I didn’t know what these vignettes meant. I didn’t know what to do with them except to let them keep coming, to keep assembling them from the fragments that were floating through my consciousness. They felt like something. I didn’t know what, but something.
11
LEAN IN
Teddy
Gretchen and I spent the rest of the week having sex, which was a twist I had not seen coming.
No, correction: Gretchen and I spent the rest of the week having sex when we weren’t doing our jobs.
To my surprise, I was increasingly digging my job. The music kids were of wildly varying abilities—none of the others had anywhere near Anna’s level of talent—but most of them, if you talked to them for a while, turned out to be cool. It took a certain amount of dedication, of seriousness of purpose, to spend a month in the woods working on your craft.
Don’t get me wrong, I was still my usual grumpy self. Anna aside, I was still letting the counselors do the heavy lifting. But I was hanging around at the end of the day when the whole crew worked on “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’d even talked me into playing bass for it.
It was, to my ongoing surprise, fun.
And shit, when was the last time making music had beenfun?
Anna and I were getting together pretty much every otherday. By the end of week three, I thought it was time to introduce the idea of making a demo I could send to Brady. I hadn’t brought it up after my phone call with him because I’d wanted to sit with the idea, make sure it felt right—for me and for Anna. But yeah, this girl was going places, and selfishly, I wanted to be along for the ride.
She was astounded. “You were serious when you were talking about me making an album?”
“Yeah, but you can’t just ‘make an album.’ I mean, you can, but no one will hear it without some kind of deal. I talked to my manager after we spoke, and he said he’d listen to a demo.”
“So I guess you do have a manager,” she said wryly.
I smirked. “Turns out I do.”
“But… how would this work?”
“We book some studio time, hire some session musicians. Or maybe not even. Between the two of us, I think we could play everything. We aim to record maybe half a dozen songs. ‘Take It Easy,’ but, like you said, mostly originals. If you’re OK with it, I’ll start involving myself more in the writing. I’ve been holding back a bit, conscious that here, I’m meant to be your teacher and not your collaborator. They’ll still beyoursongs. But I think I can help—I have some ideas. We’ll share songwriting credit with your name first.”
I paused, trying to get a sense of how she was taking this. She looked shocked but not displeased.
“If we don’t feel like we have enough songs by the end of camp,” I went on, “which we almost certainly won’t, we keep in touch, send them back and forth. Do some Zoom rehearsals. Then, when we’re ready, we record.”
“Where? Where do we do this?”
Good question. I knew studios in New York I could book.But I could hardly invite a high school girl to crash with me in New York. “Minneapolis. I’ll fly in when you’re ready. And of course your mom can be there.” I sometimes forgot that camp wasn’t reality. Which was a bummer—on more than one front. “We’ll run this all by her.”
“I don’t want my mom there.”
“Well, someone should be there.”
She was looking at me like I had two heads, which I guessed meant she felt safe with me.
“You mean in case you suddenly have a personality transplant and decide to offer me drugs and/or take advantage of me?”
I laughed, but I was stupidly pleased that she thought it would take a personality transplant for me to do something shitty. I was starting to get the feeling that this was going to work. Not just musically, but that Anna and I were going to mesh as collaborators in the real world, outside the creative soup of Wild Arts. “You know I’m not going to offer you drugs, and I know I’m not going to offer you drugs, but the world doesn’t know I’m not going to offer you drugs. But we can work out the logistics later.”
“What’s in this for you?”
Ha. She was skeptical. Good for her. “I get to say I discovered Anna Sommer.”
“Maybeyoushould be my manager.”
“Oh God, no. You don’t want that.Idon’t want that. But if you do get to make an album, I’d love to produce it, if you’ll have me. And assuming we like working together on the demo.”
