Deep Cuts, page 22
At the end of a long concrete hall, I found a smaller, more cluttered version of the studios I’d seen in music documentaries. Black cords hung in long loops from scattered keyboards. Luke was seated next to a guy I recognized from the internet to be Dennis, the studio’s co-owner and engineer, both of them facing a large console and a computer screen. A half inch of brown showed at the roots of Luke’s black hair. Dennis had a nose full of broken capillaries and was halfway through a cigarette that made the scene feel jarringly anachronistic, like entering a casino. There were no windows in the room. I stood with my roller suitcase until they noticed me.
“Here she is,” said Luke, and gave me a quick hug. The engineer moved the cigarette to his mouth to shake my hand, rising only halfway from his chair.
I sat on a hard couch behind them as they ran through the logistical agenda for the day. I nodded along, always a half beat behind, struggling to decipher the industry lingo. Dennis said the day would be spent entirely on Pro Tools since the tracks were all recorded.
“Except vocals,” I said.
Luke looked nervous. “That’s right. We do have new lyrics.”
Dennis leaned back in his chair, rocked it. “Iso booth makes this a longer and therefore more expensive day.”
Then came a strained exchange I didn’t fully understand, though I guessed that Luke was being dicked around. In the end we were allowed to record new vocals in the isolation booth, but we had to nail them in an hour, and would have to do so through a heightened tension that seemed to be coming not just from the ticking clock, but from Dennis’s rapidly deteriorating opinion of both me and Luke.
Luke entered the soundproofed booth on the other side of a glass partition, and I sat in his vacated chair. Dennis showed me how to use the talk-back button to communicate with Luke. On a dark screen, the tracks of the song ran in horizontal stripes. A corkboard on the wall inches from my head was filled with handwritten notes, promotional buttons, and candid photographs of people hanging out at the studio that stung my eyes one by one: Karen O!—TV on the Radio!—was that Bowie?
I grabbed my phone. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“Now?” he said, but jerked his head toward the hall.
The bathroom was empty and weirdly warm. I went into a stall and called Zoe.
“Hi babe.”
“My pits are dripping,” I said. “This is my shot, and I’m already blowing it.”
“Really, though?”
“I’m stumbling around like a new kid at school, wasting time. The engineer hates me, and he knows everybody, he’ll talk, I can tell. What am I doing here, Zoe? What did I think, I could just click my heels and make myself into George Martin?”
“Hang on,” Zoe said, and I heard some rapid typing. “No, you’re not a George Martin. George Martin was a classically trained symphonic arranger which informed his production style greatly. You’re a Rick Rubin.”
“I can’t believe you know who Rick Rubin is.”
“In anticipation of this call, I did some research.”
I understood her point: Rubin was famous for getting out of the artist’s way, most recently with a series of absolute legends. “I’m not exactly dealing with Johnny Cash here,” I said.
“Rick Rubin also produced Limp Bizkit.”
I laughed and left the stall, washed my hands at the sink. Through a grated window in the ceiling came a welcome gust of air, a crisp early-fall breeze off the water.
Zoe was reading aloud now: “ ‘Rubin has little in the way of musical or technological ability. His talent—and it is immense—is his taste.’ ”
I looked at myself in the mirror. Nomi had loaned me a brown-red all-business lipstick that morning. I wiped it off on the back of my hand.
“Did you hear me?” Zoe said. “Are your pits drying?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks, Zo.”
I walked quickly back to the studio, where the engineer was typing on a BlackBerry with one hand and lighting a fresh cigarette with the other. “Hope you enjoyed your thirty-five-dollar pee,” came Luke Skinner’s voice over the talk-back speaker.
