Oslo, Norway
We enter a nondescript building in Old Town. Three floors down, there’s a cozy soundproofed control room. Inside, a hand-knotted rug, a keyboard, a boxy computer, a mixing board, and a sleek leather couch. Behind a glass wall, a vocal booth. Axel is hunched over his computer. Two more producers, Yusuf Hassan and Oskar Aasland, are beside him. They are a little older than Axel is, maybe by ten years or so, and both have scraggly facial hair, forks next to their eyes when they smile. Yusuf is plucking the strings of a guitar. He is quiet but welcoming, all warmth. Oskar is a little moodier. He’s thumbing knobs on the mixing board. When he makes a joke and I don’t pick up on the sarcasm, he mumbles something under his breath.
Axel ignores our round of introductions, focused only on his screen. After a moment, he looks back at me expectantly, eyebrows raised. “Won’t you warm up?”
I nod. And so we begin.
Axel is shaking his head. “No falsetto. I need a little more power behind it. Use your head voice. Try again.”
I push my stomach out and sing the note.
“Great. Again.”
I scan the lyrics. “Can we change this, though?”
He enters the booth and leans down. “Change to what?”
“I think we should do, You’re the disciple, I’m the heaven.” The original line is Being your disciple feels like heaven, and I like my idea better. There is a current moving between us, which is: Who will give in? Axel doesn’t want to make many changes; he already has a vague idea of how I should sound. Most producers do. So throughout this first session, any input I make feels like picking at skin. Each time, he flinches as if a scab has been ripped away too early, drawing fresh blood.
“Sing it for me?”
I do, and he frowns, which means it sounds just as good. I smile to myself when he returns to the control room.
“Axel,” I say, pulling my headphones around my neck. Our eyes meet through the glass.
“Yes,” he says patiently.
“What about, Our sex is my church?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. It’s just a lyric.”
He makes a face. “Maybe we can use it later.”
Even though we won’t, it’s an initial burst of creation. A sprout in dry, crumbling soil.
During a break from the booth, I watch as Axel, Yusuf, and Oskar create a rough mix in Logic. To me, the software looks like rows of scribbled signatures, although I’ve been told each row is a different track. Here is where my voice will be immortalized: in a dark, wood-paneled room, the trash overflowing with crushed Red Bull cans, smoke flowing from the cigarettes dangling in their hands.
I watch Axel’s fingers dart across the keyboard, studying each minute change he makes. After each playback, the song improves. Eventually Axel breaks his concentration, glancing back over his shoulder, where I’ve been hovering behind his chair. “Don’t you want to see better?”
“Oh, sure. Sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” Yusuf pulls over a chair so I can sit beside them.
The screen is reflected in Axel’s eyes. He bites his tongue, his lips. His hands glide back and forth until early morning, when he stabs the space bar with his thumb for a final time, and we all listen to the playback together. My voice explodes into the control room, floating on their kicks and snares like a boat on choppy, energetic water. Axel and Yusuf glance at each other; Oskar’s eyes widen; morning light stretches over Oslo.
We all sit down for dinner together. The restaurant is aromatic and musky, pulsing with the ebb and flow of those who leave and those who enter.
“So, Axel, are you a vampire?” I ask, breaking the silence.
Across the table, he looks up. He had been staring at his silverware, deep in thought. “Huh?”
“I asked if you’re a vampire. Do you ever sleep?”
He shrugs. “I work best at night.”
“And during the day.”
He fights against a laugh but loses. It opens his face up. “You’ve found me out.”
I take a sip of beer. “I knew it.”
“Back home she couldn’t have that yet,” Pat says, pointing to my drink.
“What are you going to do about it, Pat?”
“This is better, isn’t it?” asks Oskar. “This way, you can learn to drink responsibly.”
“I do like the taste of it, and how it makes me feel. I just don’t want to get carried away.”
“Get carried away if you want,” says Sonny. “I won’t tell.”
