Marigold's Last Take

I have recorded thirty-seven bands in five years. I keep a spreadsheet, because that's the kind of person I am, and the spreadsheet says thirty-seven, and not one of those sessions kept me up the night before. Not the bluegrass group that fought the whole time. Not the metal guys who broke a mic stand and blamed me. Not even Josie's band the first time, two years ago, when she and I were still technically together and I had to pretend the talkback mic couldn't pick up the weird tone in my voice.

This session kept me up. I lay in bed at one in the morning doing math about it. I'm twenty-eight years old, I've been doing field and studio recording since I was twenty-three, and I could not figure out why one demo for one garage band in southeast Portland had me rehearsing sentences in my head like someone before a recital.

The band is called Marigold, which is also where the title of my thesis chapter comes from, sort of, since the chapter is about how local bands sound when they know it's their last take. They're breaking up in the spring. Josie is moving to Seattle, Lizzy's girlfriend finished her residency, and Leslie is staying here, and the demo exists for this reason alone. A last document. I volunteered to record it for free before anyone asked.

The fact that Josie is my ex is not the problem. We ended it almost a year ago, back when I was twenty-seven, and we're friendly about it now. Careful, but friendly. We can be in a room together and it's fine.

The problem is Leslie.

* * *

The studio is a converted garage behind a bar on Division, and you get to it through an alley where somebody is always dumping ice buckets. I parked my Corolla at 6:40 for a seven o'clock session, because I am the kind of person who arrives early to sessions she's dreading, and I sat in the car for ten minutes listening to a podcast about shipping lanes and not hearing any of it.

The bar smelled like fryer oil even from the alley. The studio door code is the year the bar opened, which Lizzy told me once and I never forgot because it's also the year I started undergrad. I punched it in and went up the little ramp and into the control room, and the first thing I noticed was that the coffee maker was already on. The second thing I noticed was Leslie, sitting on the worn Persian rug in the live room with her bass across her knees, tuning it by ear with her head tipped against the amp.

"Hey," I said through the talkback. "Where's everybody at?"

She looked up and the small smile she had got, if anything, smaller. "Josie's stuck on the 84. Some wreck by the tunnel. Lizzy had to go get a mic she left at her girlfriend's, don't ask. So it's you and me for a bit."

"Great," I said, and my voice did something weird on it, went up at the end like a question. I flipped on the monitors and started powering up the console so I had something to look at that wasn't her face.

Leslie is thirty, two years older than me, and we've known each other since I was twenty-two and she was twenty-four and we rented half a house on 37th with two other people neither of us liked. She taught me how to fix a garbage disposal. I taught her how to make actual rice instead of whatever she was doing before. You don't forget a person you shared a kitchen with for three years, even if you've never once said the true thing out loud.

The true thing being: one night three years ago, at a house show in somebody's backyard, both of us drunk, she told me she'd had a thing for me since we were roommates. She was twenty-seven and I was twenty-five. Then she laughed and said forget I said that and we never spoke of it, and I didn't, out loud. But I never saw her the same way after. That's the honest version. There's no tidier version.

I went into the live room to set mics. She stayed on the rug and tuned. It's funny, when two people have lived in each other's space long enough, how the movements sort of fit together. She tuned low to high, and I walked the mic stands in the same order, kick drum first, then the amp, then overheads. I'd reach across her to tape down a cable and she'd lift her foot without being asked. I said "duck" once and she ducked. Neither of us made a joke about it, which we would have, three years ago.

"So," she said, when I'd set the last stand. "You're really leaving in January."

"January 9th. The fellowship starts the 12th but my sister's in Boston so I'm going early."

"Massachusetts." She plucked the E string and frowned at it. "You're gonna freeze."

"I bought a coat."

"You bought a coat," she repeated, like that was the funniest or saddest thing she'd heard all week. She looked up at me from the rug, hair falling in her face, and for a second neither of us said anything. "Thirty-seven bands," she said. "Josie told me. She said you have a spreadsheet."

"It's not a spreadsheet exactly, it's more of a, okay, it's a spreadsheet."

She laughed, and that was better, that loosened the room a little. "You nerd," she said, which is what she's called me since our first apartment, and I flipped her off, which is what I've done since our first apartment, and we were fine for about four more minutes.

Then I was kneeling at the bass amp checking the mic position and she reached over to adjust her volume knob, and her hand brushed my wrist, barely, and we both pulled back too fast. Like it was scripted. I stood up and checked the overhead cables that did not need checking.

"Sorry," she said.

"It's fine." It was not fine. My wrist was fine but I was not.

The talkback speaker crackled and Lizzy's voice came through from the control room, saved by a door code. "Hey, I'm back, I've got the mic, don't ask me what happened, it's a whole thing. Is that Josie's car? Okay she's parking. Great, everybody's alive, let's make a record."