He sang the song from top to bottom in his affected growl, holding a printout of my emailed lyrics. I had replaced all the abstractions and spaceship metaphors in the verses with concrete details clarifying the song’s central story, which was, like much of the album, about striking out alone after years of feeling suffocated. I calibrated my edits so that it could read as a romantic breakup song even though the breakup in question was clearly with Caroline. Luke had surprised me by agreeing to the changes in an all-caps response: HELL YAH. He’d also liked my slightly tweaked melody—I’d sent him an audio file of myself whisper-singing it, pulling the notes apart like Joe had done on my “Bay Window” bridge—though Luke was muddying it up again now, in the vocal booth.
When he finished, the engineer looked at me with his eyebrows raised. I pushed the talk-back button and cleared my throat. “Can you do it again, but this time just, like, sing it?”
Luke stared at me through the iso booth’s window. I heard the engineer laugh slightly, cruelly, though I wasn’t sure if it was at me or Luke.
I stood and made my way to the booth so we could talk privately. Luke waited for me with arms folded, one eye on the clock that hung in the center of the main room.
“Listen,” I said. “It’s okay that you can’t sing.”
He scoffed. I was standing in the open doorway of the booth, propping it open with my hip, but we were still uncomfortably close.
“No, really, it’s okay. Think about Dylan, Cave, Mangum—you don’t need me to tell you this. The difference is, those guys didn’t care. You need to start caring less, right now. Don’t dumb the melody down to meet your range. Aim for the notes I sent you. We’ll fix it later.” I wasn’t actually sure how we were going to fix it later, but I had trust in Pro Tools.
Luke looked up at the clock again, then back at me, holding my gaze a long second. “He’s going to be so pissed,” he said, and pursed his lips as if savoring something delicious. Then he pulled his headphones on and faced the mic.
I walked back to the control room feeling slightly sick. It’s not that it hadn’t occurred to me, that I had been a revenge hire, at least partly. It was the kind of dark and unprovable thought that reared up occasionally at night, that I had learned to cram back down in the cracks of my brain before it mutated into self-destruction. But it was true this time. It was as true as Luke’s prediction: Joe was going to be so, so pissed.
As I sat back down behind the console I felt a blaze of hatred for them both. Let him be pissed. Let Luke be smug. I was producing a song.
“Are we good?” Dennis asked.
I shook my head, loosened my shoulders. “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”
“He’s a hack,” he said.
But Luke’s next take was better. Even though his voice faltered at the edges of the melody it sounded okay, it sounded emotional. The third and fourth and fifth takes were even better, and then, just as our returns began to diminish, the hour was up.
Luke went out to get us all food while Dennis and I sat down at the screen.
“I want more space,” I told him. “More room for each instrument to breathe, especially around the hook.”
I explained my reasoning—it’s a song about loneliness and freedom, it shouldn’t feel so crowded—but he was already nodding, dragging chunks of music around the screen. Each playback sounded better. Luke came back with food and two friends, and then proceeded to entertain them in the main room. This seemed insane after all his ticking-clock histrionics, but there really wasn’t much for him to do. On our side of the glass, we were focused and efficient. When I told Dennis to chop off the back half of a synth riff that went on too long, leaving only the melodic refrain, his energy shifted visibly. He was leaning in now, responding, listening. A cigarette waiting in an ashtray burned down to the ash.
After a particularly decent playback, Dennis murmured, “We should call this ‘Least Worst Song on the Album,’ ” and that’s when I started having fun. That’s when I decided it was worth it to have jumped into two dudes’ pissing match—not because it was any great accomplishment to take this song from terrible to almost good, but because this man was a professional, a recording music professional, and he was on my side.
* * *
—
Flying home, I considered the least worst ways for Joe to find out. Through the Brooklyn grapevine? From Luke Skinner himself, in some aggressive text or barroom brag? The answer was clear. When the rough cut of the song landed in my inbox the next day, I forwarded him the file with what I intended to be a brief, classy, and not-sorry intro: weird, I know, but he asked and I saw my chance to produce, etc.—ended up sounding not too bad!
