The Credits

Chapter 7: Credited

Nora's courier brought the judgment to the studio on Tuesday morning, and I signed for it at the front door with a pen that didn't work until the third try.

I took it back to the control room. Adrian was at the board with the second verse of track three up on the nearfields, and he didn't turn around.

"Sign here," I said to nobody, and put the envelope on the desk.

"You want me to leave?" Adrian said, still not turning.

"No."

I slit it open. Eleven pages, stapled twice. The numbers were on page four, the criminal disposition on page nine, and the rest was the part nobody reads, the part where the court explains itself to the court.

Adrian listened to the second verse. Then he cut the playback and swiveled.

"Happy?"

The compressor lights were going one, two, three, the way they do. Through the glass the live room was dark; we hadn't been out there since one.

"Done," I said.

He looked at me for a second, and I don't know what he was looking for, and I don't think he found it, because he turned back to the board and pushed the fader up.

"Third line of the second chorus is flat."

"I know."

"Fix it."

I put the envelope in my bag and went out to the live room and did three passes at the third line of the take we'd been running all morning until it wasn't flat.

---

The press thing was Thursday at noon in a rented room two blocks from the river, in a building that also held a dentist and a title company. Ninety people in folding chairs. Three folding tables at the front with the press kits on them — a thumb drive, a one-sheet, a poster that was just a cassette deck shot from above with no faces on it and the title set small in the corner — and a mic on a stand that somebody had gaffed to the table so it wouldn't fall over.

I read the words off the one-sheet because I'd written them the night before and I wanted to say them the way I'd written them.

"This record is called *Credited*. Twelve songs. I wrote all twelve. The first one is from March four years ago and the last one is from this past spring. That's all."

The room made the noise rooms make.

Hands. The first question came from a woman in the third row with a recorder held out flat like a phone. "Have you forgiven her?"

"No comment on that," I said. "Ask me about a song."

"That isn't a no."

"It's not a yes either."

Laughter, some of it real. I kept my hand on the edge of the table.

A guy near the back, younger, phone up. "Do you think she should go to prison?"

"The court already answered that."

"Are you satisfied with the sentence?"

"That's a question for the court."

"Are you satisfied?"

I looked at the ceiling tile above the third row for a second. The tile had a water mark on it, a brown fan shape spreading from the corner where the roof had leaked at some point nobody had fixed.

"Yes," I said, and moved on. "Next question about a song."

Which song was hardest. Which one did I almost cut. Whether the title track was the last one written, and it was, and I said so.

Four times I said the name of a song and then stopped, because the person asking didn't want the song, they wanted the story behind the song, and the story was in a court file with a date stamped on the front, and it was not mine to give away at a press conference on a Thursday.

Near the end, a woman in the front row with a legal pad and an actual pen. "You worked with her for five years."

"Eight," I said.

"Eight. Is there anything you want to say to her?"

At the back of the room, on the house board, a green channel light had been left on by whoever ran sound for the space, and I looked at it for about two seconds, which is a long time when ninety people are waiting.

"I don't have a statement," I said. "I have twelve songs."

Adrian stood up. He didn't say anything dramatic, he just stood, which in that room was enough.

"That's it," he said. "We've got a session."

---

I ate something at 3:30 that I don't remember eating. By then I was in the small room by the office, the one with the upright piano and the window that looks out at the parking lot, and I had the first rehearsal cued up and a legal pad on the lid and nothing written on the page.

My phone buzzed on the piano.

A number I hadn't saved but knew anyway, because I'd seen it in a list Nora sent me two weeks ago.

*June. It's Kayla. I don't want to bother you. She asked me to tell you she wants to see you. She said she'll come to you, wherever. She says she's sorry. I'm just passing it on. I'm not asking anything.*

I read it twice.

Then I typed: *I know.*

I didn't wait for the reply. I opened the message thread, tapped the number at the top of it, and scrolled to the bottom of the card. The button said *Remove Contact*, and it asked me one more time before it did it, and I tapped it, and the card slid up and off the screen, and the thread went out of the messages list with it.

The phone went back on the piano lid, face down.

The legal pad still had nothing on it, so I picked up the pen and wrote the date at the top, because that's what I do when I start a page, and under the date I wrote *chorus, second half — check the third line*, and drew a line under that, and that was the page.

---

At 9:15 I unlocked the control room and turned on the console before I turned on the lights, which is the wrong order, and which I do anyway.

The racks hummed. The small amber light over the talkback came up first, then the green ones on the compressor in a row, one, two, three, like something being counted. The meter bridge stayed dark until I brought the board up, and then the needles lifted a hair and sat at zero, waiting.

Through the glass the live room was black except for the blue standby light on the upright's DI box.

I opened the session and pulled up track three. The second chorus sat on the screen in two takes. The first one was marked DROP on the take sheet in Adrian's handwriting, the one we'd been running all morning. The second was the clean pass I'd cut before lunch. The rest was still open.

The clock on the wall said 9:17.

The payment on the judgment was twenty-four hundred thousand dollars, in installments, not to exceed five years, and not one dollar of it had moved, and wouldn't until the appeal window closed or didn't. I knew that going in. I knew it sitting down.

I rolled the chair in, put the headphones on, and hit play on the first take, and the third line was still wrong, and I marked it, and started again from the top of the phrase.