Chapter 12
After three long grueling days, we’d laid the foundational tracks—but, little did I know at the time, that was only the beginning.
Next it was time to splice together the comp tracks, which was basically where we picked the best sections and slapped them all together.
For that, Jeff worked with an engineer…and most of us.
Braden and Cy worked their day jobs, having already taken time off, and my hours had already been cut to just a few hours here and there—and at the rate I kept demanding time off, I was probably not going to have my job for much longer.
It might have been easier if we would have let Jeff do his job by himself, but Zack was too much of a control freak to let our producer make all the decisions on his own as to what would stay or go in the final tracks.
Surprisingly enough, some of my new material made the cut, so I was happy. That was why I was there...because if Zack wanted to cut some of my better improvs, I wanted him to have to justify it.
When we weren’t actively involved in the process, I caught Zack looking off to the side or, once, it looked like he was staring off into the distance, as if on the seashore staring at the horizon. Except that wasn’t it. He looked like his heart was being ripped in two.
And that didn’t make any sense at all. We were doing exactly what he’d always wanted. He should have been ecstatic.
On the first day of the second week, what we hoped would be our last day of putting the foundational tracks together, Zack and I were drinking watery coffee in the little kitchen at the studio, waiting for Jeff and the engineer to arrive.
And I decided to ask the question that had been nagging me. I’d been avoiding it all week, but now felt like the perfect time. “What’s going on, Zack?”
“What do you mean?”
“You…seem miserable. Depressed. What’s up with that?”
“I’m a little tense. We’ve got a lot riding on this.”
“Yeah, I get that, but—it sounds amazing. We sound so good.”
“Yeah.”
I was silent for a bit, taking a sip of the coffee, then wishing I hadn’t because motor oil might have tasted better.
Zack had his hair pulled back into a ponytail and when I searched his face, I fell in love with him all over again.
There was a tiny line in the middle of his forehead that I’d never noticed before, and I wondered if it was a sign of the emotional burden he was carrying.
But he wasn’t letting me in.
“So if it’s not the music,” I asked, “what is it?”
“Nothing.”
And then it hit me. But could Zack allow himself to be vulnerable with me? “Is it…because you didn’t go to your dad’s funeral?”
Like an explosion, he suddenly yelled. “That’s not fucking it!” And then he got up, pushing the chair back with such force that it toppled over, and stomped out of the kitchen. I sat there in silence, knowing an overreaction when I saw one.
That response was confirmation that I’d hit the nail on the head.
He was feeling guilty about not going to his father’s funeral—or maybe for not meeting him in the first place.
Regardless of what he said and how he felt about his father overall, this was like a thorn stuck in his hand that he couldn’t remove… and I’d just poked the sore spot.
How could I help him through it if he wouldn’t even talk about it?
The rest of the week was focused on overdubs, which was basically where we took the foundational tracks and made them better, each of us working individually.
But it wasn’t just the rest of that second week.
It bled into a third and even a fourth week as Zack maniacally controlled every single microsecond of sound.
Even he and Jeff got into it once or twice when Zack would want to re-record a line of vocals for the fortieth time.
And he and Cy nearly got into a fistfight when Zack demanded he play a section a different way.
By the time we got to where it was my turn to do overdubs, adding additional touches of percussion, my nerves were fraught, and I expected the worst from the man I’d called my best friend.
Inside the studio, he was a demanding tyrant.
Outside, back at our apartment, he was closed off and morose, becoming a full-on drunk.
And I had no idea how to save him. I’d thought our band getting recognized—and on our way to impending fame and fortune—would be the answer. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
On Wednesday of the fourth week, I was in the live room sitting at my drum kit.
We’d decided that, on every song, Jeff wanted me to double a lot of the work I’d done on my snare—but when we arrived that morning, Jeff provided me with a bigger drum.
“Trust me, guys. This’ll help the sound pop more on the songs. ”
As I settled onto the stool, I asked, “Can I play the songs like I normally do?”
“Yeah.”
That was good, because it would have been awkward to just play the snare, especially when I’d spent the last couple of years training my brain to work everything together in a rhythm.
