11. Grounded
Grounded
CASH
Nashville — Morning
T he drive into Nashville is different this time.
Not the city. The city is the same, the highway widening, the skyline, the compression of it.
What’s different is me. I have something in my pocket, which is to say I have something on my phone, which is to say I have a verse and a half and a chord structure that holds.
I am walking into this meeting with actual material.
* * *
Marcus Hale’s office is on the sixth floor, with a view of Music Row that looks like success from the outside and, from the inside, feels like a place where a great many decisions are made about things that belong to other people.
I have sat in this office more times than I can count.
I know the chair that wobbles slightly on the left side.
I know that Marcus keeps water on the credenza but never offers it, which is not rudeness but absentmindedness, and I have always helped myself.
I know that when he goes still, it means something has landed, and when he leans back, it means he’s calculating, and when he picks up his pen without writing anything, it means he’s already three moves ahead.
Today I am going to make him go still.
I pull out my guitar.
There is a moment. Marcus and the two junior A they keep pulling threads until something real comes loose.
There are things here I don't want coming loose.
I drive back to the farmhouse.
The highway is clear. December is coming. You can feel it in the quality of the light, flat and gray, earlier than it was even last week. The trees along the highway are bare now, the stripped-down honesty of a landscape that has stopped performing autumn and is just being what it is.
Grounded.
Marcus used it as a compliment. The label uses "grounded" to mean something specific: rooted in the artist’s authentic voice, accessible, and the opposite of "produced.
" It is a word they apply to things that test well, meaning they have learned that audiences respond to the feeling of something real, even when they cannot name what they’re responding to.
The song is grounded because it is about a specific thing. A specific person, a quality of attention, a certain kind of solitude that I have been living inside for eight weeks, and did not know I was missing until I found it.
I am not going to tell Marcus that.
I merge onto the highway heading east and let the city drop behind me, and by the time the skyline disappears in the mirror, the compression is already lifting, the weight of Nashville coming off my shoulders when I make this drive now.
The heater is running, and the sky outside is the flat gray of a December that has made up its mind.
That is also information.
* * *
Midday
The Shelby memory surfaces somewhere on I-40, as it does when the industry machine starts spinning up around something that matters.
Not the festival. Not Brad’s face. Something earlier than that.
A meeting not unlike today’s, but in a different conference room, a different A&R director, but the same energy.
The machine identifies something real and immediately begins figuring out how to package it.
Shelby had been there that day, sitting across the table, and she had squeezed my hand under the table when the room responded as if something were working, and I had thought: this is it. This is the thing we built together.
Three years later, I opened the wrong door.
The cruelty of that memory is not the betrayal itself. It is the before. The moment in the conference room, the hand under the table, the belief that I was not doing any of this alone.
I had not been doing it alone. I just hadn’t known the terms.
I merge onto the highway heading east.
The thing about carrying an old injury is that you get good at the accounting. You know which movements will aggravate it. You adjust.
What I am adjusting for now, driving back to the farmhouse with Marcus’s word, grounded still in my chest, is the awareness that the machine wanting to package this song is the same one that packaged the last one. And the last one was built around something hollow.
This one is not hollow.
That is what I need to protect.
* * *
Sycamore Ridge — Afternoon
I am back at the farmhouse by two.
I change out of the Nashville clothes, the good jacket, the boots I wear to meetings, the Cash that sits in conference rooms and performs competence, and into jeans and the flannel shirt that has been on the farmhouse hook since October.
I feel immediately better.
This is information.
I go to check on Emmett.
This is also information, but I have stopped pretending otherwise.
Angel is at the south paddock when I get to the barn, running what looks like a solo groundwork check on Dulcie.
She does not look up when I lean on the gate.
This is no longer surprising. What is slightly surprising is that it no longer bothers me.
In the first week, I had to actively resist the urge to announce myself, to say something that would prompt her to acknowledge my arrival.
Now I just lean on the gate and wait, because she is working and the work is more important than my arrival, and I have come to understand that her not looking up is not dismissal, it is just that she is in the middle of something.
After a moment, she glances over.
“How was Nashville?”
“Marcus used the word grounded four times.”
She looks back at Dulcie. “Is that good?”
“From Marcus, it’s practically a standing ovation.”
The corner of her mouth moves. Not a smile exactly. The thing that happens before one in a face that is careful about them.
“And the rest of it?” she asks.
I pause. She has asked this before in various forms. Something’s off today. How did yesterday sit with you? And she always asks in the same way. She doesn’t press and just leaves the door open.
“They want to do a profile piece. A journalist. Comeback narrative.”
She stops moving. Looks at me directly for the first time since I arrived.
“What kind of journalist?”
“The thorough kind.”
She holds my gaze with the steady attention she gives to things she is taking seriously.
“And you said?”
“I said I needed to think about it.”
She looks away, then back at me. Goes back to Dulcie.
“That’s a real answer,” she says. “Not a no and not a yes.”
“I’m aware of what it is.”
“Just noting.”
I watch her work for a minute.
“You always do that,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Say the plain thing and then say just noting , like the just noting makes it smaller.”
She looks over at me. “Does it?”