The detective flexed her lips into an inverted U. “I don’t know that they aren’t. Now I have a question for you. Did Cassidy have any tension with our rock star?”
“No more than any other. Which is to say plenty. She tended to open her columns with Soleil’s rehab lapses. Most of it is past history, though. Things I found in archives when I was doing research. Back in the day, Soleil had a wilder side and that always made good copy for ‘Buzz Rush.’ ”
Six years ago, when she was twenty-two, Soleil Gray had been a brooding Emo icon, when Emo was the thing. Although, when the rock band you front has a couple of gold records and you can fill a summer’s worth of venues in North America, Europe, and Australia—and you’re traveling to them on Citation jets—there’s not too much to brood about. The early songs she wrote and sang lead vocals on, like “Barbed Wire Heart,” “Mixed Massages,” and notably, from the band’s second CD, “Virus in Your Soul,” made millions and earned reviewer raves. Rolling Stone called her the distaff, pre-hype John Mayer, basically looking right past the rest of the band to the pale lead singer who was perennially staring through a curtain of black sloping bangs with despondent green eyes framed by mascara.
Rumors of drug use gained traction when Soleil started arriving hours late for concerts and, eventually, missing some altogether. A YouTube cell phone video capturing her on stage at Toad’s Place in New Haven went viral, showing her wasted and hoarse, forgetting her own lyrics even with the audience trying to prompt her. Soleil busted up Shades of Gray in 2008. She said it was to go solo. It was more like to go party. The singer-songwriter went a year and a half without writing or recording anything.
Even though clubs and drugs replaced studios and concerts, Soleil stayed in the spotlight after she hooked up with Reed Wakefield, the hot young film actor whose own taste for New York nightlife and ingested substances matched her own. The difference was that Reed Wakefield was able to maintain his career. The couple moved into her East Village apartment after he started shooting Magnitude Once Removed, a costume drama in which he played the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. The filming outlasted their affair, which was volatile and punctuated by late-night police visits. Having already broken up her band, Soleil broke up her relationship with Reed and buried her pain in the recording studio with long sessions, creative disputes, and not much output.
The previous May, just days after he had returned to New York from Cannes, where he received a special jury prize for his role as the bastard son of France’s first American ambassador, Reed Wakefield pulled a Heath Ledger and died of an accidental drug overdose.
The impact on Soleil was profound. Once again, she stopped working, but this time to go into rehab. She emerged from the Connecticut facility clean and focused. The very day after her release, she was back in the recording studio to lay down tracks for the ballad she had written on her bunk bed in the Fairfield County manor as her farewell to the actor she had loved. “Reed and Weep” got split reviews. Some thought it was a sensitive anthem to the fragility of life and enduring loss. Others called it a shameless derivative of “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor and REM’s “Everybody Hurts.” But it debuted on the charts in the Top 10. Soleil Gray had officially begun her elusive solo career.