Chapter 12 Jasmine
Twelve
Jasmine
Iwant to call it Diatribe,” Ryan told me one day. “I have something to say, and people are going to hear it, whether they want to or not.”
The press around that album was great—and for that reason, we wanted to keep things as under wraps as possible.
Helladonna had her whole discography leaked by a hacker earlier that year, and while it was still a great record and did go platinum, stuff like that is going to affect sales.
It affects the way that artists approach their work too. It’s just not the ideal situation.
So Skip put us on lockdown. Only authorized personnel in the studio; he did a security review with our IT guys, met with our distributors and vendors to make sure all their policies were up to date and the recordings would be safe. And for the most part, they were.
With . . . one exception.
Skip
Obviously I’m not the jackass who actually did the leak, but I blame myself.
Ryan had always had access to tracks that others didn’t, of course, and as we moved into the mixing process, there would often be a few she wasn’t yet satisfied with.
The three singles were already out in the world, done deals.
But on Diatribe, with one month left before the release, Ryan still wanted changes to “Dangerous,” “Listen!” and especially “Mine All Mine.”
I could be sympathetic as to why. Look, I wasn’t in her head, but they seemed more personal than a lot of the music she’d put out.
More reflective of her current feelings about this career, maybe.
Jas would have the best insight. They were all purportedly about relationships, but I wondered if “Dangerous” was more about taking this step toward a new sound—how it felt exciting but dangerous.
And “Listen!” was firm and a little angry, the lyrics telling someone to Shut up, shut up, just for one minute / Let me get the story straight before you try to spin it / I can’t hear myself / I can’t even think / With you and your words always talking at me.
It was “Mine All Mine” that was the genuine romantic. If we had met differently / In another life / Would you make a promise to be / Mine, all mine?
That one could’ve made the toughest son of a bitch melt. It’s beautiful, earnest, sad. The singer is falling for someone who’s off-limits—as much as she wants him, she can’t have him. So she imagines a parallel world where they’re different people.
Hey, I guess my insight’s not so bad. Or maybe I’m full of bullshit, who knows. They were just songs.
But they were important to Ryan. And while I thought all the tracks sounded great, she wasn’t satisfied, so I let her take the mixed files on a USB drive to listen to at home. We’d always done this with either CDs or thumb drives, now that they were easier. I didn’t give it a second thought.
Until T-minus two weeks before Diatribe’s release date.
It was early morning and I was in the shower; I could hear my cell ringing and ringing on the bathroom counter, and I thought, Oh hell, what’s this all about?
I had a whole smattering of messages from my PR team, but the first callback I made was to Andre, who never got in touch this early, even by Austin time.
He said, “Have you seen the news this morning, Skip?”
And I said, “Give it to me straight.”
Leaked. Three tracks: “Dangerous,” “Listen!” and “Mine All Mine.” The three that just happened to be on Ryan’s personal thumb drive.
Jasmine
Skip called an emergency meeting that morning. To this day, I don’t know how much Ryan knew beforehand, but it couldn’t have been everything. Because when he told us which three songs had leaked, her face just crumpled.
Justin
So.
I’m not proud of it. But I’m not going to say I regret it either. I’ve asked everyone to hear me out, and with your permission, Elyse, I’d like for them to finally listen.
Two things happened leading up to the leak.
One: After weeks and months of applications, I finally got a job on a medium-budget movie set.
They wanted me to be a location scout, and I lied, okay?
I told them I had a car. I didn’t think things through, but I knew for a fact that I was not going to let this job pass me by.
I needed money. Badly.
Two: Someone stole my screenplay idea.
I’d sort of been buddies with this hotshot trust fund guy at UCLA. And I’ll name names—it was Austin Proust, the son of director Thomas Proust. He made a big secret of this indie film he was doing and invited everyone in our major to the screening.
What do I see? A poignant story about a goddamn accountant abandoning his family and his careful life to hunt down Mothman.
You just . . . you don’t know what that feels like until it happens to you. It was like I was sinking into the floor, through the floor. I didn’t know what to do.
So, yeah. Maybe I was already on the defensive when I went to Ryan’s place that week. We were on the couch together watching Twilight, and she was comforting me. She said, “I always hated Austin Proust. He was an asshole to me at a party once.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “He was an asshole to both of us.”
Ryan grinned and leaned her head against mine. She said, “Want me to try to get him blacklisted?”
She was joking, but it was nice to hear. “I wish you would,” I said.
I was feeling pretty good. I thought I might even get to kiss her tonight. Ryan said, “I have something that might cheer you up.” She pulled out her laptop and plugged in a USB drive she had, then opened a track. She smiled at me.
“I finally finished the lyrics,” she said.
“Oh yeah?” I asked. I leaned back and listened.
Your hummingbird heart / Always moving, full of art.
First red flag.
I looked at Ryan uncertainly. “That sounds really nice,” I said. “Like my poem, huh?”
And she said, “What poem?”
Second red flag.
“The poem I gave you when I asked you to be my girlfriend, back in middle school. Hummingbird heart. I wrote that.”
“No . . .” She looked confused. “Is it that similar? You didn’t write it . . . I mean, I wrote the lyrics because they reminded me of you. But it’s not like—”
And I said, “No, Ryan, I wrote that. I wrote that line.”
I felt all hot inside. First Proust, now this. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “I still have my notes about the poem, but I gave the final draft to you. You still have it, right? I’ll show you.”
Her face became closed off, and she leaned away from me on the couch. “No, Justin,” she said. “I’m sorry, but we’ve moved around so much that I think it’s gone. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
Well, she did. “Okay, well, those are my words,” I pushed. “Could I . . . get a writer’s credit or something?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s kind of late in the game, but I can see. I just don’t know.”
I was about to press back on that—how long does it take to add a credit to a CD booklet?—but then Ryan got a call from her dad. She picked up the phone and walked away.
I was not feeling great in that moment. I had no money, my screenplay was dead, another one of my creative pieces had been ripped off by someone who I thought cared about me, and Ryan hadn’t saved my poem.
That one stung the most.
I sat there and stared at the laptop screen and worked myself up into this fury. And then, suddenly, the answer to at least one of those questions became clear.
I opened up an email to myself on Ryan’s laptop and made it happen.