I did not anticipate his response to be silence. It truly hadn’t occurred to me. It was worse than Raj’s scathing email because it was a thousand cuts, every inbox refresh a new laceration. At the same time, I resented how much I cared. Let him be pissed, I reminded myself constantly, before checking my email again.
After two weeks of this, on a cold Sunday night, I made Zoe call him. They had been in closer touch since Joe’s SF show, and Joe had resumed his tradition of joining the Gutierrezes for their Christmukkah, though I had taken over his spot for Thanksgiving. She went on a walk with her phone and returned a half hour later with a tight expression. I met her in the hallway between our rooms.
“Who needs him?” she said curtly, almost brightly.
“I didn’t say I needed him,” I said. “I just need to know. Now. Please. What he said.”
She sighed and tossed her cardigan into her room. “First it was about Luke Skinner, my god, he really hates that dude. And your standards are what he’s always loved about you, it’s like he doesn’t even know you anymore if you’d work with Skinner, blah blah. Then it got deeper, like, ‘Why not me? How could she refuse me when I ask her for help, but say yes to him? Strong & Wrong could’ve been so much better!’ After that he changed the subject. We talked about my parents the rest of the time, which was a relief, because that was awkward as fuck for me, dude.”
A knot was rising in my throat. “Sorry,” I managed. “But did you like, stick up for me? Because it was different with Luke, it was business—it wasn’t—”
She clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I tried, I promise, though perhaps not valiantly given his complete lack of interest in hearing it.”
“Also what about how this feels for me? It really sucks that I produced a song and it’s still got that asterisk on it. Like I’d be nothing without him.”
“So?” she said. “He’d be nothing without you either. Let’s focus on the good news here, which is that you can release yourself from Joe Morrow’s grip now, as he has from yours. Our long national nightmare is over. Honestly, how many different ways is it even possible for the same two people to break each other’s hearts?” She gave my shoulder a squeeze, a squeeze that said she knew it hurt, she really did, but she was done. “Hey, if I order in will you split with me?”
She wandered away and I lifted my hand to the spot she’d squeezed. I knew she was right: it was time. And I did feel a fledgling sense of liberation. It was buried, but it was there, rising slowly as dough.
What Makes You Think You’re the One
A happy distraction arrived at work the next week when we got a call from our biggest client, a global conglomerate that owned half the brands in your average bar—the cheap vodkas, the expensive vodkas, the old-school scotches you thought were made by monks—asking us to hold an “informal focus group” with our trendsetters in New York during the CMJ Music Festival. CMJ was technically a music-business conference but functioned for fans like an urban festival, held in small venues across Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. One of our client’s brands was a sponsor, and they knew it was a hotbed of trend information, but they wanted more than they got from our reports.
“Your reports tell us what music they love,” explained the insights director, speakerphoning into our SF office. “But why do they love it?”
“We always strive to cover the why,” I said smoothly, raising my middle finger at the phone.
“We just feel like we could get deeper,” came the voice of the insights guy. “If we were in the same room with them.”
“Of course you could,” said my boss, swatting away my finger. “The Why is a bottomless ocean. We’ll write up a proposal.”
The Why: always the golden question. If marketers could understand why kids liked Arcade Fire, they figured, they wouldn’t have to pay for the rights to an Arcade Fire song in their ads; they could commission their own knockoff version for similar effect. They wouldn’t have to buy up small-batch distilleries; they could capture the essence of Arcade Fire in a brand, slap the label on a bottle of generic rotgut, and stick it on the shelf next to Grey Goose. The Why was where the real money was.
“Beautiful,” the client was saying. “Find a nice restaurant with a private room. Figure budget for drinks. Dinner too. Maybe we’ll catch a show afterward—we can get passes as long as it’s not too buzzy.”
I was very much liking the sound of this, but my boss’s expression had started to shift. “Will the trendsetters be sampling product?” she asked coolly.
“Oh, we may let them sip a new ultra-premium rum we just launched,” he said. “But the goal here is the Why.”
