“Be sure to bring your hiking shoes when you go,” Celia advised them.
“Yeah?” Jake asked.
“Yeah,” she confirmed. “There are no roads on the property at all except for the little dirt access road that comes off the highway. And some of those dunes are huge.”
“I don’t even have any hiking shoes,” Laura said.
“We’ll get you some,” Jake assured her, reaching over and giving a playful stroke to her shoulder.
Celia noted the contact and then took another sip of her coffee. Of everyone in the house, she was the only person somewhat conflicted about the Laura/Jake coupling. Her instincts were to be opposed to it but she knew it was an instinct born out of irrationality and ... she had to admit it to herself, despite being loathe to ... jealousy. She loved her husband and enjoyed the life she had with him. Of that there was no doubt. But she had powerful feelings for Jake and suspected he had them for her. They had so much in common with each other, shared connections with each other on so many levels. Their shared love of music and their shared profession of making music meant she could talk to Jake about things that Greg was simply unable to understand or even comprehend. But it was more than an intellectual or a professional attraction she felt for him. There was an intense physical and emotional attraction to him as well. She thought about him all the time, about his voice, his smile, his sense of humor, about the way his eyes flitted to her when he thought she wasn’t looking, examining her body. There was a heavy degree of simple infatuation involved, but it was much more than that as well. Sometimes she wished she had never met Greg, that she had been single when Jake and Helen had broken up. And always she felt ashamed and guilty when these thoughts flitted to her forebrain.
She remembered the first night that Jake and Laura had gone upstairs together, the night she had glimpsed her sneaking up to his room like a teenager trying to get away with something. How that dark stab of jealousy had hit her directly in the heart when she realized what was going on. And then later, when the sounds of Laura’s excited, frantic moans had come drifting down, taking away any doubt about what they were actually doing up there, that stab had become an icy grip of despair that had caught her completely by surprise. She had actually hated Laura in that moment, had had the thought that maybe firing her from the band was in order.
Those feelings had faded, of course. In the first place, who Jake slept with was absolutely none of her business. The rational part of her knew that and knew it well. And in the second place, it was really hard to hate Laura, especially when she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was, at heart, a really sweet person with a sharp and witty personality and a love of music that equaled that belonging to herself and Jake. And she was talented as well. Laura’s saxophone playing was a major factor in what was going to help make her upcoming album a success. She was grateful for the tireless efforts the redhead had put in. Nor could she deny that Jake seemed much happier since the two of them had hooked up, that they actually made quite a cute couple.
No, she could not hate Laura for more than that fleeting moment in time. She actually enjoyed talking to her, hanging out with her, playing music with her. She considered Laura to be a friend and, when the thoughts of Jake were taken out of the equation, she was genuinely glad that Laura had gotten out of that horrible exploitive relationship she had been in before.
At the same time, however, she knew in her heart that she would secretly rejoice if their relationship ultimately did not work out.
Just over two hours later, the band was in the studio, their instruments tuned, their sound checked, all of them that were participating in this particular phase ready to start the initial run-through exercise before the actual recording of today’s piece began.
Though they were technically in the overdub stage, which meant that all of the basic tracks for both albums had already been laid down and the focus was now on adding additional instrument and vocal tracks, today’s project (and probably the project for the next week at least) was not quite an overdub. It was a reworking of the outro to Celia’s song Done With You (or Done, as they called it), the final portion, after the vocals, just before the song ended in the terminal flourish.
As originally laid down, the tune had featured heavily both Mary on the violin and Laura on the alto sax with a simple violin solo that would fade to black as the outro. But it just hadn’t sounded right to any of their ears once put down. There was something else needed, some subtle change that needed to take place to advance Done from a good tune to a great one.
It was Nerdly who came up with the idea. Instead of having Mary play the melody with her Nicolas Lupot, as she had played every other melody and fill so far, he set her up with a solid body electric violin with steel strings and piezoelectric pickups that he then ran through a pre-amp and a guitar amplifier adjusted for mild distortion such as what an electric guitar used. He then had Mary play the exact same melody at the exact same tempo as before. This allowed her to convey a tougher, angrier tone to the piece, much more suitable to the emotion that needed to be projected.
Needless to say, Mary liked none of this at first. In fact, she hated it. She loathed the electric violin, even though it was the same size, shape, and general weight as her primary violin.
“I can’t hear it when I play!” she complained the first time she tried it out.
“You hear it through your headphones, don’t you?” asked Sharon, confused, wondering if she had forgot to turn a dial or flip a switch.
“Yes, but that’s not the same,” Mary said. “When I’m playing my Lupot, even when I’m listening through headphones, I still hear the sound coming from the strings themselves, I still feel what I’m doing. This isn’t the same.”
“I know it’s new to you, Mom,” Jake said. “You’ll just have to get used to it.”
“I can’t get used to it,” she said. “The strings feel different too. The bow doesn’t slide across them like it does on my instrument. I’m not sure I can do this.”
“You can do it, Mom,” Jake assured her.
“And the sound it’s making!” she continued on. “Not only is the output quite inferior to my Lupot, but it’s distorted!”
“That’s what we’re going for here, Mom,” Jake reminded her. “The distortion is the whole point of using that instrument.”
She gave it her best efforts—she was a professional, after all—and gradually, though she would never embrace producing music in this manner, she warmed to it a bit and got used to the idiosyncrasies. The melodies came out well in the end, so well, that Celia, with encouragement from Jake and Nerdly, decided to up the game a bit and rework the entire outro to the tune. Instead of just having the single violin solo to close it out, they put Laura to work and had her and Mary work up a complex dueling solos mixture that would culminate in them playing in harmony for the finale. Since this had changed both the length and the structure of the outro they had originally laid down, they needed to re-record all of it—the rhythm tracks, Jake’s and Celia’s guitar tracks, and the piano fills—for the final thirty-eight seconds of the tune.
Today they would be recording the rhythm tracks: Ben and Ted simultaneously—the method they had found worked best for those two.
“Okay,” Sharon told everyone now, her voice going to their respective headphones. “Let’s do the run-through of the outro section only, picking up from just after where the fade out of Celia’s last vocalization ends. Is everyone ready?”
Jake, Ben, Ted, Mary, and Cindy were all in the main studio. Celia, with her acoustic-electric guitar and her vocal microphone, was in one isolation booth, Laura, with her alto sax, was in the other. Everyone gave Sharon a thumbs up.