A Tragic Song

The Oregon coast smells like salt and old disappointment, and I decided that within the first ten minutes of arriving. My manager, Derek, had called it "rustic." Derek also calls his two-hundred-dollar haircuts "casual," so his opinions on atmosphere are not exactly something I trust.

He had driven me out here himself, which should have been my first warning. Derek never drives anyone anywhere unless he's trying to soften them up for something terrible. The whole ride, he kept talking about "creative renewal" and "getting back to the raw sound," and I sat in the passenger seat watching the trees get thicker and the cell service bars disappear one by one off my phone screen like little soldiers giving up on life.

The studio was a converted fisherman's cottage sitting on a bluff above the beach, and calling it a "recording studio" was honestly generous. There was a soundproofed room with a mixing board that looked like it was last used sometime around 1997, a kitchen with a coffee maker that rattled like it had a stone inside it, and a main room with a couch, a wood-burning stove, and a view of the Pacific that nobody had asked for. Derek stood in the doorway with his arms spread wide like he was presenting me with a gift, and I looked at the blank walls, the salt-crusted windows, and the absolute howling emptiness of the place, and I thought: he is going to pay for this.

"Six weeks," Derek said, setting a folder of deadlines on the kitchen counter. "Label needs twelve tracks. Twelve solid, radio-ready tracks, Brian. Not twelve of your experimental, nobody-asked-for-this tracks. Twelve songs that people will actually buy."

"I know what twelve means," I said.

"The last EP cost us three sponsors. Three. Do you know how hard it is to lose a deodorant deal?"

"I'll survive the grief."

He pointed at me with a manicured finger. "This is what I'm talking about. This right here. The attitude. Nobody buys albums from someone who hates them, Brian." He picked up his car keys, straightened his jacket, and looked at me with the expression of a man who has already mentally moved on to his next client. "There's a grocery delivery coming Thursday. The studio equipment's all tested. And for the love of everything, please write something that sounds like it was made in this century."

Then he left. I heard his rental car crunch down the gravel road, and then there was nothing but the wind off the water and the distant, indifferent sound of waves doing whatever waves do when nobody interesting is watching them.

I put my guitar case down on the couch. I sat next to it. I opened the blank notebook I'd been carrying around for three months like a talisman against the fact that I had absolutely nothing to say.

I stared at the first page for a long time.

The thing about being nineteen and already running out of things to say is that nobody wants to hear about it. People spend their whole lives dreaming about getting a record deal, and here I was with one, with a studio, with a guitar that cost more than most people's cars, and I could not string together a single line that felt real. Everything I wrote sounded like a parody of a song. Every chord I played sounded like something I'd already heard, because I had already heard it, because I'd already written it at seventeen in a version that was apparently good enough to go viral but not good enough to survive a second listen.

I picked up the guitar around midnight, played four bars of something, hated it, and put it down. I made coffee with the rattling machine. I stood at the window looking at the ocean, which was doing its whole dramatic thing out there in the dark, waves catching the moonlight, and I felt nothing about it except mildly irritated that it was so loud.

I sat back down with the notebook. Wrote the word nothing. Crossed it out. Wrote it again. Crossed it out again.

The doorbell rang at two in the morning.

I sat there for a second, genuinely running through the list of people who knew I was here. Derek. The label's A&R guy. A handful of people who would not ring a doorbell, they would call seventeen times first. I thought, briefly, about the possibility that it was a stalker. I'd had two of those. One had been relatively polite. The other had mailed me a shoe. Just the one shoe, never explained, never followed up on.

I opened the door.

The girl on the porch had wild, curly ginger hair that the ocean wind was doing its absolute best to destroy, and she was losing the fight against it with the calm acceptance of someone who had stopped caring about that particular battle a long time ago. She was holding a stack of pizza boxes that were clearly cooling down fast, and she had a bandana the color of a traffic cone tied around her head like it was going to help. She looked at me with hazel eyes that were wide and entirely unimpressed.

