Wildflower

by Alecia Whitaker

  He drops his leg and leans forward, his elbows on his knees and his gaze intense. “But I stand by what I said last night. They will try to package you to fit into their pop image and new-country sound.”

  He glances over at my dad and then turns his stare back to me.

  “The reason I left Allied was because I wanted the freedom to find and develop truly unique talent again,” he says. “It had started becoming all about money and just churning out the same old stuff because that’s what was selling.” He stops and grins. “Of course, we want your music to sell…” My dad chuckles. I return Dan’s smile, his enthusiasm catching. “But we want it to be just that, your music.”

  “That’s what I want, too,” I say. “I loved playing my stuff at the Bluebird last night. I was nervous at first, but after we went around a couple of times, I felt like there was nowhere else on earth I’d rather be.”

  “And that was obvious to everybody in the crowd, right, Judd?”

  “I thought she was amazing.”

  “Exactly, and not just because you’re her father.” The way Dan says things, it’s as if they’re facts—not questions. “Bird, you excite me as an artist more than anyone has in a long time. Your songs were full of raw emotion, and the way you played and sang from the heart, without forcing the feelings, was like a breath of fresh air. Of course GAM wants you, but we do, too. I want to operate Open Highway from here”—he knots his fist at his gut—“not from here,” he says, pointing to his head.

  “And where do you see Bird fitting in?” my dad asks, clearly as excited about Dan Silver’s take on the industry as I am.

  “We’re not as big as Great American Music,” he answers candidly, “but we’re better. Or at least we will be with Bird on board.” He turns his gaze on me. “Bird, you’re what Open Highway Records is all about, and we want you to be one of our first new artists. I’m prepared to sign you to a full record deal. I think you have what it takes to turn this industry on its head, and I want to be the one helping you do it.”

  His pitch is impassioned. He believes I’m good enough to jump in with both feet. I look over at my dad, meeting blue eyes just like mine, and see there exactly what I’m already thinking: Dan Silver is our man. I nod slightly.

  “Okay, Dan,” my dad says, looking a little relieved. “Get us some papers.”

  Dan grins and stands up, shaking my hand first and then my dad’s before walking over to his desk.

  “It’s happening, Bird,” my dad says.

  “It really is,” I answer. And although I’ve been on the road practically my whole life, I somehow feel like my journey is just beginning.

  “WHAT DID THE GAM people say when you told them you were going with Open Highway?” Shannon asks, clamping a capo on her guitar.

  I shrug, slightly queasy about it. “I don’t know exactly. My dad called ’em.”

  “Good,” she says with a nod. “That’s what managers are for. Now, why don’t we try it again in G,” she suggests, flicking her long black hair over her shoulder.

  The first thing Dan Silver did after I signed with Open Highway was schedule a songwriting session so I could polish my songs with a seasoned professional. He’d noticed the chemistry I had with Shannon Crossley at the Bluebird and asked if I’d like to work with her professionally. I couldn’t say yes fast enough. I was a little intimidated when I first showed up at her apartment, but she’s so chill that I feel like I’ve known her forever.

  “Okay, if you think that’ll work,” I say, changing my fingers and starting in on the first verse again. We’ve decided to start with the song about Adam that I sang at the Bluebird. She’s also going to help me write some new songs, but she really thinks this one could be gold.

  I’ve never thought so hard about a song before. Usually the lyrics and melody come to me quickly, and then I move on to the next one, but today, we have worked and reworked this song to a point where I barely recognize it. With Shannon’s suggestions, it feels fuller, and I get more and more excited about it as we try new things. Some changes work, like simplifying the bridge, and others don’t, like changing the key.

  “Stop, stop, stop,” Shannon says, waving her hand in the air and laughing. “So ‘G’ does not stand for ‘Good Idea.’ ”

  I laugh, relieved, because I feel the same way.

