The next morning, they started recording. Luke opened the entire back wing, which was divided into two rooms. The first was a control room; through the glass was the studio.
“This shit is awesome,” said Hugh, his hand looming over the knobs and levers.
“Don’t touch it,” said Luke.
Hugh quickly moved his hand away.
This board was the most elaborate thing she’d ever seen, with well over three hundred buttons and levers. This whole thing seemed impossible—that they were here in this studio and someone like Luke Varner believed enough in what they were doing to let them record an album.
“We’ll start with the drums,” said Luke to Ezra. “Once we get that sound down, we’ll lay down that track.”
“How does it work?” Ezra stared behind the glass at his drum set, which had been set up with least six microphones placed around it. “How do we cut an album?”
The setup was intimidating. Between Hugh and Sandra they had five original songs. They’d rehearsed them at the Shack for the past two months and smoothed out the rough parts, but they locked eyes over the Neve console and almost read each other’s minds. Holy shit! Are we up for this? They had a month in here to work on their music together under the direction of someone who could shape their sound—it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and they all knew it.
“It’s never going to be better than this, is it?” Hugh said it so quietly that only Sandra heard him.
“No,” she answered. “It isn’t.”
Luke looked up. “Oh good. The cavalry has arrived.” He turned to Ezra. “These guys can explain to you how you’re going to cut an album.”
Two men stood in the doorway.
“This is Bex Martinez,” said Luke, pointing to the taller man. “He’s your bass player for the session. Paul says you don’t have a bass player. Bex here is a session musician originally from Santa Fe.” Bex was tall and lanky. He wore a cowboy hat and a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out. Rather than speak, he just nodded to everyone. “I think Bex can also play lead guitar and steel guitar if you need him to.”
“Banjo too,” offered Bex.
“And banjo, too.” Clapping his hands together, Luke turned back to the second man at the door, a tiny, bald man with a long beard. He looked like an elf from a Christmas special Sandra had seen. “And this is Lenny Brandt. He’s your sound engineer—all the way from England.” He turned to Hugh. “He can touch the equipment.”
“Far out,” said Lily.
“I want to hear what you’ve got,” said Lenny, who was not English but Australian. During the next twenty-four hours, Lenny and Luke had the band play the five songs they’d written. Lenny would stop them and make corrections and suggest changes, his fingers moving quickly over the dials with a great ear; his fingernails were bitten to the quick. He made furious scribbles in a small notebook, each song taking up seven or so pages before he moved on to the next.
By the evening, they were exhausted. Marie had brought dinner in for the group in the studio. Other than trips to the bathroom, the group hadn’t left the studio all day.
“Anything else?” Lenny looked at Sandra and Hugh.
“That’s all we have so far,” said Hugh.
“I have two songs.” Ezra poked his head up from the drum set.
“Have you guys played them?” Lenny turned to Sandra and Hugh, who shook their heads.
“Okay, you guys practice those two songs at night if you can, to get them ready. We’ve got five songs to work with for now for the album. Let’s try to record a song a day if we can—although that’s aggressive because I think they all need a little more work.” Lenny turned to Bex. “What do you think?”
Bex nodded. “I think Hugh and I can layer the guitars a bit more.”
“My thoughts exactly.” He turned to Sandra. “I want a regular electronic keyboard in here. Either that or we haul in that beautiful Steinway, although I get it needs a tuning.”
“It does need a tuning,” Sandra agreed.
“I think all these songs have too much reverb. You’ve got great, meaningful lyrics and you are trying to pretend you’re Hendrix. Only Hendrix is Hendrix. Got it? Find your own voices.” Lenny was leaning against the glass. “Okay, let’s all go roll some joints.”
“Fuck yeah,” said Hugh.
The next morning, they began recording the first song, laying down the drum tracks, the rhythm track next, followed by keyboard and finally vocals. When the first song was finished, Lenny handed them an eight-track tape and a bottle of tequila. “Take it somewhere special, man.”
Hugh smiled and the five of them—for Bex Martinez was now fully a member of the group—all sat in the Chrysler with the top down listening to the master track and passing the tequila around the car as the sun beat down on them. They’d never heard themselves before.
Lenny had pulled the drums forward to balance them and blended the guitar, layering on Bex’s tracks as well. The finished product was a song that wasn’t overcomplicated with reverb, but it was polished.
“Jesus,” said Ezra. “That’s us.”
And Sandra’s throat caught and she had to swallow hard so she wouldn’t cry. The parts of them had never been as great as the whole. They were good. They could do this.
Over the next two days, they’d go their separate ways in the morning and work on individual pieces and then come back together to see what they had. As they laid down two more tracks, Sandra’s strange dreams continued. France became something out of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—and Sandra felt like she was inhabiting another person. There was a painter in her dreams. Sex with this painter, whose name was Marchant, was wild, brutal, and intense. She came down the stairs in the morning exhausted, but had more clarity about things around her like colors and sounds.
Oddly, these dreams made her more creative in the studio, and it showed up in her writing. While listening to a song they’d played for six months, Sandra began to see the song differently. She thought it should be dreamier, slowing the tempo down. Bex, seeing where she was going with it, pulled out a steel guitar and had Ezra soften the snare. The result was a lush, haunting sound that felt like her dream.
On the third night, the strangest thing was that a version of Luke Varner appeared in them as well. The girl in her dreams, Juliet, had begun living with him in Paris. She played the piano—she played the Grieg, the Satie—pieces that were very, very familiar to Sandra. When the girl jumped off the Pont Neuf, Sandra was startled awake choking—spitting actual water out on her pillow. “Jesus.”
Sandra stared up at the wooden beams above her. “What the fuck is happening to me?”
At breakfast the next morning, Luke sat down across from her at the table. “Can I show you something?”
She followed him down the hall and into the room with the Steinway. He pulled out several composition books; Sandra could see they were musical compositions, at least four volumes. “You might get some inspiration from these? Lenny says you need four more songs.”
Sandra looked down at the writing, and something struck her. She recognized the first few bars and she leaned in, studying them closely. “Who wrote these?”