Later on, I knew we’d be focusing on other sounds, like the cymbals and toms for choruses, but overdubbing the snare would take most of the time.
And I was starting to get nervous about all the time we’d spent in the studio. We knew beforehand that we’d be spending several weeks there, but we hadn’t forgotten that every minute in there meant money that came out of our future pay. We were already struggling to pay the bills.
So I hoped I could get my work done in a day, because then the songs had to be edited and mixed—and I had no idea how long that would take, especially if Zack couldn’t just let Jeff and the engineer do their jobs.
As I started playing along with the sounds of the first song in my headphones, my creativity took over.
It was as if the studio had changed me and I could never go back.
I would never again be a standard drum player who simply provided a backbeat so the boys could do their thing.
I too had become an artist who had things to say through my instruments.
But as I began adding flourishes, I could see Zack’s brow furrow as he started talking to Jeff behind the glass. Even though I couldn’t read his lips or hear a word of what he said, I could imagine it.
Sure enough, as I finished the second chorus, Zack’s voice flooded my ears. “Stick with the beat, Dani. The time for improvising is past.”
Jeff said something I couldn’t hear and then he and Zack started talking—but, again, I was clueless as to their conversation.
So I took off the headphones, set my sticks down, and walked into the control booth.
By the time I got there, Zack was shouting while Jeff was customarily silent—and the engineer was tucked into a corner, pretending he wasn’t there.
Zack continued his diatribe, saying, “It would have been fine if she’d done this before we came into the studio. It’s like she’s trying to fucking sabotage this album.”
“I’m not, Zack,” I said, loud enough to make him turn around.
“This is your band and I’m honored to be here—but the drumbeats before weren’t mine.
They were yours. And they were good—but this album is going to be the final definitive sound.
And I’m sorry, but I want them to be mine.
” After a second, I added, “Actually, I’m not sorry.
All of you guys would feel the same way.
” Even that wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t know if Braden felt the way I did.
I knew he loved playing with the band, but I didn’t know if he felt creatively confined.
Unlike Cy and Zack, we didn’t have solos to show off our individual talents.
“You’re missing the fucking point,” Zack said, his green eyes nearly on fire. “For the overdubs, we need you to match what you’ve already played. Why is that so hard to understand?”
I was going to let all his meanness go, knowing that he was struggling emotionally because of his dad, fighting addiction to alcohol, and wanting desperately for this album to be perfect—but I wasn’t about to back down.
Fortunately, Jeff’s experience ensured he was an expert diplomat. “Look—we’re losing time arguing here. Dani, why don’t you play through all the tracks once however you want to, and then we’ll have you go through them again playing them as close to the original way as you can?”
That seemed reasonable to me, so I agreed. Zack’s mouth was clenched shut but he gave a short nod to Jeff, and I walked out of the booth and back into the live room.
It didn’t take me long to go through all ten songs, adding the creative flourishes I wanted to hear on the final album—but it was difficult going back.
Even though I’d played all those songs one way for the first two years I’d spent as a drummer, I was having a hard time reverting.
It reminded me of one time when I’d been at my grandma’s and she’d told me about how, as a young girl, she’d learned to type—on a typewriter, not a keyboard.
She said that they used to put two spaces after periods and question marks—but that had changed at some point with the internet, and she’d had to learn how to type just one space after a period.
“I thought all those decades of doing it one way would have made it hard to do, but it wasn’t hard at all. And now I can’t do it the old way.”
Becoming a real artist instead of a mechanical rigid drummer felt the same way to me. There was no going back.
But I tried. Because Jeff had backed me up and stopped a volatile exchange between me and Zack, I owed it to him. But I also wanted to try for Zack, because I knew how much this meant to him.
My hands and feet—and brain—couldn’t quite settle back into the old groove. And, at one point when I was playing the second song, Zack’s voice exploded in my ears. “Play time is over, Dani. Play it the way it was written.”
“I’m trying.”
“Bullshit. Try harder then.”
Jeff’s voice was much calmer. “What can we do to help you with that, Dani?”