Chapter Twenty-seven
“Please, Please Me and With the Beatles in sixty-three, A Hard Day’s Night and Beatles for Sale in sixty-four, Help! and Rubber Soul in sixty-five, Revolver in sixty-six, Sgt. Pepper’s and Magical Mystery Tour in sixty-seven, The White Album in sixty-eight, Yellow Submarine and Abbey Road in sixty-nine, and Let it Be in seventy.”
I stare at Jeremy, who’s looking a little perplexed sitting behind his desk. He’s not used to anyone giving it right back at him in the name and date department.
I raise my arms high in the air, making a V for victory. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, may I present Jane Black. She follows up Crushed one year later with—” I pause for effect, hearing the drum roll in my head “Lucky Deck.”
I slap the flash drive with the album Owen and I made onto Jeremy’s desk and plop down into the chair across from my biggest champion, tattoo artist turned record impresario, Jeremy Battenbrock.
But before he can speak, I quickly add, “And a thousand ‘I’m sorry’s to you, my friend. I was petulant. I was childish. I behaved abysmally.”
He waves a hand in the air. “First, I’m used to musicians and their little temper tantrums.” He points a finger at me, chiding and loving at the same time. “Yours was nothing, my friend. Stories I could tell you… Second, let’s fire this bad boy up.” He pops the flash drive into his computer and opens the file.
There’s a glint of wild, childlike glee in his eyes as he hits the play button. This is why he put his inker down and turned the tattoo parlor over to his brother. For that moment when you first hear a band, a singer, a song you love.
I sit back and listen as his office fills with the songs my brother and I recorded when I returned from Maine. Jeremy’s already heard “Mixed Messages,” “Don’t Ask,” and my rendition of “Physical.” Now his office fills with new songs.
“Lucky Deck” bats first, an upbeat tune with a fast guitar sound, then next is “I’ll Objectify You.” It’s slow, moody, sexy—the kind of song you’d sing to a lover. The song that first broke though. The song that woke me up the night I couldn’t break up with Matthew.
“The way you speak to me, the way you look at me, the way you touch me, I’ll objectify you, I’ll objectify you, I’ll objectify you…”
Then there’s “Breakdown,” and it’s sexy and romantic. “I want to break down your resistance. I want to drive you wild. I want to make you fall.”
After that comes “The Girl and The Ghost,” a bluesy tune, Ella Fitzgerald style, about two lovers who can’t touch each other. “Nothing but air, but smoke, but faint outlines of you.”
Next is “Honey Kissed,” a little bit faster, a little bit fun, with a throaty, sexy vocal style to it. “Honey kissed, sun ripened for you, summer cherries, warm fruit for two…”
We move on to “If I Were a Scientist,” a smooth, sweet romantic song about how we don’t have a clue why we fall in love. “If I were a scientist, I would know what this was, if I were a scientist, I could dissect love.”
Up next is “Feels Like Desire,” a pure down and dirty song, with lots of slow beats, inspired by Matthew asking me to narrate in the dressing room at the club. “Feels like rising, filling, swimming, floating, falling, flying, going… Feels like desire, on and on and over again, feels like desire, on and on and over again.”
Then there’s the last one, my favorite through and through. It’s a simple love song, that’s all it is, called “Tell Me the Snow.” I like this one best.
Tell me the snow is falling
Tell me the rain is pounding
Tell me the sun is beating down
Tell me the snow is falling
Tell me the rain is pounding
Tell me the sun is beating down
Tell me everything and nothing all the night
Jeremy lets the song finish before he opens his eyes. He’s contemplating, considering, letting the music wash over him. I, however, am leaning forward in my chair, antsy for his reaction. He untips his chair, sitting straight up now. I can tell he wants a cigar. He loves to smoke and make pronouncements. Instead, he rumbles, “I signed a new band last weekend. Saw them down at Mercury Lounge after your Knitting Factory show. Their name is Deception Vacation. Good name, isn’t it?”
I nod. “Yes, it’s a great name.”
“I booked them into the studio today. I kept it free for you all last week, in case you decided to grace us with your presence again. And you know what? I’m kicking ’em out this afternoon. And you are going to get in that studio tomorrow and finish this baby!”
He stands up and ambles around the desk to wrap me in a bear hug. “They were just dicking around anyway. They won’t be ready to record for another month.”
“I wouldn’t want you to miss your deadline,” I say. Then I look him straight in the eyes. “You really like it?”
“I always believed in you, Black. I knew you could do it.”
I squeeze him back hard. “Thank you for not giving up on me.”
I leave Jeremy’s office and walk across town back to my apartment, still humming my new songs. I like to believe they came to me in a rainstorm, in a blizzard, in a moment of insane, unmitigated fertility. But really, they were there all along, for the last two months, lying fallow in my head, waiting for me to get out of my own way. The bits and pieces of life that have become the foundation for my fifth album. Life that’s gone on around me, not only pain, not only heartbreak.
The beat to “I’ll Objectify You” rolls through my mind and I remember the first time I sang it all the way through just a few days ago in Maine. There in Haley’s tiny little studio, I held the microphone tight between my hands and started singing about Matthew. As I did, his pen slowly stopped moving across the page. He looked up at me when he realized that his hands, his voice, all of him, had become a muse for me. As I hit the refrain, his eyes were on me, those dark blue eyes, eyes the color of my parents’ lake under a clear sky, held me tight. He kept listening, watching, seeing right through me as I rolled right into “Tell Me The Snow.”
We both knew in that moment—with certainty, with confidence, without any question—that so many of these new songs did not come from a broken heart, but from one that was filling up.