headphones he could hear a sweet spot in the spectrum of his voice when he tried the third mic, singing:
Do you write a check?
Do you write a song?
Do you risk your neck?
To right a wrong?
Do you toss your change in a beggar’s cup?
Run into the flames, does it raise you up?
When you’re tied to the chair,
Will you lie, do you swear?
How do you speak the language of love?
They settled on the third mic. Gribbens took the others away and placed a windscreen in front of the keeper. Billy asked for a touch of reverb in the cans and Jake dialed it in. Time to sing it for real.
Billy closed his eyes and went inward, letting the dark details of the music carry him to that place where the studio disappeared and the part of him that was half poet, half character actor stepped up and laid it down. But in the middle of the take, he was jolted out of the flow when the backing track abruptly fell out from under him. Rail’s voice clicked into his ears, thin and distant, but as saturated with willful command as ever. “Pick a fucking beat to end each note on, Billy. They shouldn’t be that long. You’re running out of air and getting pitchy at the end of every line. Try ending it on three.”
And so it went for the next few hours. Billy sang until his voice was warmed up, rich and fluid. Then Rail had him sing the same chorus over and over in falsetto, full voice, and a raspy scream until his tone passed into a zone that was ragged and weak. The shadows of mic stands on the wood floor shortened as the sun climbed to its zenith. Purple and gold puddles moved across the room from the stained-glass panes. Rail’s criticism chattered, metallic and tireless in the headphones.
In the afternoon, the room darkened with storm clouds and snow flurries dusted the ground around the little church. The song played on and Billy sang:
Do you raise your voice?
Drop your pants?
Do you even have a choice?
Did you ever have a chance?
In a dirty phone booth,
Do you swear to tell the truth?
How do you speak the language of love?
Dark gray shapes trotted out of the woods in the falling snow. Dogs? Surely not a whole pack. Billy glimpsed motion much closer through the vocal booth’s distorted Plexiglas window and the kitchen window beyond. Something lunging past, too quick to focus on.
Wolves. He stopped singing and took the headphones off. The music marched on without him, now reduced to a trebly clattering from the headphones hanging in his hand. They were wolves—bony, motley gray wolves running in the field around the church. The playback in his headphones stopped. He dropped them absentmindedly and stepped out of the booth. Slowly, like a man in a trance, he walked across the room to where Flint was standing on a stool, peering out through a clear segment in one of the Stations of the Cross. Flint looked down at Billy, his face blanched, and said simply, “Wolves.”
“Over there too,” Billy said, nodding in the direction of the kitchenette. “They’re circling the church.”
Flint laughed. A dry, humorless chuckle that reminded Billy of the sound of a motorcycle engine sputtering out on an empty tank. “Told you, you should have booked a room in the city.”
The control room doors swung open. Rail leaned out between them and snapped his fingers like a hypnotist. The sound echoed in the space above them.
“I brought you here so you could work without distraction,” Rail said. “Back in the booth.” He pulled the doors shut without waiting for a response and took his seat beside Jake with an imperious stare that never left Billy. Behind him, the reels of the tape machine whirred, rolling back to the top of the song.
Flint said, “Do you think they’re hunting deer?”
“Deer would be in the forest where they came from,” Billy said, walking back to the booth. He slipped the headphones on, pulling his long black hair out of his eyes with them.
He tried to focus on the song, but then, halfway through the next take, he heard something in the mix that hadn’t been there before: a voice whispering in some strange clipped dialect. Billy stopped singing. The song cut off, followed by a short reverb trail.
The air inside the booth suddenly felt at least five degrees colder.
“What now?” Rail said.
“Did you just say something to me, while I was singing?”
“No.”
“I thought I heard you saying something. But it sounded like it was in Russian. Never mind, just roll it back to the top of the chorus and punch me in.”
This time he sang all the way through, but there it was again—a whispering voice at the fifth bar of the second chorus. It had to be on the recording, but he had heard this mix at least twenty times today. If the voice was on the tape, he should have noticed it before now. When he finished the take, he asked to hear it back. As the song played, he dialed down the knob labeled VOX in red sharpie on his personal headphone mixer so that his own voice vanished from the mix. No one in the control room would know he wasn’t listening to his own last performance for flaws. He turned the master volume up, holding his breath as the second chorus came around. There. It sounded like a woman’s voice saying, scar hath woluf.
What the hell did that mean and who said it? He was certain the whispered fragment hadn’t been there until two takes ago. Billy's mouth went dry, as if all of the moisture in it had drained down to his palms, which were now slick with sweat. He wanted very badly to get out of the booth, to get out of town.
