“I’ll take you to a specialist tomorrow to get molds made. You can’t perform without ‘em.”
“Of course I can.” I say it purely to contradict him, but then sigh. “Fine. I won’t. Because I don’t want to go deaf.” I let the corner of my mouth twitch up so he knows I’m just being salty.
“And because it makes you pitchy,” he adds, his own mouth twitching in response.
Patty distributes IEMs to the rest of the band and shows us the “talk-to-me” switch on the microphones so we can flag him if needed.
“I’ll use a laser pointer if I need to get your attention,” he says.
And then we start from the top.
By the second song, everything sounds like chaos. The drums thud in my chest, the bass pounds through my ribs, and my voice?—
Where is my voice?
I grab the mic, my grip tight on the cool metal, and belt my heart out.
Your lyrics have teeth, your every word bites
They sink in sharp, and the pain ignites
When I finish the chorus, I gesture to Patty to turn my volume up. He does, but it doesn’t help. The music is a wall of noise. The more I push, the more lost I feel.
I’m about to rip the IEMs out when Patty’s laser pointer hits my wedge monitor. I flash him a look hot enough to melt steel.
“You gotta stop hollerin’ like that,” he says through my in-ear.
I flip my mic switch to the “talk-to-me” line. “It’s too quiet! I can barely hear myself over the band!”
“And the band can barely hear themselves over you,” he replies evenly. “I keep adjusting the mix because you won’t sing at a consistent level.”
I grit my teeth. “Then turn up my volume.”
Patty tilts his head like he’s studying a science experiment that’s about to explode.
“What do you hear?” he asks.
I want to scream, but I’m painfully aware that every eye is on me. The crew. My band. I must look like such a diva. “Everything but me.”
He pauses. Then, his voice drops, steady as ever. “It’s the in-ears. They’re new. I get it. But you gotta trust the mix. You don’t need more noise, you need to hear clearly. Trust me; the difference matters.”
I hate this. Hate that he’s asking me to trust him. But I hired him to do a job, and right now, at least, he’s trying to help me.
I close my eyes and focus on the drums pulsing through my head, picking out the fills and cymbals. The bass comes through clearly too. But when I strum along, I can’t tell what I’m playing from the?—
“Fiddle. I can’t tell them apart.”
“Okay. That I can work with.” He adjusts something, and suddenly, the fiddle is louder in my left earpiece, my own playing in the right. “Better?”
“A little. But it still sounds jumbled.”
We hit the next verse, and I sing along while my sound shifts in my ears, making me almost dizzy. I nod or shake my head with each tweak, signaling what helps and what doesn’t. As the song nears its end, anxiety swells in me like a storm cloud. What if this is the best it gets? I won’t just be a watered-down Winona Williams, like critics are already saying. I’ll be a washout before my first tour is over. I can’t go night after night not knowing what I sound like.
Bringing Patty in was a mistake. What was I thinking, giving him such an important job without so much as an audition? This tour could make or break?—
My spiraling stops cold. I gasp as something shifts in my ears. I can hear my guitar perfectly! I’m not fighting the fiddle; we complement each other, just as I intended when I wrote thesong. Our instruments rise like birds circling each other, soaring up, up, up into the sky.
My eyes fly to Patty’s, and I feel like the tour bus just rolled off my chest.
