Chapter 12 I’m Not Gonna Write You a Love Song
I'm Not Gonna Write You a Love Song
RIFF
Heading to Glambam after lunch with my sister has me in a rough mood.
I spent half an hour trying to explain myself over a noodle bowl at Wait Pho It, but Rachel was up in arms the whole time. “They can’t make you date her,” and “You should sue,” and “Harmony Sonora is awful.”
“She’s not awful,” I argue.
“She is though. You have a right to keep your personal and private life separate. That doesn’t warrant a hate song, let alone several. Anyone who’s spent any time with you can tell right away you’re a good guy, so if she couldn’t see that, she wasn’t looking.”
There was a lot more of that kind of talk and then I ran out of time and had to wolf down the rest of my pho so I could rush to my writing session with Harmony.
I get there a few minutes late.
The writer’s lounge is soundproofed, with warm recessed lighting, and one long window. The geometric wall art doubles as acoustic panels.
There’s a sectional couch, multiple stools and leather armchairs, a coffee table with notebooks and pens, a beverage station with a fancy brewing machine and a rack of pods, a glass-door mini-fridge stocked with artesian water and soda.
The far wall is lined with mounted guitars, all leading up to a polished baby grand piano.
There’s also a small mixing console, a MacBook Pro, and midi keyboards, plus a few mics.
Harmony is already here in the middle of it, tapping her pen on the edge of one of the notebooks and chewing her bottom lip. She looks up.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got nothing,” I say. “Not when you’ve been firing songs at me like a machine gun all year.”
“It’s the second half of ‘Hate to Love’ that’s got me stumped.” She returns her attention to what I assume is a blank page.
“Yeah, we’re definitely going to have to exaggerate that part. But that’s okay; you’re great at exaggerating.” I smile flatly.
Harmony stares daggers at me, then leans forward and slowly closes her book. “You’re right. We’ll just pretend. I know that’s your favorite.”
“Look at us trading compliments. Not sure why I was worried we wouldn’t get along.” I head over to the piano and sit at the bench.
She cracks open the notebook again but doesn’t write anything. “Why are you going straight for an instrument? You don’t write lyrics first?”
I scoff. “You do write lyrics first?”
“The words set the tone. I can’t try melodies when I don’t even know what the song’s vibe is supposed to be.”
“Of course you know what the vibe is supposed to be. That’s why you’re writing the song—because you feel something you have to let out.
When I don’t have words yet, I let the feeling out in a melody.
” To demonstrate, I play an angry little phrase.
“Then, and only then, do I have a mental shelf to set the lyrics on.”
“No,” she says, “You have to verbally identify the feeling first—define it—then elaborate on it.”
“Look, if you insist on doing lyrics first, be my guest. Go ahead and get us started; you do like to start things.”
“Do I? Or are things already started and I’m just the first one to call them what they are?”
“You’re the first one to assume you know what they are, that’s for sure.”
“I can only know what other people tell me. If they withhold information, that’s on them.”
“Maybe everyone doesn’t owe you their life story right off the bat. Maybe not everything is your business.”
“It’s my business if you expect to touch me.”
I freeze with my fingers in position over the keys. She’s really going to go there?
“You’re the one that closed the gap, darlin’.” I play a few minor chords, knowing how that and the drawl will probably irk her.
“Yeah, after you initiated a ‘dance.’ We both know what your intentions were.”
“That’s the thing: we don’t both know. You have no clue what my intentions were.
” I think about what Rachel said. She wasn’t looking.
“If anything, maybe you should ask yourself why you didn’t bother to look more closely at me.
Yet I was just supposed to consider myself lucky that the amazing Harmony Sonora even bothered to glance in my direction—but if I’d known that glance was going to turn into the deadly aim of your lyrical weapons, I never would have said a word to you. ”
She opens her mouth like she’s going to argue but then stops.
“And for the record,” I add, “I did consider myself lucky.”
Her expression is tight at first, then slowly fades to something more pensive, almost regretful.
Probably just my wishful thinking.
