“I don’t want their answer. I want yours. You’re the only impartial one here that I can ask.”
“What makes you think I’m impartial? At the end of the day, we both know we’ll end up doing what the two of them want.”
“Yeah. But even if that is what we end up doing, I need to know . . . I need to figure out if I’m right, if I should trust my instincts on this.”
Cerys stood and walked up to him, looking up into his eyes. “Yes, Jase. You’re right. The song isn’t your strongest by far and it doesn’t compare to many of the others.”
Jase blew out a breath and lowered his head. His shoulders dropped away from his ears. “Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind, when it’s me against every other fucker in that room.”
“It’s not you. But as a band, you need to learn how to communicate with each other. You can’t honestly want another twenty years of this, can you?”
Confusion etched his features. “What do you mean?”
“My fitness app tells me that my heart runs a steady fifty-nine beats per minute usually, but the last three days with you, I’ve run at seventy-two. I feel anxious listening to you all bicker and yell and insult each other. I thought you were family.”
Jase looped his fingers around her wrist. It was late. They were alone for now, and somehow the touch of him grounded her. “At the end of the day, we are family. And the only way to get out of the hand-to-mouth existence we live in is this band. We either all get out, or none of us get out.”
“But do you enjoy it?” She placed her free hand on his bicep.
“The singing? It’s the only fucking thing I have in my life. Being on stage in front of people is the only time I feel like my life has any kind of purpose. I feel the roar of music and the chant of the crowd, the vibration of it tattooing my rib cage. Their voices etched inside me. It’s the only time I feel the blood in my veins and remind myself I’m actually alive. But this process, with them, with Matt? No. I don’t. I fucking hate it. But I hate being broke more than I hate arguing with them. I hate that my nan has a mould problem in her house we can’t get under control. And right now, I know Ben or Alex will be texting with their mum, even though it’s two in the morning, to make sure she’s okay because their dad is a ruthless bastard. And Luke. Well, he has every reason to hate me and Matt, but we couldn’t get out of this and leave him behind.” He ran his hand through his hair, pushing the curls out of his face. “I gotta go.”
“Wait. What if I could suggest some rules and tools for collaborating together that you could use to make the sessions less stressful for you all? Creativity can’t flourish in a place of anger.”
Jase shook his head. “Some of the best creativity comes from difficult emotions, Cerys. Pearl Jam’s ‘Release’ about Vedder finding out his father was his stepfather and his biological dad dying. A Long Way Gone, the book, based on Beah’s time as a child soldier in Sierra Leone. Munch’s painting The Scream based on an anxiety attack. Creativity can come from every emotion.”
“I think you’re confusing inspiration with creativity.”
“Semantics.”
“Not really. Creativity was the act of Vedder figuring out the words to express his emotions and putting those words to music. The inspiration for the song was a traumatic event in his life. But without the creativity, that story would just be a memory of Vedder’s.”
Jase’s fingers held her a little tighter for a moment. It was the only action that reassured her he’d heard what she was saying.
“Where does your creativity thrive?” she asked.
Jase slipped his fingers from her wrist. “Good night, Cerys.”
She sighed as she watched him go, knowing he’d already told her the answer.
5
On Friday, Jase realised he’d sung the minor key—the rest of the band had played the major chord for the twentieth time in a row—when he heard Luke smash the crap out of his cymbals.
“You know why I keep singing minor?” Jase raged. “Because that’s the way the song flows, the way that first chorus ends and rolls into the second verse, the way the second verse approaches the bridge, it needs that minor to make it unpredictable, to give it edge. The song sounds too fucking light otherwise.”
Matt shook his head and sighed.
Jase glared in his direction. “And you can huff and puff over there like one of the three little pigs, but it won’t make any difference to the fact you wrote this wrong.”
It was late. Late enough that he was starting to feel the telltale itch of overuse in the back of this throat. They’d been recording all day. A part of him knew they were all tired and fucking starving, but it didn’t seem to matter.
He shoved the microphone stand to the ground, then realised as sound reverberated around the room that the mic was still tucked in it. He turned his back to the production desk, sound engineers, and Jimmy Bexter, and tugged on his hair.
“I’m with Matt, I think it should stay in the major key,” Bexter said.
Jase looked over to Alex. The one person he could usually rely on. “This is what I was talking about at breakfast on Monday. There’s a tone to these songs.” He turned to look at Matt. “They are all starting to sound the same, and it’s a mindfuck that none of you can hear it.”
Matt cricked his neck to the left and then the right and looked down at his phone. “I sort of get what you are saying, but maybe this isn’t the song we change.”
“I think we’re all getting a bit punchy,” Bexter said. “It’s late. Let’s call it a day. Go blow off some steam.”
“I’m out.” Jase ripped his coat from the back of the leather sofa.
“Jase,” Alex urged. “Stay. We can work through it.”
“No. We can’t. Because you always fall in line with what Matt wants. So, the only thing we’ll be discussing will be how to get Jase to capitulate and fall in line.”
“That’s not fair, we—”
“We what, Matt? Tell me when you have ever fucking bent for me. Never. Because everyone else follows you, and I’m the asshole. You cling to your idea of the song so fucking tight you aren’t willing to listen to another perspective. So, I’ll be back on Monday, and we’ll record it just the way you want it.”
As he slammed the studio doors shut, Cerys’s question haunted him.
Where does your creativity come from?
He didn’t have a creative process, wouldn’t know where to fucking start. He was the show pony, on stage to open his mouth and sing someone else’s words.
Perhaps that was what had been missing from his life. A way to channel everything that raged around inside him. One thing he knew was that it wasn’t here, in this studio. He wasn’t even sure it was with these men. Without trust and honesty with each other, could he even begin to open up and share what he carried with him?
His mind swirling with thoughts of escape, to anywhere, he stepped out into the parking lot and stormed towards the road when three things collided.
A beeping horn, the feel of his knee smashing up against something hard, and the wide-open mouth of Cerys as she tried to steer her car away from him.