  Suddenly the front door opens, and a girl about my age walks in, talking on her cell phone loudly before noticing us in the living room. She instantly lowers her voice and waves, mouthing sorry to Shannon before dropping her backpack on the floor and hustling around the corner to the kitchen.

  “That’s my daughter, Stella,” Shannon says, nodding toward the front door.

  “Yeah, you guys look a lot alike,” I say. They both have strong jawlines and high cheekbones, and dress in a way that looks effortless and yet enviably stylish. They have the same dark, straight hair, too, although Stella wears hers with thick bangs.

  “She’s a senior,” Shannon says.

  “Cool,” I say. “Me too.”

  “Oh? I thought you just turned sixteen.”

  “Well, I skipped a grade,” I explain. “In homeschool. I’ve had the week off because my mom and brothers have been away, but they got back into town last night, so technically, I’m skipping class right now.”

  Shannon laughs. “Ah, just your average teen rebel, huh?”

  I smile, but we both know my life has been anything but average. Looking at Stella’s bag on the floor, lavender canvas that’s been doodled on with a Sharpie marker, I feel a twinge of envy. It’s just crazy to think about how different our days are. Like today for instance: she was at school, going from class to class, passing her friends in the hallways, and maybe holding hands with a boyfriend or something in the cafeteria—that’s how I imagine it at least—while I spent the morning sitting across from my brother at an RV kitchenette doing math problems from a workbook before borrowing my other brother’s guitar to work on an album for the record deal I signed last week.

  “You sit tight,” Shannon says, setting her guitar down on its stand. “I’ll go grab us a couple of waters.”

  As she joins her daughter in the kitchen, I marvel once more at their place, a truly incredible loft in East Nashville. Shannon said the building used to be a warehouse, but now the units have been renovated for housing, art galleries, and studios. It’s funky and fun, large and open, obviously decorated by a person with an artistic eye, and way more comfortable than Winnie. There is a Grammy statuette on one of the bookshelves and an entire room off the common living area chock-full of instruments and awards. I want to move in.

  “Okay,” Shannon says, coming back into the room. She straightens the tiers of her dangly turquoise earrings before picking up her guitar again. “Now, I’m still not loving the chorus. I mean, I love the song and the feel, but we need a button, you know? Something to tack it down at the end.”

  I frown, looking at my journal. The original lyrics were scrawled out like a poem, but now I’ve penciled in lots of notes and symbols in the margins and the spaces between the lines. What seemed like a simple song at first has become an intricate ballad. I like our version much better now, but right when I think we’ve nailed it, Shannon wants more.

  “How do you know when a song is done?” I ask. I’m not frustrated; I just sincerely want to know. It feels ready to me.

  She shrugs, strumming the opening notes. “When it feels whole.”

  I stroke the strings of Dylan’s guitar and nod. I don’t really get it, but I trust her. She’s the one with the Grammy, after all. We play the song about Adam again, but at the end of the chorus, Shannon stops. “What do you want from this guy?” she asks bluntly.

  My hand slaps the strings quiet, and my mouth hangs open. When she puts it that way, I’m kind of at a loss for words. “I—I just—”

  “She wants him to notice her,” Stella interrupts, leaning against a thick wooden column with her bag over her shoulder and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in
hand. Shannon and I both look up at her, surprised. I didn’t even hear her come into the room. “Sorry.” She shrugs, although she doesn’t appear to be. “Just speaking from experience.”

  “No, you’re totally right,” I say, turning to face her. “It’s like, I know him pretty well. He’s really good friends with my brother.” I chew on my lip and look out the window toward the Cumberland River. “But I don’t know if he sees me as just a friend or as something more.”

  “Do you flirt?” Stella asks directly before taking another giant bite of her sandwich.

  I blush. “I think so,” I answer, thinking about our Coke game. But then I also think about how Jacob calls it lame, and I wonder if Adam does it just to humor me or if it really is our “thing.”

  “He gave me flowers,” I say, perking up and thinking back to that amazing night at the Station Inn.

