Chapter 12: Westmouth - 20th January 2014

They Heard It Too

Monday, January 20 2014 · 12:48 p.m. · Westmouth · Private

I arrived at the studio this morning with a guitar, a notebook and a speech I’d been rehearsing since yesterday. Harry ruined the speech by already having Saturday night’s performance open on his computer.

They’d watched it. Both of them. Ellie watched it at home, and Harry listened to it again yesterday through the studio speakers. He’d somehow saved just the audio, so we could go through it without waiting for the video to load every time.

I asked what they thought.

Ellie said, “You looked as though you were enjoying yourself.”

I told her I meant the music.

“I know. So do I.”

That stopped me for a moment.

She said there were places where she could hear me enjoying what the band was doing, and that it changed how I sang. I hadn’t been thinking about that on Saturday. I was listening to Charlie or turning toward Roxie, and sometimes I’d sing the next line a little differently because of something they’d just played.

And you can hear that even when you aren’t watching me grin at everybody.

Harry played “A Woman’s Work.”

It was strange hearing it in that room with the two people who wrote it. I suddenly wanted to explain every little thing we’d changed, even though they’d already heard it and neither of them looked remotely upset.

Then Harry stopped it just before the chorus and played the same few seconds again.

“That,” he said. “Listen to what happens there.”

I listened to myself.

He meant the band.

That happened quite a lot this morning.

There’s something Ronnie plays that I hadn’t properly noticed while I was singing. And Bones pushes the chorus without making it feel hurried. I knew I liked the way it felt onstage. Harry kept finding the reasons why it felt that way.

He can’t turn the broadcast recording into five perfectly clean instruments and a voice—he said even he’s not that good. There’s also crowd noise in there. And everything is already mixed together. But he’d worked out some of the parts and put rough versions into the computer so we could hear what happened when he took something away.

His pretend band is very obedient, but I prefer the real one.

So does he, thankfully.

I finally got to give them my speech, although by then it had become a conversation and I’d forgotten the clever beginning.

I told them I wanted to record that version with Blackfriars’ Nightmare. Properly, here at River Bank. I wanted some of that bite from Roxie’s guitar in the new songs too, when it belonged. And I wanted to try a cello.

Ellie asked me about the cello first. Of course she did, it was the one thing she hadn’t already heard.

I told her about Lana and the quartet. About sitting close enough to see her bow move and hearing a sound that seemed almost like a human voice, but without words.

Then I tried to explain the duet idea. I told them that I don’t just mean having a long, pretty note underneath everything. Lana played a phrase on Saturday that sounded as though it wanted an answer, and I keep wondering what would happen if I sang one. And wondering if the cello could answer me.

Ellie went to the piano and asked me to sing a few lines of “A Woman’s Work.” Then she played something low between them.

It wasn’t the sound I had in my head. A piano isn’t a cello. But I could hear where another part might fit, and I found myself waiting to hear it before I sang again.

Harry asked whether I’d been imagining the cello in that song or one of the unfinished ones.

I told him both. Now.

Possibly that is how expensive ideas begin.

We talked about the new songs as well. I played a chorus with a little more force than I’ve been giving it, and Harry asked me to keep doing that while he tried something behind it. Ellie made me sing it again afterward with just the guitar.