“That’s hot, baby,” he told her.
“It is not hot!” she said, and then she reconsidered. “Okay, maybe it is kind of hot, but there’s no way I’m going to a restaurant like this.”
“Prude,” he told her with a smile.
“I am not a prude,” she said. “I’ll have you know that I just fucked a guy in an airplane hangar on the wing of a plane while still wearing my dress! What do you think of that?”
“Anyone I know?” he asked.
She slapped at his shoulder. “Shut up,” she said. “No restaurant if I have stuff in my cooter. Besides, Elsa is making you a special dinner for your homecoming.”
“Oh yeah?” he asked. “What is it?”
“You’ll just have to wait and find out,” she said. “I’ve been sworn to secrecy.”
“What a rip,” he said sourly.
Jake played the master copies for her when they got home, starting with Celia’s album. The first cut was The Struggle, and she listened in awe as she heard the final version, as she listened to her saxophone—that’s me playing that, she thought in wonder—coming out of the speaker, mixed perfectly with the rhythm instruments and Jake and Celia’s guitars.
“Wow,” she whispered, feeling pride and wonder competing for top billing.
“Pretty good shit we came up with, eh?” Jake asked.
“I can’t believe how good it sounds.”
“The Nerdlys outdid themselves on this project,” Jake said. “They used that mixing board as another instrument, maybe even the most important instrument. They blended all of those basic tracks and all of those overdubs into a work of freaking art.”
“It’s amazing,” she said, listening to Jake’s guitar solo on the cut. She had heard him play it dozens if not hundreds of times before, but she had never heard it like this. It sounded crisp, clean, the timing absolutely perfect, the blending of volume in perfect symmetry with the backing instruments.
The next cut was Done With You, which featured the dueling solos between Laura and Mary on the outro. Again, she had personally played her part of that dozens upon dozens of times during the recording process and the overdubs, but hearing it now, fully mixed and integrated, was almost like hearing it for the first time. She knew the notes, of course, but hearing the blend of the instrument with the others, hearing how it played against the backbeat of the drums and bass, was surreal, as if she were listening to someone else’s work—someone with some talent—but at the same time, she knew it was her lips, her fingers, her aptitude that had produced the music.
“That chick on the horn kind of rocks, huh?” Jake asked her.
“She really does,” Laura said with a smile.
They listened to the entire CD from start to finish and then put in Jake’s and listened to that as well. She was not quite as familiar with Jake’s work as she was with Celia’s, as she was only featured on one cut: South Island Blur. True, she had heard all of Jake’s tunes just from being in the studio while they had worked on them, but she did not know them quite as intimately. Had she been hearing them for the first time ever, especially without the benefit of her recent experience as part of the unnamed band, she probably would not have cared for most of them. Most featured some level of distorted electric guitar for the primary melody, a sound she had emphatically abhorred in her pre-enlightenment days. But now, now the tunes sounded sweet to her ears, particularly Insignificance, which had been mixed into a hypnotic blending of Jake’s tenor voice, his fingerpicking acoustic skills, and Mary’s brilliance on the violin.
“You guys did a really good job in the mixing,” she told him.
“And the mastering,” Jake added. “Don’t forget about that.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Mixing is the blending of the tracks together to construct the cut out of the available tracks. Mastering is the setting of the cut order and the adjustment of the volumes and levels so that all of the tracks on each and every cut on the CD mix together in a similar manner and sound good in whatever format they’re being played. It’s what keeps Insignificance from being louder than Island, or vice versa. It’s what makes the CD sound good while being listened to in someone’s car, but also while being played over the airwaves as a radio song.”
“I had no idea there was so much involved,” Laura said. “Now I know why you had to stay another two and a half months after I left.”
“That was what we were doing,” he said. “Making CDs and then listening to them over and over again under all kinds of different conditions. We listened to them in the house, in the cars, out of a boombox down on the beach, you name it.”
“What’s the next step?” Laura asked.
“The next step is to let some record execs hear what we have. Obie has already sent out some copies to certain people. Once they get a listen ... well ... that’s when the fun really starts.”
The following Monday afternoon, in a conference room on the upper floor of the National Records Building in Hollywood, that fun was about to start.
Steve Crow, who had been assigned as the contact between Oren Blake II, the holder of the MD&P contract with Jake Kingsley for his solo album, and National Records, the entity that had the ability to fulfill that MD&P contract if the price was right, had called a meeting. He had received the envelope with the two master copies that very morning. It was time to hear what Kingsley had come up with.
Also present at the meeting was James Doolittle, the head of the artists and repertoire department, and Rick Bailey, the head of the new artist development department. All three participants remembered another gathering they’d participated in a few years before—in this very room, in fact—to listen to a cassette tape that had been presented by the band Intemperance. That tape had been a joke, filled with songs like Fuck the Establishment, which was an angry, profanity ridden piece that, while powerful, was also completely unsuitable for airplay; and The Choice, which was a contrite yet playful tune about picking out a can of soup in the grocery store; and The Discovery, which was about finding a piece of lint in one’s navel. Intemperance—Jake, Matt, and Bill the ringleaders, of course—had deliberately produced and recorded substandard and offensive tunes as a ploy to renegotiate their contract.
And it worked, Crow had to remind himself sourly. He still had some hard feelings over having a band full of young punks get one over on him.
“All right,” said Doolittle, who was the highest ranking member of the meeting—for what that was worth. “I understand we’re going to hear Kingsley’s master, at last.”
“Got it right here,” Crow said, holding the white CD case up.
“It’s kind of a boring album cover, isn’t it?” asked Bailey. “Is he going for a White Album kind of feel, or maybe The Wall?”
Crow rolled his eyes. He was not a real fan of Bailey, never had been. The man had obviously been put into his position because of connections, and not because of his musical and industry knowledge. “This is not the final album cover,” he explained, as if he were talking to a four-year-old. “This is just the master copy they sent us. If we decide to go into production with the project, an actual cover will be designed for the shelf product.”
“Oh ... I guess that makes sense,” Bailey said.
“Glad I could clear that up,” Crow said.
“Is there a copy of the Mexican chick’s master in there as well?” Doolittle asked. “Remember, any deal we make for Kingsley’s work is contingent on us agreeing to manufacture, distribute, and promote Valdez’s work too.”