  “He gave you flowers?” Stella asks enthusiastically, plopping down on the couch next to me. “Oh yeah, then he totally likes you.”

  “You really think so?” I ask eagerly. I’m so freaking pumped to finally have a girl’s perspective.

  Then I glance over at Shannon, worried that maybe she’s annoyed that we’ve interrupted our songwriting session for girl talk, but she seems as engrossed in my Adam crush as her daughter. “What kind of flowers? Roses?” Shannon asks.

  I grin, remembering. “It was a little bouquet.”

  “If a guy buys you flowers, he likes you,” Stella says.

  “If a guy opens his wallet for anything, he likes you,” Shannon says dryly. “That’s been my experience.”

  Stella rolls her eyes. “Yeah, because the guys you date are cheapskates.”

  I stare at her, unable to imagine talking to my own mother like that, but Shannon just chuckles. “True, but they make for good songs.”

  “Well, he didn’t actually buy them,” I admit. “He must have picked them. They were wildflowers.”

  “Oh,” Stella says, drawing that one word out in a monotone way that makes me think she has more to say but won’t out of politeness.

  There is an awkward moment. I look down and start to strum, thinking back to the flowers and how mad I was when Dylan tossed them out. Dad’s sneezing his head off as it is, he’d said. Those weeds aren’t helping.

  “Like in the song,” Shannon says. “If you ask me, wildflowers are nice. Stella used to pick dandelions for me, and I cherished them more than a dozen roses from any man.”

  “I guess,” I say quietly. I was excited to get flowers for the first time, but now I’m embarrassed talking to Stella and Shannon about it. It had seemed so romantic, like Adam had gone out of his way to do something sweet for me, but maybe he’d just picked them from the cracks of the parking lot as an afterthought. Maybe it wasn’t romantic at all, just nice. Just like Adam.

  I sigh heavily, feeling exactly the way I felt the night I originally wrote this song, months ago. Adam had said he’d loved our set and even mentioned hanging around after, but then he and my brothers just up and went bowling without me—they said it was a “guys’ night”—and I was left at home with my parents and my journal.

  “I just want him to see me, you know? Like really see me, deep down.” I look up at Stella, then Shannon. “Does that make sense?”

  “You want him to perceive the real you,” Stella says, before shoving the last of her sandwich into her mouth.

  I nod. “Exactly.”

  Shannon takes a sip from her water bottle and then shoos her daughter out of the room. “Go do your homework, missy. We’ve got to figure out this song or Dan’s going to kill me.”

  Stella rolls her eyes and picks up her backpack. “Party pooper.” Shannon returns the gesture, and I smile. Although I’m close with my mom, too, Shannon and Stella seem more like friends than mother and daughter.

  As Stella slowly plods up the spiral staircase to her loft bedroom, she calls out, “Bye-bye, Birdie.”

  I look up and smile. “Bye, Stella.”

  “So…” Shannon says, reaching over and grabbing a pen. She scribbles in her own notebook and then suggests, “How about we end the chorus with ‘notice me’?”

  I look at my own journal, and it’s like a lightbulb goes off. “It’s perfect.”

  And just like that, the master has taught the student how a writer knows when a song is finally finished.

  IT’S CRAZY HOW fast life can change. Two weeks ago, I was crammed in a tiny RV, living and touring with my family. Now, I’m standing in an equally cramped space, but it’s covered wall-to-wall with spongy black foam, and the only things in here with me are a microphone and a music stand holding the pages of “Notice Me.” Dan liked the demo I recorded with Shannon, and if he likes the studio recording, it will be the first song on my album.

