Lonesome Lies Before Us

by Don Lee

“No. Just you.”

  “You should,” Mallory told him. “You could find a major label for this for sure.”

  “No one would want anything this bleak.”

  “I could give it to Ronnie, my music manager. He might have some ideas.”

  “None of this has any commercial potential,” Yadin said. “Especially with me as the recording artist. If you’re an alt-country singer, you’re in no-man’s-land.”

  “They’re calling it Americana or roots now,” Mallory said, “and they’re big categories. There’s an audience for it. What would it hurt to have Ronnie make a few calls?”

  “Those days are over for me,” he told her. “I’m done with that route, letting myself get ripped apart.”

  In many ways, the new world of the music industry—reduced to self-releasing—was liberating to Yadin. He wouldn’t have to worry about the numbers or hope for a breakout or prove anything to anyone. The only person he had to please was himself.

  Mallory mindfully chewed a tiny bite of salad. “You still have a fan base out there,” she told him after swallowing. “You ever read the posts on that forum?”

  “What forum?”

  “The one dedicated to you.”

  “There’s a forum about me?” he asked. “On the Internet?”

  “How do you not know about these things?” she asked. “It’s called the Yadin Park Preservation Society. That’s how I found out about your experimental tapes. They’ve been waiting for another album from you, just as I have. It’d be a great story—your comeback. Who doesn’t love a comeback? All the stuff about your sobriety, getting healthy, losing so much weight, that’s a compelling media angle. Why won’t you even explore getting a label?”

  “I told you, Mallory, I’ve made up my mind about this.”

  “You know what’s involved with a self-release?” she asked. “All the things you have to do these days as an indie musician?”

  She told him that he would have to promote himself on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Bandcamp, Myspace, and YouTube. He would have to maintain a website and a blog and an email newsletter. He would have to manage accounts on PayPal and Rhapsody, SoundCloud, Amazon, iTunes, CD Baby, Pandora, and Spotify, and God knew what else.

  “It’s mind-boggling,” she said, “all the details you have to attend to. Then, for tours, you can’t just play in clubs anymore. There aren’t enough venues left, and the economics—going to a city for just one show—don’t add up when you have to split the door. You have to do house shows. You know what house shows are?”

  He didn’t.

  “Shows in people’s living rooms. Instead of tickets or cov ers, you get donations and a couch to sleep on, and you have to book the shows yourself, beg for hosts, drive all over tarnation trying to sell enough CDs and T-shirts and merch to gross a couple of hundred bucks so you can break even. Why deal with any of that? Leave the business side to the professionals.”

  The prospect of needing to do that sort of self-promotion and marketing, establishing all those Internet accounts and sales outlets, dazed Yadin. He had had no idea. He hadn’t thought about anything beyond getting the album finished and manufactured. Quixotically he’d imagined that people would find his album through word of mouth and order it through the mail, maybe from the prison-cassette company in Van Nuys. Now he was thrown into doubt about the viability of the entire enterprise.

  He said to Mallory, “Can we not talk about this anymore? I’ll self-release the album when I’ve saved enough, and whatever happens, happens.” He was still hoping the credit counselor, Joel Hanrahan, would figure things out for him with a refi or HELOC so he could put out the record sooner rather than later. Otherwise, he would moonlight for extra cash, wash dishes, maybe try to find demo or landscaping work.

  Mallory set down her fork. “What do you mean, ‘saved enough’?”

  He had slipped.

  “You don’t even have the money to put it out?” she asked. “How much do you need?”

  “Around seven grand.”

  “I’ll write you a check this minute,” Mallory said.

  “No,” Yadin said, pained by thought. He realized now this was, in part, why he hadn’t given her the cassette at the Centurion. He didn’t want her to think the only reason he had come to see her was for her connections or money.

  “Why not?” she asked. “I don’t want to be crass, but it’s a trivial sum to me.”

  “I need to do this myself.”

  “Think of it as a loan, then.”

  “That doesn’t make it any more appealing,” he said.

