CHAPTER 20
ROMY
The thing about producing is that when you’re doing it right, nobody outside the room ever knows what you did.
Marisol’s album is called Undersong, and by the second week of April it’s finished, and I can tell you what my job was in one sentence: I kept the floor under her.
Every song on it she wrote, every note she sings is hers, and my fingerprints are nowhere and everywhere — the take we kept because she laughed halfway through the bridge and the laugh was better than the note she’d planned; the track I made her record sitting on the booth floor because standing up made her sing at the audience and sitting made her sing to one person; the day I sent the string players home and put her brother’s cassette recording of their mother singing on the intro instead, forty seconds of a kitchen in Reno that no arranger alive could’ve written.
Ellis engineered, produced half the tracks with me, and fought me on exactly one thing all month.
“The ballad’s too quiet,” he said, week three. “Radio won’t touch it.”
“Radio isn’t the floor,” I said. “She is.”
He grumbled and mixed it quiet, and last night he texted me a single line: the ballad’s the one. I screenshotted it. I’m framing it. I’m going to hang it in the studio where he can see it every day for the rest of his life.
The showcase is at a small room in Echo Park, two hundred people, industry and press and exactly zero pyrotechnics. Marisol wanted it that way. “I did the arena,” she said. “I want to see their faces.”
Backstage she’s vibrating. Nineteen years old, top-five single, a lawsuit-adjacent scandal she didn’t create swirling one floor above her career, and she’s worried about the second verse of track six.
“I keep rushing it,” she says.
“You rush it because you don’t trust it yet,” I say. “The verse is fine. You’re still deciding if you’re allowed to have written it.”
She stares at me. “That’s annoyingly specific.”
“I’ve had some practice with people deciding what they’re allowed.”
Tessa appears with the set list and a look that means two minutes.
She’s twenty-three and she runs this whole building now — the venue offered her a job after the gala, and she took it, and negotiated, which she tells me she learned from watching me.
I didn’t know anyone was watching. That’s the thing about the back of the room.
You think you’re invisible, and somebody’s taking notes.
Marisol hugs me hard enough to compress a lung, and then she’s gone down the corridor, and I take my place at the back of the room by the soundboard, next to Ellis, where producers stand.
The back. By the board. Where I can hear the room instead of the stage.
She’s magnificent. That’s not a review, it’s a weather report.
The room goes with her from the first line, industry people who came to be seen staying to actually listen, and by track four — the floor-recorded one — I watch a famous A I tell her the truth, which is that she did her job and her job was him, and that I’m not her client anymore but I’m not her enemy either.
She replies within the hour: For what it’s worth, he’s different lately.
He asks what things cost now. I stare at that for a while.
It’s not my business what he asks anymore.
That’s the whole point of where I live now.
The phone buzzes. Marisol: Rolling Stone wants to talk to you about “the Wildstone method.” Please tell me you’ll make them call it that.
I laugh out loud, alone in my office, and it echoes a little, and the echo is fine. The house holds it and gives it back, and everything in here is something I chose.