“You’re the fucking weirdo. Look at you, zebra robe, hungover at noon, looking like a cheap extra from a softcore no one gets hard to.”
Calvin’s hands go up. “Sorry, mate. I know the guy, he’s got his own way of doing things. Thought we could have a laugh about it. Clearly not.”
I let it slide. No need to drown a hungover idiot in his own pool.
“How do you know Yosh?”
“He’s friends with my ex, Tiffany. God, don’t make me talk about her.”
“Oh, yeah? I actually met Tiffy the other day. Nice girl. Chatters a lot. I totally get why you two were a thing.”
“You met her? For real?” Calvin’s eyes light up a little too fast for someone who supposedly doesn’t want to talk about it. “Did she mention me?”
“Nope. Didn’t bring you up.”
“Let’s keep it that way.” He presses the cold water bottle against his face, then his neck. A second later, he pulls out a tiny pocket fan from somewhere inside his disgusting robe.
“Careful if I were you,” he says over the whir of the fan. “She’s got a thing for us strawberry blondes.”
“Yeah, not gonna happen, bro,” I grin, tipping the last drops out of my bottle.
Then I stand up, crush the empty plastic bottle in my hand, and walk over to where Calvin’s stretched out on the couch like a drunk king.
“I’m heading down to the studio. My fingers are itching to create something.”
I didn’t come to Palm Oasis to relax. I came here to remember who the hell I am.
Calvin spends the afternoon by the pool, which means the studio is mine.
I don’t mind as it gives me the space to work through rough voice memos and scribbled MIDI sketches.
The first few hours are a bit of trial and error. Every chord progression I play, every beat I built feels close, but it just doesn’t quite hit the sweet spot.
Inspiration has always been my best friend and my worst enemy, showing up whenever it pleases and disappearing just as fast.
But by late afternoon, something changes.
My brain and hands work like they’re directly connected, like I’m on shrooms or something. Only I’m just deep in the vibe, and the music pours straight out of me. I’m layering sounds, triggering samples, dialing in filters without overthinking.
That beat I’d been hearing in my head for days finally comes through the monitors, and I swear, it feels like an angel pisses on my tongue.
For the first time in forever, I’m producing sober. No hangover haze or chemical brain fog. Just music. And it finally makes sense again, the way it used to when people in the industry called me a gifted kid.
It’s not like the stuff I made over the last two decades was bad. Far from it. I’d built a career off award-winning productions.
But the truth? I’d been creating for other people. Always trying to deliver what the client wanted. And it worked. Everyone left the sessions happy. Except me.
Because it wasn’t me. I never put my soul into it. They’d called me an artist, but I didn’t feel the art. Every mainstream hit felt like a betrayal to the person inside, even if he was locked away for years by the sex, booze, and party side of me.
But this is different, this isn’t mainstream at all. It’s something I can't even put into words because I’d never heard anything like it before.
That’s what Calvin says too when he stumbles down the basement stairs with a greasy pizza box in hand. Still hungover, he lays down on the floor in his disgusting zebra robe while making me hit play over and over again.
Finally, he says, “That’s some wicked, out-of-this-world shit, McKenna.”
We stay in the studio for hours, tweaking, shifting microtiming, layering textures. Calvin, who is surprisingly a perfectionist when it comes to music, keeps nitpicking until I’m laughing from pure frustration. But he is right. That tiny detail turns out to be the cherry on the cake, and now, by the end of the night, we might have actually pulled it off.
Not only did we create a song, we created something Calvin swears will go down in music history. I’m sure about that, but I’d never made anything that feels this real.
