Chapter 7
When Eve’s plane lands at JFK, she cries with her head tucked against the window.
The tour bus went on ahead of her; she stayed an extra day in DC because she was meeting with a producer there who love love loves ski rat and wanted to know what Eve was working on next.
Eve played him some of her new stuff. He said “hmm” a lot.
“Hmm, anything else? Hmm.” He also nodded a lot.
Eve could not determine whether this was good or bad.
She didn’t cry on her flight from Denver, so this is weird.
Everything is objectively better now than it was then.
Her Instagram following has quadrupled. Her streams are up by a factor of ten.
She has a wonderful boyfriend and she lives in the same city as her best friend.
These are positives! It’s just overwhelming.
Suddenly she has so much more to lose. She is pretty sure the hmms were not good.
Backstage in Brooklyn, her hands shake like they never have before.
Danny is there in the audience. Shannon is also in the audience, and Julian, and Gigi.
These are people who would probably support her even if she was really shitty, and yet, it feels so much worse than performing in front of strangers.
She steps out into lights burning like an imploding sun and sees them all there in the front, Danny and Shannon and Julian and Gigi. Her parents are not there. Why would they be? Why would they be! Eve is once again wearing basically just a bra under a windbreaker.
She plays her set. Sings a lyric wrong. Almost drops her guitar because her hands are so sweaty.
When she gets to the end, she thanks everyone from the tour. She thanks Stella. She thanks her friends and family for coming to watch. And then:
Eve gives herself five seconds to decide who she is. Five seconds of silence is a long time on stage. She has both songs tugging at the muscle memory of her fingers. It’s just a simple question, really: Would Eve rather be smart or in love?
There was a time, before the Great Malaise, when Eve’s parents used to call on her to calculate restaurant tips.
She was young then, maybe seven or eight, an age when 18 percent of $137.
54 was a feat. But then they grew accustomed to this trick, and they started calling on her to answer crossword clues: ETNA, ENO, ENT.
But they got tired of that, too, and so it fell upon Eve to unearth new hoops and new ways to leap through them.
The reason Eve wants her parents to think she’s smart is because they never will.
So she could sing the clever song. But they didn’t show up.
And even if they did, it would not be good enough.
But then there is Danny: who has never asked her to be anything other than she is.
Five seconds of silence, and then Eve says, “My last song is a new one, so bear with me.” She shuts her eyes against the glare of the lights for a moment, and she says, “This one is called ‘Sunbeam, Baby.’ ”
And then she plays it.
When it’s done, she kisses her palm and holds it out to Danny, and nobody else matters, in the end.
He’s standing there at the front with his black T-shirt and his corduroy button-down and his chin tilted up to her like she’s the sun.
When she writes a song, she knows thousands of people might hear it, but thousands of people are an exercise of imagination.
She can’t write a song picturing thousands of imagined reactions.
She writes a song and she thinks of Danny.
On one hand, this feels reductive and small—creating art, and all for a boy!
On the other hand, what could be more obvious?
She writes about love so that he knows how she feels.
She writes about love so it becomes more true.
That’s probably the real reason machines won’t ever stop people from writing love songs. The machines might get good at making them. But people will still want to make them true.