Rail’s voice blasted in his ears, loud and metallic. He jumped and swatted at the little mixer, cranking the volume down again as Rail said, “I want you to put the emphasis on the second syllable. On the beat. Got it?”
“Yeah, okay.” Billy wiped his hands on his jeans, sipped his tea, and set the mug down with a tremor in his hand.
Two takes later, Rail was satisfied, and he called for Flint’s overdubs. Billy stepped outside for a moment to take in the air while the engineers were setting up for guitar. The snow flurry had ceased and the wolves were gone. Scanning the gray sky and the silent tree line, the only sound Billy heard was in his memory where an old song, a song that never really stopped playing, marched on—the dull jangle, twang and thump of Robert Johnson’s battered steel string guitar, and that reedy African voice that sounded so old Billy could imagine it issuing from the dusty thro
at of a Canopic jar: Got to keep on movin’, blues fallin’ down like hail. Got to keeeep on movin’, hellhounds on my trail.
Rail declared the session over just after midnight. The producer offered his hand to Flint as they walked down the church steps together. Flint switched the handle of his guitar case over to his left hand to receive the gesture. Billy thought his friend looked a little weaker after that handshake.
Rail continued on alone across the gravel lot, lighting up the BMW with the key fob. When the taillights disappeared, vanishing over the crest of the hill beyond a mist of glowing red exhaust, Flint looked up at Billy standing in the open door.
“I’m glad he didn’t press me to stay on another day,” Flint said.
“I think he knows you won’t take any shit from him.”
Flint smiled thinly at the overestimation. “You could give him the same idea, Billy.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not under contract.”
Flint wanted to say more and they both knew it, but all he said was, “I’ll be taking a car back to the city in the morning, probably before you get up. Take care of yourself, eh?”
“Thanks, man. You were brilliant.”
“Any time.”
Billy watched Flint walk across the field to the rectory. Gribbens jogged down the steps, slapped Billy on the shoulder as he passed and said, “Later, Billy.”
Billy started back up the steps, the sound of Gribbens handling his mother’s car like a stunt driver receding into the night behind him. Jake appeared in the doorway, shaking his head, and said, “You’d think the accident would have made him just a little more careful.”
Billy shrugged, then jutted his chin out and said, “Hey, Jake, can you hang just a little bit longer and play something back for me?”
Was that a sigh Billy heard? He couldn’t read Jake’s face, backlit in the doorway, but if the young engineer begrudged him for extending the day’s work, his voice kept the sentiment in check when he said, “Sure thing.”
Jake flicked on the lights in the control room and asked, “What song?”
“‘Language of Love.’”
“Of course. The song of many vocals,” Jake said, pulling the box from among its fellows, all lined up on the windowsill next to the multi-track, their spines labeled in Gribbens’s neat hand. He threaded the tape onto the machine, typed a number into the transport, and set the reels spinning, the pitch of the motor rising as it picked up speed and lost the resistance of a full spool, then falling again as it slowed to a stop at the head of the song.
Billy said, “Take me to the top of the second chorus.”
Jake checked Ron’s notes and shuttled to the proper cue. The room was filled with the thick rhythms of bass, drums and keyboards, as well as the newly minted cacophony of layered guitars and a choir of Billy’s vocals. They listened to the chorus until about the halfway point, when Billy reached past Jake and hit the STOP key, rewound a few beats and hit PLAY.
“What are we listening for?” Jake asked.
Billy shushed him and leaned into the speakers. “There, you hear that?”
“Sounds like talking in the background,” Jake said, sitting up.
“Doesn’t it? You didn’t hear that when I asked Rail if he was talking to me during a take?”
Jake looked embarrassed. “If we didn’t have some of the tracks muted right now, I think it would be harder to pick that out. You probably only noticed it because you had headphones on.”
“Yeah, but what is it?”
“Dunno. I mean it’s obviously someone talking. Could be on one of the drum tracks. Steve might have said something while he was playing. Or even Jeff. One of them cued the other and it got picked up by a drum mic. Don’t worry about it. I’ll sift through the tracks and find out where it is when we have some down time. If I can’t spot erase it, I’m sure whoever mixes the song can hide it. It’s only there for a second or two.”
Billy furrowed his brow, then said, “Find it now.”
“That could take a while. Why’s it so urgent?”
“I want to know what it’s saying. And it sounds like a woman’s voice. I don’t think it’s Jeff or Steve.”
Jake ran his hand through his hair and sighed. “Alright.” He hit the rewind key and said, “If you want to watch TV upstairs or something, I’ll give a shout when I have it isolated.”
