Chapter Five
Five
The ferocious eruption from the crowd at the sight of him shakes the vertebrae in my spine.
Halloran hardly even reacts. He’s casual, calm, wearing a simple pair of dark trousers, those same white high-top Converse, and a beat-up brown leather jacket like he’s going to spend the day thrifting.
Approaching the mic with a genuine smile, he sets down what appears to be some kind of on-the-go mug, waves once to the electrified audience, and when Conor’s chord hits the cue, begins to sing.
Then he brings. The house. Down.
With each rip of his guitar and sailing chorus from the depths of his chest, I realize more and more that Tom Halloran is the most sensual, soulful, roaringly talented musician I’ve ever borne witness to.
His voice has a swaggering fullness to it—round and smooth and complex.
An intimacy, though he’s playing to thousands.
Molly and I come in as backing vocals on the next song, “Halcyon,” and I’m already breathless. It begins as an openhearted, tender ballad and when the first high note arrives, my pulse freezes—
But I hit it to a tee.
And it feels like releasing a breath I’ve held for days.
As I clap in time with Molly to the plush, swirling beat, we keep the harmony easily, and I’m surprised by the inexplicable desire to laugh.
I’ve missed performing so terribly. I’ve missed the music swimming through my body.
The live audience, the adrenaline, the utterly liberating and devastating realization that every show can only exist in that moment.
That you are one mere thread in the luscious tapestry that is unfurling before the crowd.
It’s the sharpest point of creation, live performance. And I adore it with everything in me.
I belt the next honey-sweet riff while Halloran shakes those wild curls and stomps his massive feet as the chorus breaks into a knee-quaking rock anthem. I can feel his movements in my bones. His entire sonic landscape in my chest. His pain, somehow, in my own heart.
“Halcyon” ends to raucous applause and we all suck in breaths like we’ve finished a marathon.
I tear my eyes from the glittering mass of phone screens and camera flashes to peek at Molly beside me.
Aside from the slight sheen of sweat across her brow she looks radiant.
Poised. She offers me a single nod of approval and I return the gesture in thanks.
“C’mere, Memphis,” Halloran’s voice booms, breathless, as he addresses the rabid crowd.
C’mere. I heard him say it in the interviews I watched on the bus here.
An Irish phrase meaning listen , or listen to me .
But that accent is so thick in person, the corners of my mouth quirk up.
There’s something earnest and endearing about it, despite the clear command he wields over his audience.
A kind, soft-spoken woodsman who still knows his way around an axe.
Pushing hair from his face, he attempts to begin the next song but the crowd won’t let him.
Not while they scream and chant his name.
Louder and louder. Three syllables on repeat: Hal-lor-an, Hal-lor-an, Hal-lor-an.
He can’t even hide his smile as he turns to Conor across the stage in wonder. Conor only shrugs with a devilish grin.
Okay, these boys are cute.
Fine. Fine. I’m not blind. I can admit it to myself—Halloran is cute. He’s handsome, he’s talented, he’s humble. He’s practically dazzling when he grins. Fine , I say to my mom in my head.
The crowd might have been just starting to quiet, but when Halloran bends down to grab his mug and takes a sip, they rip into another set of near-agonized roars as the long column of his neck works a swallow.
Someone in the crowd screams, “WHICH TEA IS IT?” and the whole lot of them break into shrieks of glee at some inside joke I’m not privy to.
But Halloran just laughs into his mug. I quirk a brow at Molly, who’s fighting a smile of her own.
If I squint, I can barely make out a sign in the front row held up by two young girls that reads Barry’s or Lyons? with a drawing of tea bags.
“Just pure petrol,” Halloran says into the mic softly, his voice smoother now from the hot drink. “Only way I function. I’m a menace without my morning petrol.”
The collective laughter is deafening. He chuckles along with them—his unseriousness between songs even more charming than any online clip could have prepared me for.
“No,” he adds, still grinning. “That’s not true. Don’t go spreadin’ that…” He appraises his mug, one hand still on his guitar. “Don’t you think it’d ruin the fun,” he asks the crowd, voice deep and gentle, “if I told ye?”
Another side effect of the accent—you, said like yeh. More uncontrollable screaming. His sly smirk. The red lights turn hazy blue, and the next song on the set list picks up with a percussive beat.
“Just going to lighten the mood a little,” Halloran says as the beat thumps, “with a joyful ditty about freezing to death.”
The audience squeals and shrieks—clearly, they know the song he’s referring to. It’s a drum-fueled jam about getting drunk and lost in some twisted woods at night in a storm and stumbling upon your own self making love to your ex right there in the dirt—just your average breakup song, right?
