Tryp was thumping on the bass drum, almost through with the sound check when Xan strolled onto the stage, holding his guitar and notebook.
Xan sat down in the center of the stage and tugged a pen out of his notebook. “When you’re done there, Tryp, do you have a moment?”
“Sure.” Tryp leaned to the mic. “Is that good?”
A man’s voice echoed through the empty arena. “Yep, that’s good. Give me a roll on everything one more time?”
Tryp rolled around the whole kit, playing one drum after another, so that Mitch could hear them all together to make sure they were balanced. Technicians on either side of the arena raised their thumbs.
Over the speakers, Mitch said, “Thank you, Tryp. Mr. Valentine, are you ready for sound check?”
Xan picked up the mic lying on the floor next to him. “Fifteen minutes, if you would be so kind?”
“Fifteen minutes,” the disembodied voice confirmed.
Tryp sat on the drum throne upstage near the scrim and watched Xan stare at the page, his face as smooth and expressionless as a calm English lake, which was how he looked when he was frustrated and furious with the music.
Of course, as Xan was an Englishman, probably, or he sounded English at least, his current placid expression was probably exactly the same as when he was internally losing his shit with elation. He’d read too much Rudyard Kipling, Tryp suspected.
Tryp asked, “How’re you doing there, Xan?”
The blond ends of his hair swung around his face. “Splendid.”
Yeah, and that could mean anything. “What’re you working on?”
“Songs.”
“Songs?”
“Songs.” Xan sighed and pushed his hair back. “Actually, Tryp, I need a consult on this. Care to give it a go?”
“Sure.” Tryp climbed down from his kit and ambled over, twirling his drumsticks between his fingers, a nervous habit that he wasn’t willing to even try to give up.
“So I’ve got this hook,” Xan said, pointing to the paper, “but everything around it is utter rubbish.”
“Utter rubbish, huh? Not your garden-variety rubbish?” He sat on the floor, his long legs crossing. His drumsticks clattered on the wood beside his leg. “Let’s see it, man.”
Xan handed over the notebook. While Tryp read the lyrics—and they were beautiful, maybe epic, depending on what kind of melody line they put behind them—Xan checked the mic to make sure the switch was off.
“We’ve only got a few more months of touring,” Xan said, “and then it’s back to the recording studio. I don’t know what the fuck to do, Tryp. I only have three songs that might be suitable. I need eighteen on the page before we enter the studio. We need to demo at least fifteen, to winnow those down to a dozen for the album.”
A cold sweat misted the back of Tryp’s neck, and he picked up his drumsticks, spinning one around the fingers of his right hand. “You’re really freaking, huh?”
“I assure you, I am not freaking.” Xan sneered a little on the American slang. “I am desperate for material and yet I am hollow inside. I’ve given it all for the first two albums, and Killer Valentine’s oeuvre should not include nihilism.”
For all Tryp’s abbreviated schooling, it was a good thing he read a lot of books, because he understood what Xan had said. “We still have months, Xan.”
“Jonas wants six demo files to send to record companies in two weeks.”
“Well, shit.”
“Indeed.”
Tryp spun the drumstick in his fingers and passed it to his left hand like a butterfly was flitting around his fingertips. “Cadell?”
“That well is also dry, I’m afraid. Cadell is undergoing a personal crisis of his own and cannot write.”
“Damn. Is he all right?”
“As well as can be expected, but I dare not push him beyond performing.”
Tryp slung his drumstick around his knuckles, caught it, and spun it like a satellite whipping around his hand. “I’ve got one that I’m sitting on, Xan, but it’s not ready, and I can’t sing it.”
“We could transpose the key.”
Because Tryp was a baritone, while Xan could reach the higher notes with his tenor range. “It’s not the key. I tried playing it for Elfie, and I choked up.”
Xan’s brown eyes softened, just a little, as far as he ever let himself go when he wasn’t performing. “It’s that raw, is it?”
“Yep.”
“The music soothes the pain, in time. ‘Alwaysland’ sat in my notebook for six months before I could bring myself to play it for others. If it’s too soon for you, keep it for the fourth album.” He snapped his notebook closed and prepared to stand.
“You could sing it.”
“Could you do a duet?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t like lifting other band members’ work wholesale.”
That was why Cadell sang some songs with Xan. Xan had tried to get Tryp out of his drum kit for some of the songs that Tryp had come up with the hooks for, but he cited Neil Peart as the consummate drummer/songwriter and stayed in his castle. “I can’t. If we’re going to use it, it’s yours.”
“Do you have it with you?”
He glanced back to Rade’s keyboards, plugged in and ready for his sound check. “I can play it for you.”
“If you would be so good.”
Tryp played it on the keyboards, which had a strange, plastic feel under his fingers because he was still used to the solid keys and hammer-thrum of a real piano, and sang it softly to Xan.
Somehow, the second time wasn’t quite so damn hard, and his heart didn’t feel ripped out of his chest.
Afterward, he swiveled on the stool, and Xan was watching him from a folding chair, sitting forward with his hands folding in front of him, his brown eyes so focused that he could have lasered through steel.
Xan said, “Tryp, that’s a fucking hit.”