* * *

Josie came in out of breath, apologized twice, kissed the top of Lizzy's head on her way past because that's the kind of touch-free household they run, and sat down at her kit. "Did I miss anything?"

"Nope," Leslie said, too quickly, and I started fiddling with gain knobs.

Josie is my ex and I'll say plainly that watching her sit down at a drum kit is still one of my favorite things, the way she spins the throne down two clicks and taps her sticks together without hitting anything. It stopped being romantic a long time ago. It's more like watching somebody read a book in their own language.

We ran levels. I called out names and they played, one at a time and then together. Lizzy handled her own DI since she's the sound tech of the outfit, which meant I mostly just stood in the control room with my arms crossed being useful in theory.

First run of the song, the one they want to keep, and they got through eight bars before Josie dropped a fill and called for a stop. Second run, Leslie came in early on the bridge. Third run, everything was fine until Lizzy's girlfriend called and Lizzy's phone buzzed on top of an amp and Lizzy said a bad word and stomped into the control room to answer it.

"We could keep going," Josie said. "Just bass and drums."

"We could," Leslie said. She looked at me through the glass. "You want to try?"

"Sure," I said. "You know it, or you want me to count you in?"

"Count me in," she said, and something in the way she said it had nothing to do with the song, and I pressed record and counted her in, one, two, three, four, and she played the whole verse clean, first time all night, and nobody but me and her knew it was for anything else.

I saved the file, labeled it "verse_test_L," and leaned back. Lizzy was still in the corner on her phone, hand over her other ear, saying "no, I know, I know" to somebody I assumed was her girlfriend. Josie was breaking down the fill she'd missed, playing it half speed. Leslie stood at her mic with the headphones around her neck.

"Run the vocal pass," Lizzy said, coming back in. "Just scratch it, but I want to hear the song whole."

So Leslie put the headphones back on and I rolled it and she sang. Leslie's got a low voice, kind of grainy, and she knows how to sit behind a beat instead of on it, which is the whole reason half the songs work. Two verses in, she cracked. Not a wobble. A crack, like the note broke in half and she squeezed her eyes shut and pushed through the rest of the chorus an octave off her own center.

I stopped the tape.

"Monitors," she said immediately, into the talkback. "I can't hear myself on the bridge, the drums are eating me."

"That's not monitors," I said.

"It's monitors."

"Les, you've got a head cold or you've been talking all week, or you've been smoking somebody's cigarettes, but that's your throat. That crack is coming from you, not the mix." I could hear it. Five years of recording people teaches you where a sound lives, whether it's in the room or in the body. Hers was in the body.

Lizzy leaned over my shoulder and looked at the waveform. "She's right. It's you, Les. There's no mud in the mix, it's clean."

"Well, great," Leslie said, and pulled the headphones off and set them on the stand with more care than the moment called for. "Great. Sorry, everybody. Let me drink some water."

Josie hit the talkback. "Nobody's mad. Drink water. We've got time."

We did not, actually, have as much time as Josie thought, but I didn't know that yet.

* * *

Leslie sat on the amp case in the live room with a water bottle and I went out there with a lemon from my bag, because I keep a lemon in my bag, which is a long story about my advisor and a choir in Eugene, and squeezed some into her bottle. She watched me do it.

"You carry a lemon."

"I carry a lemon."

"You've changed," she said, deadpan, and drank, and I sat down next to her on the amp case and looked at the ceiling foam, which is a mismatch of gray and eggshell blue that somebody glued up years ago by the look of the adhesive.

The talkback clicked. "Marguerite, it's Lizzy. Josie just texted me, her roommate locked herself out, she's got to run her a spare key, she says twenty minutes, maybe more."

"Okay," I said.

"Also, real talk, my girlfriend just landed early and I want to be at the airport when she gets out, so if this runs long I'm gonna be a disaster. Text me when Josie's back."

I looked at my phone. It was 8:12. Lizzy had been the buffer between me and Leslie all evening, the way a screen door is a buffer between you and the weather. Now the door was gonna be open for a while.

"Twenty minutes," Leslie said, when I'd relayed it. She was doing something with a pick, rolling it across her knuckles. "We could get the vocal again. I feel better."

"You're not singing again until I hear you hum."

"Doctor."

"Shut up and hum."

She hummed the bridge line. It came out clean, low and even. I squeezed the lemon rind over her bottle again because it made me feel like the lemon was earning its place in my bag, and she watched me do that too, and then the talkback clicked off and the room got quiet in that way a room does when two people are in it and both know something.

"Three years," she said.

"Don't."

"You do this. You know that? You get quiet when something's true."

I got quiet, which proved her point, and she set the pick down and turned on the amp case to