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“What do you think?” Vivi asked as it ended. “I tried to replicate your drum stuff on my computer, but I’m pretty terrible at that. Could you do it, you think?”
“Yeah, definitely. And the piece still needs a really solid hook,” Remy said, feeling oddly bold in this conversation. Perhaps it was because Vivi’s hair and eyes and skin weren’t there to distract him, or perhaps it was because this was a conversation he knew how to swim in, unlike that weird, murky casual-or-professional quagmire they’d wandered into for a time there.
Vivi said, “I agree. But I think it should be something that layers under what’s there, so the vocals more or less stay the same—not the lyrics, necessarily, but the core of it.” There was a lilt in her voice, like she expected him to contradict her.
“Mm, I don’t know,” he said. “I think if the vocals rise an octave there, it’ll work better. It’ll highlight it.”
“Okay, maybe—hold on, let me play it that way,” she said, and he heard the clicking sounds of her opening her guitar case. She strummed through the song again, singing along quietly, playing so softly that he suspected no one else in the hotel could hear.
“Yeah, there,” he said as they came to the chorus. “Right there. And if we—I mean, you—had a solid beat under that, something heavy on strings? It feels like that sort of song, I think. Strings always break people’s hearts.”
They picked through the rest of the song, chord by chord, experimenting with different beats, different keys, different ways she could alter the chords to wrap the listener up in the sound rather than leave them simply bobbing their heads. It was different from writing with Val, and not only because Val Young had never written a breakup song in his life—different because this felt almost like an entirely different form of creation.
With Val, Remy was always seeking ways to prove Val’s words—chords and beats and hooks that would drive home what Val was trying to say in a way listeners could understand. Make an angry song angrier, a forlorn song more forlorn, and a sexy song hotter. With Vivi, it was like they were working toward the end feeling, rather than from it—like she was finding ways to make the breakup hurt more rather than singing about something that was already there. This wasn’t an unpleasant realization—it felt more like he had a hand in creating the feeling the song generated rather than just a role in highlighting it. The sun was gone by the time they hit the final chords, and Vivi still hadn’t left New York.
“I think I’ll have to stay here tonight. Which means I’ll have to reschedule tomorrow.” She sighed into the phone.
“Yeah?” Remy asked. “You mean the show?”
“No, no, I wouldn’t cancel the show. I’ll walk back to—where are we? Phoenix. I’ll walk to Phoenix if I need to. But I had an interview with Records and a radio thing.”
“You could do them over the phone too,” Remy suggested.
She laughed. Her voice was breathy and low, almost muffled—she was lying down, Remy suspected. “I hate talking on the phone,” she said.
“We’ve been on the phone for…Jesus Christ, two hours,” Remy said, glancing down at his phone screen.
“Yeah, but we’ve been working, so it doesn’t count,” she said. “Though, wow, it’s one o’clock? What time is it there, again?”
“It’s only eight. And I drank all your sparkling water, by the way,” Remy said.
“Have you eaten? There’s food in the fridge. You can have it,” Vivi said.
“That’s not food. That’s hummus and vegetables and yogurt.”
“That’s organic hummus and fancy-cut carrots and…well, yogurt. It might be fancy yogurt.”
“I’m not a yogurt guy,” Remy said. “I think we’ve got Hot Pockets in the band bus. I should go back there and make one.”
“No, you’ll lose me,” Vivi said suddenly.
Remy went still, unsure how he’d so suddenly found himself in the quagmire again. “What?” he asked.
“Your phone. I’ve got a microcell in my bus to get a better signal. If you leave the bus and it switches over to a tower, the line will go dead,” she said.
“Oh.”
This shouldn’t have mattered, because they were done working on the song. They were talking about yogurt. And besides, he could call her back or she could call him back or they could just talk again when she got into town the following morning. But there was something about hanging up, about ending the call at two hours twenty-one minutes and seventeen seconds that felt wrong—wronger, even, than the fact Remy was about to continue a phone call with his boss that had swiftly turned into something personal rather than professional.
Wronger than the fact that he liked it.
“I guess I’ll eat yogurt then,” Remy said quietly. He paused. “Do you have cameras in here?”
“That’s a creepy question, Remember Young,” Vivi said, but he heard her smiling, unsure how, exactly, he’d learned what her smile sounded like.
“No creepier than having a secret camera on someone,” Remy refuted.
“There’s a camera,” she said, “but it’s on the front of the bus. To see people boarding. There’s nothing in the lounge. Why do you ask?”
