CHAPTER TWO
“Let’s do it again,” Alex said, looking from Jack in the control room to the rest of us.
“Fuck,” Nick said, bending over and plucking his pack of cigarettes off the little side table he’d left them on.
“I think we’ve almost got it, guys,” Jack said over the intercom. “It’s just missing that little thing—that flavor.” I scrubbed at my face and grabbed the beer I’d almost forgotten about to take a gulp of it. Even though we had hundreds of thousands of dollars at our disposal, the band had decided to stick with recording in Miami; it was where we’d gotten our sound together, and it was where we all wanted to be. Ron, our manager, had tried to tempt us to go to New York or LA or even Toronto, but none of the paired-off guys in the band wanted to spend weeks away from their girls, and we had all always done better in our own environment. We’d flown Jack in after going over show reels for about two weeks; he’d worked with Kill Kill, Bacchus, and Minute Music Militia, who we all loved, and his ideas for the album based on the demos we’d put out there were the most like what we wanted to do.
“Mark, think you can tighten up that part in the last verse? You’re losing the punch on the snare,” Alex said. Mark rolled his eyes a bit but sat back from his kit, examining the head on his snare. I took another sip of my beer and went through the bass run quietly, trying to see if there was a better way to play it—a faster chord change or a quicker progression. For a minute, everyone took a break, examining their instruments, and I could feel the ripples of tension in the room. Mark was having a good day, but Alex was right: the snare bit at the end of the last verse just wasn’t coming through like it should.
We’d agreed that we’d work on the live recordings first, just to get a baseline and to get an idea of the shape of the album, and then move onto individual parts. For once, Alex was actually inviting contributions—songs—from the rest of us; we’d started out in rehearsals with about fifty songs between the five of us, which we’d narrowed down to about twenty. If we couldn’t pick and choose at the end of the recording process, it was going to be a monster of an album. But we all had a couple of tracks we’d put forward—which was different from the previous few albums, where almost all of the songs were written by Alex and Nick, with the rest of us filling in parts.
I had a good shot at getting at least two out of four of my songs on the finished album, and I figured Jules had maybe three that were worth recording and including. Mark only had one that made the cut, but he’d only put in three, and he’d admitted the other two just weren’t there yet—maybe the next album. The rest either Nick and Alex had written together or separately; still, it wasn’t a bad ratio of songs for a finished album, and I had to figure that some of that had to do with Jules going off with his girlfriend to record a side project. The last thing anyone in the band wanted was to split up—together we were fucking magic, and if Jules’ work with Fran had lit a fire under Alex’s and Nick’s asses to pull more of the rest of our stuff into the loop, I wasn’t going to be a shrinking violet about it.
Once everyone had settled in, we went back to work, playing through the song again. Mark nailed the last verse, but Jules flubbed one of the bits in the bridge. “Take a break,” Jack suggested. “Come back in ten.”
I grabbed my phone, my beer, and my cigarettes and headed outside the studio; technically it didn’t matter where I smoked, since we’d booked the complex for the duration of the recording and we’d paid a deposit for cleaning specifically so we could smoke inside, but I wanted the air and the mega-watt South Florida sun in my face for a little bit. I sat down in the grass after I made sure there weren’t any ants, and lit up, unlocking my phone and opening Facebook while I lit up. The notifications told me I had five event invitations: Heather Brooks—who I only knew from tenth grade French—was throwing some kind of makeup party. Decline. Jonny had an event going on in Downtown Ft. Lauderdale the next weekend at Stache—that one I tapped ‘interested’ since it was a pretty good-looking show and I could always pregame a bit to save myself on the overpriced drinks the club served. A friend of a friend whose name was actually Jessica but who had decided to go by “Jezebel” after abandoning her husband and two-year-old son to try and become a famous BDSM performer had invited me to yet another fetish party at yet another strip club out in Plantation; I declined and then went to her profile page and took her off my friends list altogether. Going back to my events, there were two left: a pool party at my friend Hannah’s house in two weeks with a luau theme and a show up in Lake Worth at Propaganda, featuring Atreides, Jackal 5, Kingsroad and Heatkeeper; I accepted both invites and closed out the app.
“Yo, Dan! Break’s over, man,” Nick said from the door.
“Give me two seconds, I need to finish this,” I told him, waving the cigarette butt in his direction. I thought about Sophie, not for the first time since I’d seen her at Respects; as I took a last drag of my cig and stubbed it out, I wondered if she went to any local shows. Probably not—she’d get her fill of bands working at the club. I went back into the studio and pushed her out of my head.