Your next album is The Cycle.
This shades dark again and included the single “Musk” which, like “Tulips,” though far less tender, is a raunchy, barely veiled narrative of McCade and Lyla’s sex life, particularly how much he enjoyed performing cunnilingus on her and receiving fellatio from her.
If Lyla is struggling under the spotlight, and McCade doesn’t like it shining on her, why did he share such intimacies so publicly?
[Sighs]
Because you don’t tell a poet what poems to write.
And anyway…
The damage was already done.
The thing is, we’d entered the fast lane.
And once you’re there, you got two choices.
You keep up.
Or you crash.
But just to say, that’s a kickass song. It’s sexy as fuck.
And I think at that point, Preach was so fed up, he was feeling, if you couldn’t beat ’em…
Give ’em something to really be jealous about.
And last, Lyla fuckin’ loved that song, and at first, he wrote it for her and had no intention of including it on the album.
He did it, we did it, because Lyla encouraged us to.
Partly because she knew it was a hit.
But mostly because, she had a lot of fuck yous to deliver.
And that was one big, steamy, dirty, smutty, wicked-awesome fuck you.
[Grins]
And you know the fuck of it, to this day, that’s our highest grossing album.
And that album…
And that song…
Won us our first awards.
Listen, you never bitch about being rich and famous.
You just don’t.
Heard someone say once, I forget who, the only thing worse than someone interrupting you at dinner to ask for an autograph is no one interrupting you to ask for an autograph.
And that is true.
Would I rather have played the bar circuit until I got sick to death with it and ended up sitting in my armchair in my living room drinking a beer and wondering what if, instead of admitting I just wasn’t good enough, or didn’t work hard enough, and I should have moved on?
Fuck no.
What we built and what came with it, all of it, I’ll take it.
I’d take more.
I’d take less.
[Grins]
Though not much less.
This all sounds like one huge bitch.
But it isn’t.
When you’re in the thick of it, it’s an everyday party, sister. It’s good times, and the pills you’re taking mask it, so you have no clue you’re run down and about to burn out. You’re just into what you’re doin’, and when it’s done, you’re rarin’ for what’s up next.
And our music is out there, it’s getting heard and people love it. We’re onstage and they’re singing our words back to us in this wall of sound and that…
Man, that…
Except the love of a good woman and becoming a father, there is no better feeling than that, and seein’ as the love of a good woman and being a father is everything times about a million, that’s sayin’ something.
My father would have been proud.
And my mother was against it at first…
But she died proud of me.
What I’m saying is, even doing this right now with you, looking back at all of this under a microscope, I would do it again.
I wouldn’t have to think for even a second about it.
And I wouldn’t change a thing.
The thing is, you’re in it. You went for it. You bought into the dream. Made your deal. Sold your soul. Whatever.
You wanted it.
And if you go for it and you have luck or talent or you work hard for it or all three, however you get there, you get it.
The ones you love.
That’s a different story.
Lyla:
It was, and still is, very sweet, even if it was, and still is, upsetting how the guys reacted to all that happened to me.
But it didn’t really bother me.
Honestly, although it was tough at first, you get used to it pretty fast, especially if why it’s coming at you is worth putting up with it.
They had a mind to me, they always did. All of them.
But that period of my life was not about any of that.
I learned very quickly none of that mattered.
It was about losing my mother, which is something you never get over.
And since Mom moved us in with them when I was eight, my grandparents were really my parents too, so losing them was the same.
They all went so fast, it felt like it was one after the other, and with everything else going on, I couldn’t cope.
I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have Preacher and the band.
My family was dying.
And there I was, with a new family.
I’m in school. I’m graduating from school. I’m trying to find a job. Discover who I am, what I’m about.
And the only thing I’m sure of in all of that, the only thing that’s solid, is Preacher.
I mean, think about this. Think about any twenty-something kid who’s starting their life.
You get to an age you look back and think, “I wish I was that young again.”
Well, I don’t.
Because we wish we were that young again because we’re not, we’ve lived life and we’ve learned, and we want to go back because we know things we didn’t then.
But going back is going back to not knowing those things.
And we lay gild on those years because we were young, and we have our full life ahead of us but figuring out who you are and what you want out of life is tough work.
We forget that part.
We forget that really, there were chunks of it that just plain sucked.
It’s the ones who figure out that they have to be in their now.
That’s the meaning of life.
Not only do we have no other choice, but where we are, we earned. We’ve lived that life and we’ve learned those lessons and we can take all those gifts and tragedies and build on them to have more.
There’s always more.
Every next second you’re breathing is more.
Until you’re not breathing.
And something I learned with my mother dying at age forty-three is to pack everything I got into every breath I take.
I did that then without even knowing it.
And I do it now.
Lyla:
[Off tape]
Would you talk about the Young and Beautiful List?
[For a moment, says nothing, then begins laughing before, suddenly, she stops]
I was staring out my window in the back of the limousine when I felt Preacher, sitting beside me, move.
I looked to him and saw he had his hand in his inside jacket pocket.
He pulled out the vial and murmured, “Want a bump, baby?”
I turned his way, scooted closer and said, “Set me up.”
He filled the little spoon, held it out. I pressed one nostril, leaned into it and breathed the white powder in.
Repeat with the other nostril.
I tasted the bitter in the back of my throat.
And I liked it.
Preacher took his own, replaced the vial in his jacket, did a long sniff, set his head back on seat, closed his eyes and lifted his hand to pinch his nose.