Molly and I belt in harmony during the whimsically dark chorus, and I notice Halloran turn from the audience to study me as I sing.
I can hear my falsetto soaring over Molly’s alto notes, and pull back just a little.
Halloran doesn’t smile or nod, too consumed by his skillful manipulation of the guitar strings, but his brows knit a little.
Did I do something wrong?
I try to smile at him and get nothing in return. He’s already swept back up in the devastating swell of the chorus, stomping his feet in rhythm and tipping his head back. But I know he’s heard me. I know he’s singled out my voice.
Halloran’s full-throated vocals blast through the explosive end of the song, choking on the final lyrics in which he allows himself to die out in the rain’s cold so that this other version of him can be with the woman he once lost. I want so badly to find the whole thing heavy-handed and self-serious…
but I can’t. In fact, as Molly and I hum through the somber backing vocals, and the projected tree shadows fall across Halloran’s broken face, wound tightly in some kind of excruciating rapture, I find tears nearly springing to my eyes.
The cheers from the crowd bring me back down to reality. Molly covers her mic as she whispers, “He’s something, huh?”
I watch him—his now slightly damp collar pressing against his neck. The long, Tarzan-like tresses he tosses out of his face. The respect he gives his audience with each grateful dip of his chin and huge hand pressed to his heart in thanks.
I can’t even fathom a response to her, so I nod once, eyes still on this man I’m realizing I completely underestimated. This concert—the one I’m performing in— feels less like a gig and more like a religious experience.
And it’s not just his richly atmospheric keys and organs, or his murmurous, slow-burn of a voice.
It’s the way he takes his ear monitor out to listen to the crowd sing his words back to him like gospel—the Church of Thomas Patrick Halloran.
It’s how tears flood his eyes in awe at each of them.
How he mutters a low thank you very much after each song.
It’s as if he has no idea how colossally successful he is.
By the time Grayson’s soft piano cues succeed in quieting the crowd’s roaring, it’s the last song of the show. The one the entire audience has been waiting for. The torch song that made Halloran a platinum artist off his first single at twenty-six years old: “If Not for My Baby.”
Molly leaves her post beside me, grabbing the mic and sauntering down to the front of the stage to meet Halloran, who’s abandoned his guitar.
He greets her with a subtle nod that she returns to him, and it dawns on me that there’s a bit of playacting involved in this finale number.
She’s playing the role of Cara Brennan—the singer Halloran wrote and recorded the song with.
As Wren lays a soft and steady rhythm with her drums and Conor comes in with the melodic initial chords, Halloran’s distinctive low, sweeping voice serenades Molly.
“ The oceans rise to meet the skies, ” he croons. “ My love just tells me, now we can be free.”
“ Broken roadways, sweet rain sideways ,” Molly sings back to him. “ The end of days, if not for my baby .”
It’s not theater, but their performance is of a great love at the end of the world.
One gone terribly wrong, looked back on with rose-colored, post-apocalyptic glasses.
And as the song picks up to the chorus, I feel the devotion Halloran once felt for whoever this woman was—Cara, I’d imagine—in my own heart.
My eyes are burning. My lungs, too. My vocals begin to peter out.
“ I want to be lost ,” Halloran begs into the mic, “ not found in my aching .” He cants forward. “ I’d be hawthorn frost, if not for my baby.”
All the while Molly hits her impeccable, heart-wrenching high note. A lamentation of all the reasons she had to leave, despite the love Halloran laid bare at her feet.
I’m missing my lines as I really hear them for the first time. The insatiable longing. A man who saw the world anew through his baby’s eyes, and now has to reconcile that world with this one she’s no longer in. My eyes find the spotlights and I stare into them until I remember where and when I am.
It’s a mercy when the drums crescendo and their harmony ends. The lights snap to pitch-black, the crowd goes berserk, and I try to remember what compelled me to botch that last song so badly.
It was Halloran and Molly’s moment—perhaps nobody even noticed?
When the lights flash back on, Halloran raises his hands up in thanks to the audience, and motions for the band to come and stand beside him. I scoot my way to the far end beside Grayson and feel his hand snake around my back and settle low on my hip.
We bow as one, my heart still hammering from both the exhilaration of my first successful performance and my anxiety over those errors in the final song.
Halloran bellows out one last thank you into the crowd, and promises to return to Memphis as soon as he can. We file off the stage to the sound of their unrelenting elation, and the endless chant of his name.