  “I’d be investing in you. It’d be a tax write-off. I have one hell of an accountant. He set me up so I’m my own Sub-S corporation—a movie and TV production company. The other day, I had someone from the San Vicente film commission come to the hotel and meet me for coffee. Twenty minutes, talking about a possible film that doesn’t exist. But it’ll allow me to deduct my entire trip, even the tips. Your album would be a wash for me. Why won’t you let me help you? I really want to. Is it just pride?”

  “Yes, pride,” Yadin said. “I had to file for bankruptcy a while back, but I didn’t have an accountant like you. I’ve been grinding it out for years to get back on my feet, not be in debt anymore, clear my credit. I want to do this on my own without having to rely on anyone for handouts.”

  “It wouldn’t be a handout.”

  “Call it what you want. That’s what it’d amount to.”

  He took her plate and his bowl and deposited them into the sink.

  “It’s that important to you?” Mallory asked.

  “Yes,” he told her. “Maybe I’ll try Kickstarter or something, but I need to do this myself.”

  “All right,” she said, “but if that’s the case, you’re going to have to do something about the sound quality of the recordings.”

  “What are you talking about? The sound quality is perfect. You can’t say that room isn’t special.”

  “The sonics in there are terrific—unbelievably so—but I’m not talking about that,” Mallory said. “I can hear your chair creaking, your fingers squeaking on the strings. I can hear you licking your lips and taking breaths, your nose whistling. There are vocal pops—you didn’t use a pop shield, did you?—and trucks going by. There’re kids playing in the background of one song, crickets at the end of another.”

  “Some of that’s intentional. I want to keep all that in there,” he said. “I’m not going to have any of it filtered out. That’s the whole point of tracking it live. It’s more authentic when it’s not all cleaned up.”

  “I get it,” Mallory said. “I know that’s the charm of lo-fi, keeping it loose and rough, but sometimes this drops down to the level of a bad demo or bootleg. It comes across as amateurish. The EQs on a lot of songs are off.”

  “They are?” He sat back down at the table.

  “It’s not obvious to you?” she asked. “You used to have such a great ear. In a couple of places, you didn’t set the gains properly, so there’s clipping. What kind of mics did you use?”

  “SM58s.”

  “Too bad you didn’t have 7Bs, at least,” Mallory told him. “You got some phase and bleed issues, and, worse of all, there’s tape hiss on every song.”

  “There’s always going to be tape hiss with analog,” Yadin said. “What you get in return is some life, some depth. You totally lose that 3-D effect with digital.”

  “The problem is, quieter stuff is harder to record,” Mallory said. “All it takes is for you to have a dry throat to wreck everything. Did you have a little cold at one point? Even if you send the tapes out to be mixed and filtered, I don’t know. I think you need to re-record a lot of the album.”

  “Really?” he said, profoundly disappointed. It wasn’t the time it would take to re-record the songs that bothered him. Most of them had been first or second takes, all done in less than three weeks. Yet he had recorded the tracks on the album one by one, immediately after he’d finished writing eac
h song, and he’d been in the moment then, fully immersed in the emotions of each performance. He didn’t know if he would be able to re-create that kind of freshness.

  “It might be just as well,” Mallory said. “The arrangements of just you and the guitar, it gets too stark and monotonous when it’s every song. You need to do something different occasionally.”

  “Like what?” Yadin asked.

  She stared at his kitchen cupboards. “You don’t have anything alcoholic hidden away for your guests?”

  “No,” he said. “Like what, Mallory? What do you think I should do differently?”

  Looking down at the table, she pushed her bottom lip out and clamped it over her upper lip—a gesture he remembered. She did it whenever she was gathering herself to make a decision. “There’s something I want to ask you, Yadin. Something I’d like you to consider. A personal favor.”

  “What?”

  “If you re-record the songs, I’d like to work on a few of them with you,” she said. “Sing backup or harmony, maybe play backing for you.”

  It was the last thing Yadin had expected her to say. “You’d want to do that?” he asked.

  “I’m forty-five,” Mallory said, “although my official biography has me at forty-one. Hollywood and Nashville are not kind to women my age. I blew my last shot at salvaging my music career with my last album.”

  “That’s not true. It sold pretty well, didn’t it?”

  “You know that’s not what I’m talking about. What a disaster. They’ve all been disasters.”

  “You’ve written some good songs,” Yadin said.