“Nah, I’m good,” Billy said, planting himself on the couch and flipping open a copy of Rolling Stone.
Jake started muting entire groups of tracks, running his finger across a row of buttons, leaving a trail of red lights and snuffing out entire swathes of the mix. First all the drums. The voice was still there, clearer now with less to obscure it. And it was a woman. He wondered if a radio station had been briefly picked up by a poorly shielded cable. Next, all the guitars. Still there.
Billy listened as Jake carried out the tedious process of looping the three bars in question to repeat over and over again, isolating the vocal tracks in solo mode and marking the strip of masking tape that identified each track with a penciled X to rule out one after another. Billy had never liked hearing his own voice naked, without musical accompaniment or reverb—especially early takes of a new song with all the rough edges still showing, but he endured it, forcing himself to listen carefully. Jake had been right about how time-consuming it was. He almost drifted off but startled back to a state of alertness when his chin touched his chest. He tuned in again. The rollers engaged. The spools revolved.
Scar hath woluf
“Got it,” Jake said.
Billy leaned over the console. Now he was fully awake, adrenaline saturating his sinews.
Jake pushed a fader up and played it again. The whispered phrase sounded distant compared to Billy’s sung lines before and after it.
“So it’s on one of my vocal tracks.”
Jake nodded and made a note on the track sheet. “Track seventeen. A harmony part. And it doesn’t overlap with your singing, so I can erase it no problem.”
“Don’t erase it!” Billy yelled, his hand out, fingers splayed. He rubbed his eyes and pondered. “I think that might be the take I was doing when I first heard it. If it’s on my track, that means my mic picked it up while I was singing.”
Jake bit the inside of his cheek, eying Billy sidelong.
“It’s like someone was in the booth with me, whispering over my shoulder. Whispering into my ear.”
Jake raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth but nothing came out.
“What?” Billy asked.
“Nothing, I just… I just think it’s late and you’re tired and maybe more than a little stressed out.”
“You hear it too, Jake. It’s on the fucking tape. The needle moves when it goes by. Shit, you found it yourself. Don’t tell me I’m hearing things.”
“I didn’t say that.”
They stared at each other until Jake looked away.
“You think it’s me,” Billy said at last.
Jake looked down at the field of knobs before him.
“That’s not my voice.”
For a moment neither of them said anything. Then Billy asked Jake to play it again.
Scar hath woluf.
“It sounds like the last word might be ‘wolf,’” Billy said, “and those wolves were outside when I heard it.”
“Billy… have you ever heard of an artist going into a kind of… creative trance?”
“It’s not my voice.”
Jake pulled his chair closer to the console, rested his elbows on the leather pad, and rubbed his eyes with his fingertips.
Billy said, “I’m sorry, but if I said it, why don’t I know what it means?”
“My girlfriend majored in psychology. She talks about this kind of thing all the time, and according to her, trance states work like that. Maybe it means something to you subconsciously. It slipped out while you were getting into the song.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“What do you think it is?�
�
“A ghost. There, I said it.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, the possibility that you went into a trance for a few seconds and whispered some gibberish you don’t remember saying requires a much smaller leap than the idea that a ghost was in the booth with you and we caught it on tape.”
Billy made a sour face and said, “Play it backwards.”
“Huh?”
“Can you play it backwards?”
Jake glanced at his watch, but nodded. “I can do it, yeah. Let's see… uh, flipping the tape over and finding it again could take some time. I’ll boot up the computer and fly it into Pro Tools. Take a couple of minutes.”
Billy paced the big room, smoking a cigarette, and eyeing the vocal booth with suspicion while Jake worked. When Jake waved him back in, there was a small blue waveform on the screen.
Jake tapped the spacebar. The sample played in reverse.
Billy clutched Jake’s shoulder. “Did you hear that? It says, follow the tracks.” He looked excitedly at Jake for confirmation, but Jake kept his eyes on the screen and clicked the mouse to cue it up again.
Jake played it again.
Billy said, “Well? Right?”
“It could sound like ‘follow the tracks.’ Especially now that I’m listening to it with that in mind.”
“What the fuck, Agent Scully? It’s as clear as day.”
“It’s clear to you. But we’re both really tired.”
Billy sat down hard and sunk into the couch. Jake was right, he was tired, but why couldn’t the kid admit that he heard the message? What was he so afraid of? He said, “You know, if you want to talk psychobabble about subconscious states and such, I could point out that the reason you’re in denial about what you heard is because it scares you.”
The Devil of Echo Lake Page 14
