Chapter 29

I dragged myself down to breakfast the next morning, my limbs heavy and sluggish. Things might have ended well, but the stress from the previous day, with Amanda going to the hospital and spending most of the day thinking I was going to have to perform on my own, had taken its toll on me, apparently. Even with winning, I’d tossed and turned all night.

Cole was already up when I made it down to breakfast, along with a handful of the other performers. He gave me a nod as I headed to the coffee pot and poured myself a cup.

“Morning,” I mumbled, joining him.

“Here, I would have thought you’d be in high spirits after how well last night went,” Cole said.

I took a long sip, letting the hot liquid wake me up a little before responding, “Yeah, it was great in the end. But man, the rest of the day was stressful. I really thought I was going to have to go it alone up there.”

Cole shook his head, grinning at me. “Are you kidding me? You’ve been at the top both nights running. I’m pretty sure you could go up on that stage alone and still blow the roof off.”

“Unless they decide I didn’t follow the rules and send me home because of it. Besides, I got lucky last night. You saw Vince go down, and he killed it night one. Had it been me and Amanda, I would have gone home. Them finding Linda to play with me changed everything.”

“I still think you would have come out first even if it had been with Amanda.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” I said. “And hey, you were great last night too. You and Marissa really sounded good together.”

“Talk about someone carrying someone. Marissa is amazing and did most of the heavy lifting. Plus, we have similar sounds, so it was easy for us to work together. I’m mostly just glad I didn’t end up on the bottom again.”

“Don’t talk like that. You’re a good singer,” I said.

“I appreciate you saying that, and I’m not saying I’m bad, but we both saw what happened night one. I haven’t spent enough time on stage and who knows what the next competition is going to be. Honestly, I don’t think I’m going to make it much further.”

“Don’t talk like that, man. You’ve got real talent and you proved it last night. Don’t sell yourself short.”

“I appreciate what you’re trying to do, man, but I’m just being realistic here. I got in over my head coming on this show. There are people here with way more experience than me ... people like you. I don’t have the skills or training to keep up.”

“Look, even if you do end up being sent home, you can’t go down without a fight,” I said. “Make each performance your best; leave everything you’ve got out on that stage. That way, even if you do have to go home, you’ll leave a lasting impression. Everyone has to put in their stage time when they’re starting, and this is a hell of a stage to do it on. After this, everywhere else will seem easy.”

I could see he was about to disagree with me again, and I held up a hand, “Man, I got lucky. I had people willing to go way out of their way to give me shots. I got stage time backing a guy who had decades ... literally decades on stage. He then gave me a shot on the road, and then gave me my own spot up front. I got to make all my mistakes and learn to get comfortable with training wheels. You’re doing it the hardest way imaginable, and it’s going to make you a better singer. After all this, could you imagine being even a little nervous in front of just a hundred people? Don’t think of it as winning or losing. Think of it as building to the next thing.”

“I guess when you put it like that,” he said with a reluctant smile.

“Besides, don’t give up yet. You can still do well. Who knows what the next challenge is? Maybe we’re all going to have to do country classics or something.”

“I could only be so lucky,” Cole said.

“Either way, if you are going to go home early, you want people to remember you so you can build off of it. You’ve got to go down swinging. Do you think anyone’s going to remember Vince after his episodes air? No. Or they’ll remember him stomping off, blaming his partner. If you were picking a show to see, would you want to see that guy? So, use it, man. Go out big, doing the best you can.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “I appreciate the encouragement. I really do.”

“Hey, that’s what friends are for,” I said, bumping his shoulder.

Before he could say anything else, one of the production assistants appeared and said, “Can we have all contestants in the living room, please?”

I could feel everyone around me tense up a little bit. This was the third and final challenge and what would decide who went to the finals. No one had touched the stuff behind the bar last night, even the contestants who’d partied the other nights. I think between seeing ten of us go home and Amanda losing her spot after she went to the hospital, everyone was forced to start taking this seriously.

As we shuffled into the living room, I took a seat on the couch next to Cole as the others filled in the remaining spots, which was easier now that eleven people were gone.

“Welcome to your final challenge before the finals,” the producer, a woman named Bonnie, announced without preamble. “Each of you will be assigned a breakout hit song featured in a popular movie from the last forty years. You have complete freedom in how you want to perform it. You can play it straight, trying to recapture the magic of the original, or you can reimagine it and make it your own. The only caveat is that we must still be able to recognize the original in it. Also, as always, you’re expected to show us something of yourself in this song. Even if you do a faithful cover, we still want to see you as an artist in your performance.”

More restrictive than the duet challenge, but I didn’t have to convince someone else how I wanted to perform the song, so I’d take it.

“As an added bonus,” she said, “you’re going to get more time for this one. You’ll have the rest of today, all day tomorrow, and the morning the day after to rehearse and prepare. Your performances will commence that evening where, as always, your judges will evaluate the performance on how it reflected the original and how you showed yourself in it, as well as on the music itself and your stage performance. You’re also going to have access to more control over the staging. We will have producers ready to talk to you about anything specific you want done to support your performance and time to work it out. You’ll also be allowed some time the afternoon of the performance before the crowd and judges arrive, to rehearse your performance on stage with your full presentation, to work out any timing issues.”