I shake my head. “I think I have an addictive personality.”
Sonny laughs. “You don’t even know what that means.”
I know exactly what it means. It is my mother and her stained teeth. Her lies. “Yes, I do, Sonny. My mom is an alcoholic.”
The table of men stare at me, blinking. Maybe I’ve revealed too much.
“My father is the same, actually,” says Axel casually. He takes a sip of water, the only drink he’s ordered. “When I was young, I used to visit him in Lillehammer. That’s, ah . . .” He draws a vague shape in the air, pointing toward the ceiling. “North of here. A few hours north. When they hosted the Olympics in ’94, we went together. I was still a student then. He came to pick me up at the train and he didn’t recognize me. I waved to him, and he just stared at me blankly.” He laughs to himself. “He was fucked already, you see. He doesn’t remember the Games at all. I asked him about it the other day. It’s strange to me how I can remember an event so vividly, while he has nothing at all. It is like I shared this memory with someone who was already dead. Is that like your mom as well?”
Listening to his story, it feels like we’ve been punctured in the same exact spot.
“Yeah, my mom would stash her bottles away, and my brother and I would find them. It was always surprising, coming across one. It would explain the behavior from three or four nights before. We’d go, oh, there it is. This bottle was when she got home and screamed at us to go fuck ourselves.” I sip on my own drink. “She had all these hiding places. In her dresser, under piles of clothing. In the dishwasher. Under the bathroom sink with the toilet paper.”
“I had no idea,” says Pat, and he really does seem concerned for a moment. Cheeks ruddy from his own alcohol, his face lying slack. He turns to Sonny. “Did you ever tell me that?”
“Donna is a piece of work,” says Sonny, throwing me a look. “She hardly checks in on her own kid.”
“I guess the alternative is a nightmare, too,” Pat says. “Some parents are way too involved with their kids’ careers, in my opinion. Savannah Sinclair’s mother manages her. I hear there have been problems. She’s mishandled finances, donated a lot, maybe millions, to this one pastor.”
“That must be a fun Thanksgiving table,” says Sonny with a laugh. Axel is watching this back-and-forth silently, tapping his finger against his chin.
I take another sip of beer. White bubbles float to the top and settle on the surface. I watch Pat through the amber glass. I tighten up in his presence; he is the one steering my entire career, the one who will report back to Lyle Michaels and tell him whether I’m still worth Lolli’s investment or if I’m already spoiled goods.
On the way back to the studio, he explains why we are in Oslo, not Stockholm. “Axel’s father is dying, you know,” he says. “He refused to move out of Oslo once he got sick, so Axel is taking on fewer projects to take care of him. The fact that he’s chosen to work with you, well, it says something. It really says something.”
Back in my hotel room, Wes is calling, which is a rarity, but I don’t jump to my phone. I just watch it ring. Last year, loving him felt like a forgotten word, always on the tip of my tongue, never pushed forth. Now we’ve both grasped it, but it has several definitions when we thought it had only one. At the very last moment, I pick up.
“Hello?”
“Hey. Are you on break?”
“We just had dinner. But I have to be back at the studio in an hour. We’ll probably work all night.”
“Ah, yes. Axel. Is he being hard on you?”
“A bit.” But this isn’t the full truth—Axel is exacting and honest. When he challenges me, I know I will be better for it. He is critical but never cruel.
“He tends to do that.”
“At least I’m not thinking about what happened.” I close my eyes. Because when the baby is larger than a toddler in my mind, when its cheeks have grown sallow and the rosiness has leaked away, I remember my fear. The terror of holding the test in my hands, and the whole world looking down alongside me to see those two lines. I think of Argus, the hundred-eyed giant. There are so many eyes on my body, and I can’t move without them all narrowing in judgment.
“That’s really good,” he says softly. A moment passes.
“What are you thinking about now?” I ask.
“Now? Just you.”