When she seems like she really isn’t going to say anything, I start to play another melody, whatever feels right, something kind of bittersweet. I keep going with it, repeating musical phrases until Harmony’s voice tries to pick it up, humming experimentally while she writes something down.
As I start the first phrase over again, she softly sings, “‘Didn’t want it, didn’t mean it, but here … we … are … like we’ve pinned all our hopes on a dying … star …’”
I stop for a moment.
Not bad.
I play it again, and this time I harmonize with her as she sings her lyrics.
Didn’t mean it, didn’t want it, but here we are,
Like we’ve pinned all our hopes on a dying star
Damn we sound good together. It was electric onstage at Coastal Hearts, even more pronounced when we recorded “Lip Sync,” but here, alone together in this quiet room, with only the piano and our voices …
I clear my throat.
Just because we both have good vocal skills doesn’t mean there’s anything to it.
I can admire how smart Harmony is and how hard she works and the way her lips purse when she’s thinking, and I can also still acknowledge that it’s kind of shitty to call people out in songs when there are two sides to those stories.
We do the phrase one more time but we’ve got nothing after that, so I have to stop again. We both try to think of the next line.
“‘Don’t think we’ll ever see eye to eye,’” I sing roughly as I plunk out the main notes of my melody.
“‘You act like the … rules … simply … don’t apply.’” There’s a stack of blank sheet music on a cart next to the piano, so I grab a handful and a pencil and start jotting down chords before I forget them.
“‘We’d rather be going toe to toe.’” Harmony scribbles that on her open notebook. “’Game on for the tenth time in a row.’”
Harmony and I stare at each other. I don’t think either of us expected the words to start flowing this easily, but neither of us is going to complain.
We have to take what we can get.
We sing through all that a few times, tweaking the melody and harmony. For a minute, the feud doesn’t seem to matter; we’re two professionals working, collaborating.
“‘No holding back,’” I add to the words. “‘We’ll … go for broke. Which one of us is going to choke?’”
She shakes her head. “How about, ‘No holding back’—”
“‘No holding back, let’s duke it out. We’ll prob’ly end up in a double knockout.’” I’m kidding, but sometimes throwing out random phrases helps.
Harmony grimaces, tries again. “‘No holding back’ …”
“’Step in the ring.’”
“‘No holding back …” she repeats, ignoring me, straining for something else.
“‘Let’s … see what you’ve got,’” I offer.
She scrunches her face for a second, then perks up. “Yes. ‘No holding back, let’s see what you’ve got. Come on … hit me with your best shot’!”
All I can do is nod once. The master has spoken.
“From the top?”
Didn’t mean it, didn’t want it, but here we are,
Like we’ve pinned all our hopes on a dying star,
Don’t think we’ll ever see eye to eye,
You act like the rules simply don’t apply,
We’d rather be going toe to toe,
Game on for the tenth time in a row,
No holding back, let’s see what you’ve got,
Come on, hit me with your best shot
After more refining, we get the sheet music and the lyrics written how we like, and I look at the clock to see we’ve been at this for two hours.
“I think we’re in a good place to stop for today,” Harmony tells me. “We can sleep on this verse and come back fresh with some ideas for the chorus next time.”
I stack the sheet music. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe we should exchange numbers. Or emails. That way we can shoot ideas back and forth outside of this room—which means we’ll have to spend less time together in it later.”
She flashes me a hesitant look, but eventually sighs and comes over to me with her pencil, holding out her hand for the sheet music. I give it to her and she writes a number along the margin of the top page. “There. I’ll get yours when you text me.”
“Great,” I deadpan. “Nice doing business with you.”
Harmony rolls her eyes, then heads for the door. She rests her fingers on the handle as she glances over her shoulder at me. “You write really beautiful melodies, by the way.” It looks like it pains her to say it.
And yet, she said it anyway. What game is she playing? I feel like deep down she has to know I’m not the Riff she’s seen in music videos, or on magazine covers. But why does she keep resisting that intuition?
More importantly, why do I care?
“Thanks,” I say, almost in a whisper.
Then she’s gone.