"Pizza delivery," she said. "Obviously." She shifted the stack in her arms. "You are the person who ordered four pizzas at one-thirty in the morning, right? Because if not, I have driven forty-five minutes out to the edge of the actual earth for nothing, and I would like you to know that would be a very rude thing to do to a person."

I looked at her. I had not ordered four pizzas. I was about to say that when she tilted her head and looked me up and down with an expression that landed somewhere between assessment and mild pity.

"Nice flannel," she said. "Are you wearing your dad's shirt, or is that actually your size?"

"It's my shirt," I said.

"Okay." She did not sound convinced. "Look, are you going to take these or not? They're getting cold, and extra pepperoni deserves better than to die out here on a porch."

"I didn't order any pizzas."

She stared at me. Then she looked down at the address written on the receipt taped to the top box, then back up at me, then at the cottage behind me, then back at my face with the slow, dawning expression of someone recalculating an entire evening.

"Huh," she said. "Wrong address." She said it with the tone of a person who is deeply inconvenienced but refuses to give the inconvenience the satisfaction of a bigger reaction. "Okay. Well. You don't happen to know if there's another recording studio on this bluff, do you? Because the app is showing me two pins and I think I clicked the wrong one."

"There's one about a half mile north," I said. "It's the one with the actual sign."

"Right. The sign. I did see the sign and think 'surely that can't be it,' because it looked professional and I was told to look for a 'converted cottage,' which, in retrospect, I should have taken more literally." She adjusted the boxes again. She looked at me. "You look terrible, by the way. Like, genuinely. Are you sleeping? At all?"

I had been running on approximately four hours of sleep for the past two weeks, but I was not going to discuss that with a pizza delivery girl who had shown up at my door by accident at two in the morning, so I just looked at her with what I have been told is a fairly effective expression of cold displeasure. My manager calls it "the face." It gets people to back down. Journalists, fans, a particularly aggressive publicist once.

She looked at it for a moment and then laughed, which was not the response I was going for.

"Oh, that's good," she said. "Is that the celebrity stare? I've heard about those. 'Don't you know who I am' energy. Very committed." She nodded, like she was genuinely complimenting the effort. "You might want to work on it a little, though, because right now you mostly just look like you need a nap and maybe a personality transplant, but I can see what you're going for."

I stared at her.

"Do you know who I am?" I said, and immediately regretted it, because it is a terrible thing to say and I knew it was a terrible thing to say even as it was coming out of my mouth.

She gave it genuine, thoughtful consideration. She even looked up at the sky for a moment, like she was searching her memory.

"Flannel guy," she said finally. "Who didn't order the pizza."

The wind came off the water and hit us both. One of the pizza boxes shifted, and she caught it with the practiced ease of someone who has done this a thousand times. She looked at the boxes and then back at me.

"Look, I don't suppose you actually want four pizzas," she said. "Since I drove all the way out here and they're already cooling down, I could just leave them and we could call it a weird night, or I eat the pepperoni myself, which is honestly also an option I'm open to."

"I'm not paying for someone else's order," I said.

"Fair enough." She shrugged, completely unbothered. "Honestly, more for me. You have a good night, flannel guy. Try to get some sleep. You look like a Victorian ghost who just found out he's haunting the wrong house."

She turned and walked back down the porch steps with the four pizza boxes, perfectly balanced, moving like the cold and the dark and the forty-five-minute drive and the wrong address were all just mildly interesting details in an otherwise fine evening. I watched her go. The gravel crunched under her feet. A beat-up delivery car was parked at the end of the path, and she loaded the boxes into the back with practiced efficiency, got in, and drove away.

The quiet came back. The ocean kept going. The wind hit the windows.

I stood there in the doorway for a moment, and I was genuinely, thoroughly annoyed in a way I had not been in weeks. Not the dull, low-grade annoyance of sitting in a label meeting while someone in a suit explained the "youth market" to me, and not the tired, background irritation of existing inside my own creative block. This was sharp. Specific. The particular annoyance of someone who has just been laughed at and isn't sure what to do about it.