Everyone looked excited about that. Most had only played small stages, local coffee shops, or busked, and hadn’t had a chance for any big productions. While I appreciated that level of show, I’d only gotten to use the full thing a few times. It had been enough, though, to know it wasn’t my strong suit. Lyla was much better at spectacle than me, and for both the Charlotte show and when we opened for Linda, I’d let her take the lead on it. But, if everyone else was going big, then I needed to go just as hard.

She started calling up people one at a time, telling them their movie. Cole got a romance from about ten years ago that had been huge. While I didn’t love the incredibly over-the-top ballad that had been everywhere that summer, I could think of some ways he could turn it a bit country and still make it work as a big country-style ballad instead of the more diva-driven pop song it was.

Just as Cole sat down, Bonnie held up a card and said, “Charlie, you’ve got ‘Shattered Dreams’ from the movie ‘Skyfire.’”

I was shocked and almost stumbled. So far, everyone else had gotten songs from this millennium, but that movie was from, like, the late eighties. True, it was one of the biggest movies ever made, enough so that even I knew about it, but I couldn’t imagine anyone asking for a reimagining of it. Worse, I did know ‘Shattered Dreams.’ It was a synth-heavy tear-jerker of a song with full orchestration and huge R&B vibes, sung by a four-person group that did a ton of harmonies. It was an incredibly dated song, and really outside of my style. I also couldn’t help but notice that I was the only one who got a song done by a group, rather than a solo artist.

It almost felt like sabotage from the producers, although I hadn’t thought I’d done anything to upset them. Worse, I didn’t even have much time to think about it as they hustled us out the door to go to various recording spaces in and around the studio lot. I was on the lot this time, taken to a smaller recording stage not far from the sound stage where we filmed the performances.

As I stepped inside, I froze. Sitting on a stool by the mixing board was none other than Trey Mitchell, quite possibly the biggest celebrity in Hollywood. I knew I was doing a song from his movie, but he’d made it like forty years ago, and I was basically a nobody. At no point did I even consider they’d have someone from the movie here, let alone Trey Mitchell.

Mitchell glanced up from his phone and gave me a brilliant white smile, staring at me with those piercing blue eyes.

“Hey, Charlie,” he said, standing up from the stool and grabbing my hand, shaking it. “I understand you’re going to cover a song from ‘Skyfire.’ I tell ya, I don’t envy you that. Soul Express was something else back in the eighties. That song was huge, so it’s going to be big shoes to fill.”

“I ... I’ll try my best,” I said, trying to get a hold of myself.

First JoDee Blanchard, now Trey Mitchell. It was kind of mind-blowing.

“So,” he said, waving me into the chair where the sound mixer would normally sit. “The producers of the show asked me to come down and give you some thoughts on the movie, maybe answer some questions about it, and see if it helped you to really get the feel of it. I guess they hope I’d be able to tell you the secret of how that song got so big, but I swear, I’ve never been a music guy. What you all do is a little like magic to me. I just stand in front of a camera and play make-believe.”

He gave another big smile. I don’t even think I noticed the words he said. The way he focused his entire attention on me when he talked to me kind of made the rest of the world disappear. I swear he might have been the most charming person I’d ever met.

No wonder he was a movie star.

After much too long of a pause, I asked, “It must have been incredible working on a film that huge back then. Was this your first big film?”

Mitchell nodded, sitting back on the stool, “Yep. I’d done some small stuff and had a supporting role the year before, but this was my big break. It was something else. Huge special effects, and this was before computers did most of the work. A stacked cast. We knew we were onto something special, although I don’t think any of us expected it to explode quite like it did. And that song, man, it being number one for, like, seventeen weeks, really helped. You couldn’t get away from it. It was also the right song for the movie. They didn’t record it until after we finished principal photography, but they really captured the emotion of that moment in the movie. Helped make it transcend.”

“Did you get to hear the song before the movie came out?”

“Sure. I mean, I heard it at the preview screening, but Arnold Teirn, the director, invited us all in after they handed in the song and let us see a scratch cut with it edited in. Whew, let me tell you. It really hit. It’s such a big, emotional scene, and when they put the song over it ... man. It was something else.”

“What was it like filming that scene?”

“It was tough, real emotional,” he said thoughtfully. “By that point, Drew and Natasha, our characters, had been through so much together. Her death just gutted him. I had to channel all that loss and pain. We knew we got it on the day of filming, just from the crew’s reactions, but once we saw the finished cut, with the song behind it ... Yeah, it makes sense it was such a hit.”

“It must have been hard, pulling up all those emotions.”

“For sure it was, but it’s what we do. People want to see real emotion up on the screen, so we’ve got to really tap into something personal to give it to them. But ... I think in that moment, there’s more than sadness, you know. There’s also some hope in it. Like even in the darkest moments, there’s still something worth fighting for. Drew had to find that hope to keep going after losing Natasha. I think that’s what resonated with the audiences, and why it got so big.”

I wasn’t so sure about that. I’d only seen the movie once, but I remembered the explosions, shooting, and jumping off cliffs more than I remembered sadness and hope. I mean, I did kind of remember his character’s wife’s death scene, but it wasn’t life-changing or anything.

I wondered if he was saying this because that’s how actors need to talk about their movies, or if he really bought into it.

“And what about when you were just listening to the song, not tied to the movie?” I asked. “Did it hit any differently?”