"Where does Nerdly's piano fit into all this?" Jake asked when Matt first introduced the piece to them.
"We'll put some in," Matt said. "We'll do tempo changes between the chorus and the verses that'll slow down enough for piano work and then the entire bridge can be nothing but piano and your acoustic guitar."
"But during the bulk of the song, no piano at all?" Nerdly asked.
"That's right, Nerdly," Matt said, glaring at him. "No fuckin' piano at all. Do you need to be in the fuckin' spotlight every goddamn second?"
Jake and Nerdly looked at each other with concern and then simply shrugged. They played the song the way Matt wanted it played and although it did not sound like an Intemperance signature song, even Jake had to admit it was a well done piece of music.
That led to Jake's next song, which was just the opposite. It was called I See You, and was about the struggle between the meek side and the strong side in one's personality, how they complimented each other, and how a person could not function if one buried one's strong side in favor of the meek. Jake had written it shortly after returning home from the international tour and he considered it one of the best pieces lyrically he'd ever composed. The problem with it was that it was too slow of a piece to go on an Intemperance album. Musically, it could only be played to the accompaniment of a finger-picked acoustic guitar, a few piano notes, and maybe some soft bass notes, during the verses and the chorus. There was no room at all in most of the tune for a distorted electric lead. Jake had filed the tune away in his unused file quite some time before with a vague notion of pulling it out again if he ever went solo. But when Matt forced them to do a tune with very little piano in it, it occurred to Jake that the old rules were pretty much dead. He dusted the song off and introduced it at a session as soon as they had Faces At Dawn down.
"What the fuck was that shit?" Matt demanded after Jake did the first run through of it. "How in the fuck are we supposed to translate something like that to an electric riff?"
"We're not," Jake told him. "The verses and the chorus will be acoustic guitar only. We'll put in a basic electric riff for the bridge intro and then an extended, double distortion solo before the final verse. We'll up-tempo the climatic verse to include some accompanying distorted lead in the background and then fade to black after the last lyric."
"You're out of your fuckin' mind!" Matt accused. "No electric in the verses or the chorus? That's fuckin' easy listening shit!"
Jake simply shrugged with a smile on his face. "Do you need to be in the fuckin' spotlight every goddamn second?" he asked.
They argued some more, with some of the other members even casting their doubts about whether a piece like this should be on an Intemperance album, but Jake held the trump card ultimately. They had already agreed to do things the way the songwriter wanted them done.
They worked the song out and gradually, as everyone heard more and more of it, they began to like it. Jake's guitar picking during the vocal portions was rich, melodic, and mesmerizing. Charlie's bass strings and Nerdly's piano were worked in to provide the perfect accompaniment, and Jake's voice seem particularly suited to the slow, mournful verses and chorus. Although Matt remained bitter that his lead guitar played only a small part of the song, he was musician enough to do his very best on the parts where he did play. His first notes kicked in after the second chorus, playing a nicely composed riff to back the bridge vocals. After the bridge, Jake switched his guitar over to distortion and took over the electric riff while Matt put down an impressive solo that started medium tempo and progressed to a fast, finger-tapping climax one minute and twenty-seven seconds later. Following this, the first portion of the climactic verse was sung with no accompaniment at all except for Jake's acoustic and then the final chorus went back to two heavily distorted electrics in unison that kept up the tempo to the final fade-out.
All in all, Jake was very pleased with the end results. I See You was still nothing like a typical Intemperance tune, but he thought it one of the best pieces of music he'd ever composed. And he realized something very fundamental while the composition was underway. He liked having final say over the engineering of his tunes. He liked not having to answer to anyone but himself.
The tune they were working on now was called Grandstand, another non-traditional piece by Matt, and, so far, the tune they were having the most problems with. Grandstand was not just another heavy-metal palm-muted piece, although it did contain some very hard-driving riffs throughout it, it was something almost entirely new in the spectrum of music. It was a fast tempo power chord dominated song with heavy drum and bass backbeat, little piano, and little rhythm guitar, but Matt wanted the lyrics sung in the style of a rap song.
"A fucking rap song?" had been Jake's first reaction.
"It's not a fucking rap song," Matt replied. "You just sing it like one."
And so he'd demonstrated, running through the basic tune for the first time and singing the lyrics, in machine-gun, hard-core rap style, while grinding out the guitar. Jake's first impression was that it sounded like shit and that this was some sort of one-upping maneuver in response to I See You. It was only after they continued to try putting the tune together that Jake realized Matt was entirely serious.
"Matt," Jake said the one time he'd tried to reason with him on this song, "There's no way in hell National is going to put this song on the album. They'll use their veto power on it. This is more than just a departure from formula, it's a completely new style of music unlike anything that's been done before."
Jake had expected another profanity laced argument but, to his surprise, he got a reply that was almost reasonable. "Didn't we say the same thing about I Am Time?" Matt asked Jake. "Remember? A harmonica in place of a lead guitar? Unprecedented! Absurd! But we fuckin' did it, didn't we? And it fuckin' sold almost seven million copies as a single, didn't it? In fact, it's still one of the most played songs on rock radio."
Jake had to admit that Matt had a point. He argued the issue no more and tried the best he could to sing the song as Matt meant it to be sung. The problem was, Jake had never really listened to rap music and had never picked up on the nuances of conveying the proper emotion with his voice in that style. He tried the best he could but he just couldn't pull it off. It would only sound like what it was — Jake Kingsley shouting out lyrics instead of singing them. It got to the point where Matt was accusing him of deliberate sabotage.
"All right," Matt said now as everyone took their places in front of their microphones. "Let's do a few run-throughs of Grandeur again and see how bad Jake can fuck it up this time."
"I think it'll be better this week," Jake said, not rising to Matt's bait.
"Oh?" Matt asked. "And why would you think that?"
"I had dinner with Bigg G after we left for the week on Thursday," Jake said. "He helped me a little bit with the whole rap thing. I also spent most of my flying time on the way back from Chicago listening to Bigg G's albums on the CD player. Of course, I couldn't play them that loud because they'd drown out the radios, but I think I'm starting to see how it should go."
Matt looked at him, seemingly wondering if Jake was fucking with him. Apparently he decided that he might not be. "All right then," he said. "Let's see what you got."
They ran through it. The opening consisted of both guitars playing the palm-muted power riff while the drums and bass settled into the beat. And then the guitars fell silent, leaving only the rap-style backbeat of the bass and drums. Jake began to sing. The lyrics were basically about wanna-be musicians who did not have enough talent to move beyond club gigs, about how they could get the barest taste of the big time but knew they would never reach it. The emotion of the lyrics — as Matt intended them to be sung — was that of contemptuous teasing, a taunting of those with lesser talent by those who had it all. Jake knew the lyrics by heart now and did not have to refer to a sheet. Though they did not come out of his mouth with perfection on this first run-through, it was clear to the other band members that he was trying. They sounded much better than the previous week.