"So how's school going?" he asked her as she sipped from her soda. "Are you taking complete and total advantage of the educational opportunities that California offers you?"
"Now you're sounding like Nerdly," she said. "But school is going okay I guess. I haven't been able to pull a full schedule this last year because I'm working here a lot in the afternoons, but I'm more than halfway to my degree."
"Good for you," he said. "You still want to be a teacher?"
"More than anything," she said.
"Follow your dreams," he told her. "That's what I did and look at where I am now."
"You're in our restaurant now," she said. "Is that where your dreams brought you?"
"This is the culmination of years of dreaming," he assured her. "So how about Stan? How's he doing?"
Stan was her boyfriend, a fellow UCLA student majoring in World History. Like her, his dream was to one day teach high school kids in a public classroom. Jake had met him a few times on his previous visits. He was a nice kid, maybe a little nerdy (not that there was anything wrong with that) but obviously quite in love with her. She had obviously been quite in love with him as well, which was one of the reasons why Jake was able to maintain a friendly relationship with her — since she was already spoken for there was no sexual tension between them, just the normal flirtations. The frown she displayed when he mentioned his name told him immediately that things had gone sour in the relationship.
"You broke up?" Jake asked.
"Yeah," she said with a wistful sigh. "About three months ago. It just wasn't meant to be, I guess."
"What happened?" he asked.
"He asked me to marry him," she said.
"Oh, well I can certainly see how that would put a damper on the relationship."
"Not funny," she said with a pout. "I turned him down."
"How come? It always seemed like the two of you were meant for each other."
"Lots of reasons," she said, obviously not enjoying talking about it. "Mostly I just wasn't ready to get married yet. I'm only twenty-two, right? What's the rush?"
"I suppose," he said. "I'm twenty-six and I haven't done it yet." He coughed. "Uh... get married that is."
That brought another giggle to her lips. "Anyway, I have a new boyfriend now. He's a fourth year med student at UCLA. I don't get to see him much since he's always in classes or at the hospital, but he really seems to like me."
"And do you like him?" Jake asked.
She shrugged. "Paul's fun — when he's around. And Mom really likes him. She says it never hurts to have a doctor in the family."
"Didn't she marry a doctor once?" Jake asked, recalling a random piece of trivia Jo Ann had mentioned once about one of her ex-husbands.
"Yeah," she said. "He was her second — the one whose alimony and child support payments got us this place. Mom was his trophy wife for about ten years while I was growing up. He adopted me, you know?"
"No, I didn't know that," Jake said, suddenly getting uncomfortable with this conversation.
Rachel seemed to pick up on this. She immediately turned the subject to something else. "Anyway," she said, "are you going to be stopping by more?"
"Probably," he replied. "We're back in the old warehouse, trying to come up with some new tunes for our next album. We'll be doing that at least five times a week for the next few months. I'm sure I'll be inclined to stop in a few times a week for some good food." He looked at her, his eyes lingering on her cute face. "And good company, of course."
She blushed again, a shy smile on her face. Jake smiled back at her and then took another drink of his beer.
The band got together in the warehouse for the next nine days straight and worked on developing their new music. They worked straight through the Christmas holiday without so much as a phone call home to their families. For the most part, the camaraderie they'd once enjoyed while composing new music to play at D Street West in Heritage returned to them and was even enhanced some as they knew they were now composing for a much larger audience. Darren, as he'd promised, was as productive a member of the band as he'd ever been, offering suggestions that were occasionally even useful and hardly grumbling at all when Jake introduced a piece with tempo changes in it. They were able to perfect both Cold Reality and Can't Chain Me and started working on three more songs — one by Jake and two by Matt.
There were a few sour points to the composition sessions. Matt was unable to modify the heavy palm muted riffs he was working on into something that would mix well — or at all, in fact — with a piano. No matter how much he slowed it down, it was still too fast.
"This is fuckin' ridiculous, man," he complained to Jake one night as they drank a few beers at Jake's place after the session. "These palm-muted riffs are some of the best things I've ever done. They fuckin' rock, man, you know what I mean? Ain't there some way we can squeeze in at least one song that has 'em?"
Jake was not a big fan of the palm-muted riffs, from Matt or from anyone. He thought them unnecessarily heavy and even a bit simplistic, taking advantage of what was little more than an exploitation of an already common guitar technique. They also limited the musical accompaniment and forced the singer to vocalize in a narrow range. "We're Intemperance, Matt," Jake explained to him. "And Intemperance means we have to have Nerdly's piano in the songs in some way. That's one of our signatures, one of the things that makes people buy our albums, that makes them play them on the radio."
"Yeah," Matt said. "I suppose." He shook his head angrily. "One of the best riffs I've ever come up with and I can't do shit with it because we have a signature sound."
Jake had a hard time commiserating with him at first. And then the same thing happened to him. He composed a song called As You Will on his acoustic guitar over a two-night period. The lyrics were a rich examination of the give and take that went with a male-female relationship. The underlying rhythm of the song was a complex melody that was fingerpicked out on the acoustic and accompanied by a background of piano. Unfortunately, when he introduced it to the rest of the band, only Nerdly liked it.
"How the fuck are we supposed to translate that into a lead riff?" Matt asked him after hearing it for the first time.
"Well... we don't," Jake said. "We'll keep the song basically acoustic and you'll accompany with short chords in the high range and then an extended solo after the bridge."
"No distortion riff at all?" Matt asked, appalled.
"And where do my drums fit in?" Coop wanted to know.
"You'll just keep the rhythm in the background on the chorus and the bridge," Jake said.
"No fucking distortion riff?" Matt said again. "That's beyond ballad, Jake. That's well into the land of easy-fucking-listening shit. That's not Intemperance any more than leaving out the goddamn piano on my palm-muted riffs."
Jake had to admit that Matt was right. As great of a song as he thought As You Will was, there was no way to convert it into a song that would fit with the Intemperance style of play. He was forced to shelve it.
And then there was another song Jake introduced called I Am Time, which was a dark tune about the insidious nature of time passage and how a mere mortal could do nothing to stop it or even slow it down. The base rhythm he strummed out was fast and powerful but again, did not seem to translate well into an electric riff without becoming overly repetitive and boring. And even if it was mixed up a bit — as Matt had a gift for doing — there was no room for a rhythm guitar to accompany it, especially not with piano backing thrown in. Everyone in the band liked the song — even Darren thought it was badass — but as much as they tried to make it sound good using all of their instruments they couldn't seem to pull it off. The closest they came was having Jake play the main rhythm with loosely distorted electric and having Matt play an almost constant solo in the background that matched the rhythm. It was a novel concept but it came off sounding a little harsh because the tempo of the song forced Matt to play too fast, thus drawing attention away from the rest of the instruments with his guitar.