  “Not really. Not anything I’ve ever been proud of. I’ve always had a whole team of songwriters and producers behind me, and I let them dictate everything. On tour, the band would play to click tracks, and they’d Auto-Tune the fuck out of my voice. I might as well have been lip-syncing. There wasn’t a single thing authentic about it. People know when a song’s honest or not. You can’t fake it. For once, I’d love to be involved, even in just a tiny way, with a project that has some integrity. Your project.” She wrapped both of her hands around his left hand on the table. “Will you let me do that, Yadin? Would you allow me that privilege?”

  Absently, lightly, she rubbed her fingertips over the calluses on his palm, around his fat fingers and thick, dry skin and bitten nails. Her hands were so soft.

  “How long can you stick around?” he asked her.

  9. Step Away 4:18

  She said Thursday. She could stick around until Thursday morning. It wasn’t much time—just two days, discounting that Monday night, since Mallory didn’t have any of her instruments with her—but it would have to do.

  After Yadin washed the dishes from their dinner and Mallory had a cigarette outside, they went back into his studio and listened to the entire album, going through it song by song, and chose which ones they would redo together, agreeing they would aim for four. They talked about the arrangements, which vocal lines could use harmony, where they might add fiddle or rhythm guitar or slip in a riff or instrumental, and he gave Mallory the lyrics and chords to the first two songs so she could take them back to the hotel and familiarize herself with them.

  What worried Yadin was how he would conceal the recording sessions from Jeanette over the next two nights. He couldn’t tell her about them now, after deceiving her about seeing Mallory at the Centurion, after not revealing in the first place that he and Mallory had once been lovers—something he never divulged to anyone because he thought it would come across as pathetic, trying to boast that he’d once fucked someone famous. Besides, who would have believed him? Tuesday was also rehearsal night for the church choir. He would need to devise an excuse for why he wouldn’t be showing up.

  But in a sense Jeanette made things easier for him. For whatever reason, she was continuing to evade him, not responding to his messages. On Tuesday evening, after he got off work, he tried calling her, and, as he expected, she didn’t pick up. He left her a quick voicemail, saying he felt too worn out to make it to choir practice that night, maybe he was coming down with something. Jeanette was ordinarily averse to communicating during the week, and considering her current mood, i.e., the silent treatment, it wouldn’t have surprised Yadin if they didn’t talk again until church on Sunday.

  He returned home, and Mallory was waiting for him in front of the cottage, her convertible filled with gear. Her personal assistant had driven everything up from L.A. that afternoon while Mallory had been golfing.

  “Are you putting her up at the Centurion tonight?” Yadin asked as he helped Mallory unload the equipment. It was a six-hour drive, minimum, back to L.A.—a long trip for the personal assistant to take twice in one day.

  “It’s a he,” Mallory told him. “No, a B&B in town. I’m nice but not that nice.”

  The assistant had delivered Mallory’s custom-made fiddle, Gibson J-45 guitar, a pair of Røde K2 condenser mics with pop shields, some high-end XLR cables, a dual-channel FMR Audio preamp, a pair of Sony MDR-7506 studio headphones, an Olympus handheld digital recorder, and a plethora of other items, most in their original packaging.

  “How much did all of this cost?” Yadin asked, assuming the personal assistant, on Mallory’s orders, had raided a music store that morning.

  “They’re not brand-new. Everything’s from my house. I’ve been tinkering with Ableton Live on my Mac for a while now, recording snippets of things. That’s why I know so much about self-releasing. I was looking into it for myself, crazy as that sounds, but everything I tried to write was shit.”

  It took them quite a bit of time to set up the equipment, and almost as long to sort out working with each other again. “You’re going to sit in the chair the whole time?” Mallory asked. “You’re not going to stand? I’m going to stand.”

  “I always sit.”

  “It’ll feel awkward. I’ll be looking down at the top of your head.” She adjusted the height of a black aluminum conductor stand, on which she had propped the lyrics, and squinted at the words. “Fucking hell,” she said, and pulled out a pair of reading glasses from her purse. “I hate these things.”