“Mm-hmm,” my boss said, pursing her blue-red lips. I wasn’t sure what was going on; buying our trendsetters dinner was not remotely typical, and I’d never seen that look on her face during a new project call.
He rattled off a few other demands—“Percy should moderate, they’ll feel more comfortable talking to one of their own”; “Let us know when you’ve picked the show, we’ll make sure they carry our rum at the venue”—and then said it was great chatting with us ladies.
My boss ripped off her headset and pronounced, after a guttural grunt, “Fake research.”
“What does that mean?”
She grunted again and typed lightly on her laptop, telling me to hold my thought by way of one raised eyebrow. I waited. She was the founder of the agency, but we were small enough that she still had her hands in everything. I liked her as much as I could like a treadmill capitalist who needed a half Xanax and Norah Jones to sleep at night, which, it turned out, was a fair amount. She was smart and tenacious and she managed me with respect.
When she was done typing she looked at me steadily. “This isn’t about the Why, honey. They already pay us plenty for the Why, they’ve got Why coming out of their ears. This is about seeding their new rum with influential scenesters during CMJ, to get them to tell all their friends.”
I was confused. “Why don’t they just pay them to be brand ambassadors?”
“Their budget was probably earmarked for insights. Plus it’s inauthentic. This isn’t Red Bull, this isn’t the nineties. Everyone knows when a brand is paying for ambassadorship now.”
I nodded. “Okay, so it’s fake research. Does that…” I wanted to say matter. “Upset you?”
“Of course it upsets me!” She clamped her thumb and forefinger onto the edges of her forehead and moved her pliable, fiftysomething skin in circles. “It upsets my integrity as a researcher!”
I caught my eyes before they rolled. We’d had this conversation before. I didn’t understand the concept of integrity in an industry like ours, which existed solely to help corporations sell young people products they didn’t need. I thought we were all swallowing whatever sad excuse for integrity rose up in our throats every morning, but apparently that was just me; my boss and co-workers felt they were playing a vital role in the system, making products more relevant for a consumer who was often misunderstood by the business world. There were times I could see their point. “So, what, we’re going to turn him down?”
She looked back at her computer, where she was filling in our project costs spreadsheet. “No,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the screen. “We’re going to charge double.”
* * *
—
New York had shifted into a premature winter in the few weeks since my visit to the studio, brittle leaves barely clinging to the trees on lower First Avenue. I found the restaurant our office manager had booked—Peruvian inspired, inoffensively trendy—and introduced myself to the hostess. “People love this shit,” I muttered under my breath as I made my way to the private back room. The client was already there.
“How was your flight?” he said as he shook my hand. He’d clearly put effort into dressing down for the event, wearing a pair of dark-wash boot-cut jeans and sneakers, and was twisting the expensive watch on his wrist as if he knew it gave him away. I set my backpack down at the head of the long table and gave my standard answer about getting so much work done on the flight.
The brand manager arrived, and I knew he was the brand manager because he was wearing a fleece vest with the fucking name of the rum on it. “Hey!” he said, barreling toward me with his hand outstretched. “I’m Kyle!”
“Hi, Kyle!” I said. “Can I ask you to please remove all logos from your clothing? We don’t want to bias the respondents.”
“Oh! Sorry!” He stripped off the vest, revealing a button-down that also had the name of the rum on it, embroidered just above the pocket. He looked at it, then up at me. A server appeared at my shoulder and asked me to review the prix fixe menu.
“I’m going to trust you can figure this out,” I said to Kyle with a smile before turning to the server.
Trendsetters were trickling in. Two greeted each other with recognition, but two wasn’t bad. I fanned out an assortment of discussion stimuli on the vintage credenza, mostly CDs of bands playing CMJ as well as older artists I considered key influences. A proliferation of tabletop candles sent warm shapes moving on the walls and I felt something I recognized, curiously, as excitement. It was nice to know what I was doing, even if it was all fake.
