Least Worst Night of the Century So Far
Least Worst Night of the Century So Far
The studio was in Brooklyn, an old building near the water. Before entering I tossed my half-full Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in a garbage can on the corner. The caffeine hadn’t been doing my anxiety any favors.
Luke Skinner was funding the day himself, which meant we were at a slightly cheaper studio in the same building as the one where the band had recorded their tracks weeks earlier, on the label’s dime. I’d paid my own plane fare, spent the night on Nomi’s couch, and had a red-eye out that night. My boss thought I was going to a wedding.
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.