  Yadin did a run-through of the first song, “The Days As We Know Them,” on his Martin D-21 Special, and Mallory tried to follow along on her 1965 Gibson J-45. It was a beauty of a guitar, sunburst in maple and wine, just like Dylan’s, and it issued out a nice thump and snap. It’d been manufactured before the infamous Norlin era, when Gibsons were built heavy with double-X bracing, which had made the guitars sound utterly dead.

  “Are you tuned down, like, half a step?” Mallory asked.

  He had one song on the album in drop-D, but everything else was in standard tuning. As a general rule, however, he liked to loosen his strings down a semitone. It created a fatter tone, fit his vocal range better, and made his playing flow.

  She had her own quirks. She had brought a fifth of Pappy Van Winkle with her and poured a couple of fingers into a Centurion rock glass to sip on, neat, but she also imbibed from bottles of Vocalzone and Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa syrup—a tablespoon of each—to moisten her throat. On days she was singing, she told Yadin, she avoided milk, ice cream, citrus fruits, coffee, spicy foods, soda, and anything cold.

  She launched into a series of vocal exercises: humming, lip-trilling, bumblebeeing, solfèging. He watched her queerly—this was all new.

  “What? You don’t warm up?” she asked him.

  The only thing he ever had to do was clear his throat. That would be all Mallory required, too, Yadin thought, if she quit smoking.

  They began rehearsing the song, but Mallory interrupted him almost immediately. “Wouldn’t it be cool to start with the chorus instead of the verse?”

  “No.”

  They argued as well over the next song, “Tell It to the Angels.”

  “It’s just 1-5-4, right?” she said, setting down her guitar and picking up her fiddle. “Can we raise the key a little?”

  “No.”

  As they l
aid down the tracks in earnest, though, they eased into a familiar rhythm. Her voice was as good as ever, so expressive with her shadings and phrasings, and her fiddle sweetened and deepened the songs with her full-bow notes, melodic fills, solos, and rides. Their musical chemistry was still there, as if they had never stopped playing together.

  “Now we’re cooking,” Yadin said, exhilarated.

  This was what he had been chasing and missing all those years, before everything got corrupted by becoming a recording artist. It had never been about performing for others. It had been about playing with others—with Mallory, Whisper Creek, friends, in kitchens, garages, and barns—just jamming and finding synergy and congruence and chancing upon moments of improvisation. It was what he had loved, starting out as a songwriter in Raleigh—making music simply for the joy of it.

  He dropped out of high school a week into his senior year. At the time, he had been living in Norfolk, Virginia, where his mother had gotten her latest job as a phlebotomist, drawing blood from dissolute sailors at an STD clinic. Lured by the music scene, he hitchhiked south to the Triangle and kicked around for several years, busing tables and washing dishes at the Rathskeller and the Circus Family Restaurant and doing demo work to support himself, sacking out on coworkers’ couches, occasionally squatting in abandoned buildings or empty houses or renting trailers or storage lockers and showering at the Y.

  He subsisted mostly on tomato sandwiches, a staple in the South. He’d get a bag of ripe, juicy heirloom tomatoes from a farmers’ market or a roadside stand, cut them up, and lay them between slices of cheap store-bought white bread (Merita was his preferred brand), sprinkled generously with salt and pepper and slathered with Duke’s mayonnaise—no substitutes allowed. All the while, he was trying to sharpen his guitar skills and write songs. He went to dive bars up and down Hillsborough Street—the Comet Lounge, Kisim’s, the Brewery, Sadlack’s Heroes, Boo’s Hideaway—to listen to music, and along the way befriended other aspiring musicians.

  There was a lot of talk then that Raleigh and Chapel Hill would be the next Seattle, a hotbed for new grunge acts. Punk bands like Superchunk abounded, but the Triangle would soon become more famous as a breeding ground for alt-country groups like Whiskeytown. Yadin was there for the first intimations of the genre, and gradually he found his affinities sliding from noise rock to alt-country. Nearly every free night, he participated in informal jam sessions at peo ple’s apartments and houses. One coterie in Raleigh called themselves the Siesta Club. They’d drink cans of beer and grill burgers and hot dogs and get stoned and play horseshoes until the sun set, then sit on the porch or around the kitchen table and strum guitars and mandolins and banjos and sing. They’d do covers, but more and more, they challenged each other to present their own compositions.