  A voice blares through the small space: “This time, hold that note in the lift a little longer.” I look at the producer Dan hired for me and give him a thumbs-up through the glass that separates us. Jack Horn is supposed to be the best. He and his team of sound guys have worked with everybody from Sugarland to Willie Nelson, and although he’s nice enough, he’s all business. I’m used to performing for live audiences, people who stomp their feet and bob their heads, not a forty-year-old in a backward baseball cap with a constant worry line between his eyes. Every time I sing “Notice Me,” Jack gives me directions on how to do it better. I thought I’d be in and out of here, but it’s been all morning and we still don’t have it right. I’ve had to pee for thirty minutes now, but I’m afraid to mention it.

  “So, from the pre-chorus, then?” I ask timidly.

  He nods from the control room and the music pours into my headphones. I start in on the lyrics again, leaning toward the microphone. My fingers ache for an instrument, but we laid down Maybelle’s fiddling pass yesterday, and we’re just doing vocals right now. I had no idea that recording a song required so many steps. The whole process is way more complicated than I ever imagined. I thought for sure my family would be my backing band, but Dan nixed the idea in favor of what he called “session veterans” who already know the sound we’re going for. My dad hadn’t seemed surprised, but my brothers were pretty mad when I told them.

  “So we’re not good enough for you anymore?” Dylan had demanded.

  “You totally are,” I assured him. “I’m definitely going to play that song ‘Before Music’ for Dan. And since you and I wrote it together, you’ll get a songwriting credit if we use it on the album.”

  “But I’m not a good-enough musician.”

  “That’s not what he meant,” I tried to explain.

  “She’s even sticking up for him now,” Jacob chimed in, pulling up the black hood of his sweatshirt and grabbing the car keys. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Then they took a drive to who knows where, not coming home until after dinner. I wanted to talk to them about it again, but my dad told me they needed a little time and space. “There are a lot of changes coming that we’re all going to have to get used to,” he said.

  Tell me about it, I think now. I love the magic of performing for live audiences, even though our shows are exhausting, but it’s a whole different beast trying to keep up that same energy in the studio, take after take. And this afternoon, I’ll be singing and recording every piece of harmony myself. All this for just one song.

  “Stop, stop, Bird.” Jack sighs into the speaker by the soundboard. He takes off his headphones and stands up. My heart sinks. I look over at my dad for some moral support, but he’s not even paying attention anymore. He is completely engrossed in his cell phone, and honestly, I can’t blame him. He’s heard this song a million times by now.

  “Sorry I’m messing up so much,” I say into the mic.

  Jack leans over the soundboard and pushes the speaker button. “Are you kidding?” he asks, seeming genuinely surprised. “You’re doing great.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he explains. “I’m just a perfectionist.”

  “Oh my go
sh,” I say, letting out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and clutching at the ties of my hooded sweatshirt. “I thought you wanted to pull your hair out.”

  “No, not at all,” he assures me. “I just want it to be spot-on perfect, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He removes the pencil tucked behind his right ear and holds up his sheet music. “Make a note after the bridge,” he instructs me. It feels so weird to be having an entire conversation through a giant pane of glass. “When you come back in, I really want you to punch it. This is the big moment, okay? And when we nail that, let’s take a break.”

  “Cool,” I say, marking it.

  I readjust my headphones and take a drink of water, relief washing over me. I’m not majorly screwing up; I’m just working toward perfection. I can handle that.

  “Here we go, Bird,” Jack says, sitting back down and motioning to his sound team.

  The music flows again, my cue in two bars. I lean nearer to the mic and focus on the feelings behind the words. I close my eyes and let my voice fill the room, bring my hand to my chest and come in stronger at the final chorus, letting loose with the vocals, pleading with this boy of mine to actually be mine.

  “I never knew the words ‘let’s take a break’ could be so powerful,” I say to my dad outside the bathroom. “That was brutal.”

  Together, we walk down the small stairs, both of us eager to get a little fresh air before heading back into the studio.

  “I thought you sounded great,” Dad says. “The first few times he stopped you, I thought maybe he was hearing nerves or maybe you were flat a couple of times, but then I was just as baffled as you were. I don’t know what those guys were hearing, but I guess that’s why they’re the professionals.”