I went back inside. I sat down on the couch. I picked up the notebook.

I wrote: She looked at the celebrity stare like it was a cheap magic trick she'd already seen three times and wasn't buying.

I looked at it. It was the first sentence I'd written in three weeks that didn't make me want to cross it out immediately.

I wrote another one: Wild ginger hair losing a fight with the ocean wind and not caring about it even a little bit.

Then: Hazel eyes that looked at four cooling pizzas and a wrong address like they were just minor scheduling conflicts, not disasters. Eyes that looked at me like I was also just a minor scheduling conflict.

I wrote for twenty minutes. None of it was a song. It wasn't even close to a song. It was notes, messy and quick, the kind of writing you do when you're annoyed enough to stop editing yourself before you start. I wrote about the bandana the color of a traffic cone. I wrote about the way she'd said "flannel guy" with the same tone someone uses for a perfectly adequate sandwich, present, functional, not particularly exciting. I wrote about the laugh, which had been genuine and completely unbothered, the laugh of someone who found the celebrity stare genuinely funny rather than offensive.

I wrote about the Victorian ghost comment and hated that it was actually a little bit accurate.

I sat back after a while and looked at what I had. It wasn't a song. It wasn't even the skeleton of one. But the page wasn't blank anymore, and my hand hadn't cramped up from not writing, and for the first time since Derek had dropped me off at the edge of the world, the silence in the room felt like something I'd chosen rather than something that had been done to me.

I closed the notebook. I set it on the coffee table. I looked at the dark window and the blurry reflection of the lamp in the glass, and outside of that, the faint, silver-dark line where the ocean met the sky.

The guitar was still on the couch beside me. I picked it up without thinking about it too hard, the way you do when you stop trying to play something meaningful and just let your fingers find whatever they find. I played a few notes. Then a few more. Something slow and a little off-center, not quite in the key I usually worked in, with a rhythm that was slightly uneven in a way that felt right rather than wrong.

It didn't sound like anything yet. It was just a feeling, formless and new, the way a melody sounds when it's still deciding what it wants to be.

I played it twice more and then stopped, because I didn't want to push it. Some things collapse if you look at them too directly too early.

I set the guitar down. I made more coffee with the rattling machine. I stood at the window and looked at the ocean, which was still out there being dramatic and indifferent, and I thought about a girl who had driven forty-five minutes to the wrong address at two in the morning and had treated the whole thing like a mildly interesting inconvenience before driving off with four cooling pizzas and her complete and total lack of interest in my career.

I thought: she didn't even ask for a photo.

I thought: she didn't know who I was. Or she knew and it didn't register as anything worth mentioning.

Either way, it was the strangest thing that had happened to me in at least a year, and I was still annoyed about it, and the annoyance was doing something interesting in the back of my head, the way friction does something interesting to two pieces of flint.

I went back to the notebook before I went to bed and wrote one more thing at the bottom of the page, just because it was true:

She told me I look like a Victorian ghost haunting the wrong house. I've been in this studio for six hours and she's already the most honest person I've talked to all year.

I underlined it. Then I went to sleep for the first time in two days without lying awake hating the sound of the ocean.

The notebook was still open on the coffee table when I woke up the next afternoon, the pages catching the gray coastal light coming through the salt-crusted windows. I looked at it from across the room for a while before I got up, making sure it was real, that I had actually written something and not dreamed it. The words were still there. Messy, specific, not a song yet, but real in a way that the blank pages had not been.

Outside, the ocean kept going. The wind was still at the windows. The coffee maker rattled when I turned it on.

I sat down with the notebook and read what I'd written the night before, and somewhere in the middle of reading the part about the hazel eyes and the wrong address, I started humming, low and absent, the fragment of melody I'd found on the guitar. It didn't have words yet. It didn't need them yet.

I hummed it twice and then stopped, because you can't force these things, and also because the coffee was ready, and I had the distant, slightly uncomfortable feeling that this was only the beginning of something that was going to be very annoying indeed.