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That afternoon, after the latest Girls’ Day, Marcella sat in Dash’s finished basement with the rest of the Lowdowners: Dawn Nguyen on drums, Wade Novak on bass, Kenny Black on sax, and Joe Strano on keyboards.
Dash’s basement was their primary rehearsal space. The house had been his father’s; its garage was the site of the Lowdowners’ birth almost thirty years ago. After his father’s death, Dash took the place over and built out the basement as a studio. They’d cut their first demo down here. It had sounded like crap, which was why they now paid Darrin to do their engineering and producing, but Marcella would never forget the excitement of doing it themselves.
Now, the band was sprawled on the various pieces of Goodwill furniture that made up the ‘leisure’ side of the basement—except for Joe, who was at the ancient, aqua-hued fridge, pulling bottles of Rolling Rock out for everybody. They weren’t rehearsing today; Wednesday was business day, when they at least had a band meeting. Which was the agenda for this afternoon.
“Just a bottle of water for me,” Marcella called. She thought most beer tasted like watered-down piss. Also, she had to pick her son up from soccer practice in a couple hours.
Joe came back laden with five green glass bottles and a slightly blue plastic one. As he doled them out, Dash said, “So here’s the single.” He pressed a button on the remote in his hand, and the slow, soft first chords of ‘One Last Lonely Night,’ seeped from the sound system.
Marcella thought it was a great song. One of their best. With almost all of their original pieces, she’d started it out, built up its bones, brought it to Dash, and together they put on the muscle and flesh and blood. Often, in that process, the song came to mean something different from the meaning the bones had seemed to suggest.
In this case, Marcella had written the first draft sitting up late at night, alone in the apartment while Ajax was sleeping over for a friend’s birthday. She’d been feeling pretty down. There hadn’t been anything wrong, exactly, and she wasn’t naturally a downbeat person, but that night, she’d been melancholy and had sat there with a bottle of red wine, feeling more and more maudlin with each glass. She’d written a song about being fed up with being alone. She’d come up with the title as usual, riffing on the chorus:
One of these nights is gonna be too long.
One of the nights is gonna be too lonely.
One of these nights is gonna be my last.
Even for blues, it was pretty dark.
She had notebooks full of bad songs, wrong songs, and half-finished songs, and for a while, she’d thought this one would stay in the notebook. But something about it spoke to her, so she shared it with Dash.
He’d loved it—and also asked her if she was okay. She was, and she’d told him so.
Then he’d added his magic. In addition to sensing the exact right key and tempo for the words, he’d woven other stanzas in around hers, made it a duet, between a woman at the end of her tether and a man who wanted her but was only just figuring out how to say it.
Now the chorus was:
One of these nights is gonna be too long
(Hold on a little longer)
One of these nights is gonna be too lonely
(I’m right here outside your door)
One of these nights is gonna be my last
(But our first)
Dash’s additions were so great, so simple yet complex, that the song could be understood two ways—either as lovers finding each other in the black and saving each other, or as one of them coming in too late. It was a fucking perfect blues song.
The whole band thought so. Sometimes there was some ego clash because they used so many of Dash and Marcella’s songs, and Kenny, Joe, and Wade all also wrote. In this case, however, nobody complained. As soon as they’d heard it, they’d all known. This one could actually get them out of the regional bar scene, get them a real-deal contract. Those fuckers were unicorns in the music scene these days.
When the song ended, Joe and Dawn both wiped their eyes.
“Fuck,” Kenny said on a sigh. “Goddamn, that’s good.”
Dawn, Joe, and Wade all nodded.
Dash grinned. “Yeah, we did good. Darrin thinks we should do a real video for it.”
“What do you mean, a real video?” Wade asked. “We do a vid for all the original stuff.”
They did, but to this point, their vids were just them playing.
Dawn scooted to the edge of her chair, leaned on her knees, and put her Rolling Rock bottle up near the side of her face, twisting her hand in that affected way she had that bugged Marcella for no good reason. “He means, like, tell the story of the song. Acting, effects, a whole production, right?”