I run my fingers over my breasts. Cup the weight in my palms. “Anything in particular?”
“Well, I was imagining you surprising me. You, in my bed when I get home.”
“Just waiting there?”
“Exactly,” he says. I feel turned over in his hands.
“Am I naked?”
“Uh-huh. I think you are, yeah.”
“Nice.”
He laughs. “So, you’re naked, and you’re waiting for me. You’re such a good girl.”
“Wes. That voice.”
“What voice?”
“It just makes me laugh. Sorry.”
“What do you mean?”
“No, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” he says, but his voice is clipped.
I lie back onto my pillow, closing my eyes. I speak into the darkness behind my lids. “For some reason, I couldn’t get into it that time.”
“Okay. I mean, we don’t have to do anything. We can just talk.”
“Yeah, okay.”
I apologize for calling him so much last night. The press coverage leaks back into my head whenever I step out of the studio, so I had called him again and again, called Gwen, called my mom, called Greg, called every one of my dancers, but only silence answered in the end.
He asks what was going on.
“Nothing. I think I just needed to hear your voice.”
“We had a show last night. And we had an annoying interview. This random reporter asked us all, ‘Screw, marry, kill: you, Savannah, Gwen.’ I said something like, ‘I’d marry all of them. They’re all great girls.’ Something like that.”
“You didn’t want to screw me?”
“Well, I did, but I felt like that’s what he expected me to say.”
“No, I get it. Very respectful.”
I continue, “I think he probably wanted you to kill me, though. Marry Savannah, screw Gwen, kill me. That’s the national consensus.”
He must agree, because he’s quiet for a long time.
The lights are dim in the studio. I’m lying on the leather couch, watching Axel’s golden head nodding along to the playback.
“I want to leave a space for a harmony here, something like—” And he demonstrates for me, his voice scratching against his throat. He flushes. “Well, you try.”
I sit up on the couch to sing for him.
“More control.” He draws a straight line in the air. This time, he nods when I sing. He says to do it just like that from now on.
The praise rises through my body, settles somewhere in my chest.
“The texture of your voice has a velvety, smooth element to it, like honey, but it can also sound like you chain-smoke. That rasp is what I want in the bridge.”
“Well, I do chain-smoke. So do you.”
He rolls his eyes.
“Axel?”
“Yes?”
“Is the stick up your ass uncomfortable?”
“Very,” he says, leaning back in his chair. It rolls a few inches, hits the wall. I return to the booth. The entire time I’m singing, I feel his eyes. He isn’t concerned with the way I look—it’s meaningless to him. He cares only about the capabilities of my body as an instrument. I am sure he can see the organs inside of me, the pumping, churning machinery. My diaphragm expanding and contracting. The breath ejected from my lungs. By taking me seriously, he has stoked me with fuel.
As he compresses my vocal, he hums to himself. He is always humming to himself. I swing around in an empty rolling chair. Every so often, he glances back at me, amused.
“Your voice isn’t so bad, you know,” I say. “If you just hum, it’s not so bad.”
He smiles. “Very funny.”
“Do you ever sing for other people?”
“No, never.”
“You’ve never been in a band or anything?”
“Absolutely not.”
“So you don’t mind that no one ever hears you, or knows who you are? You’re like the Wizard of Oz.”
He doesn’t turn away from the monitor as he says, “I’ve never seen that movie.”
“Well, the whole point is that he’s an anonymous man behind a curtain.”
“I prefer it this way. This way, I can create, and my face is unknown. For most people, especially in your country, the art and being the face of the art is interchangeable.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“There’s nothing wrong. I just prefer it this way. It’s not very important to me if people know I wrote a song. The fact that I did write it, and it’s out in the world, is enough for me.”
“That’s kind of brave.”
He snorts at that. “Brave? No. Not brave. We are all a small part of something larger than ourselves. This is a good way to think. You and me, we are working toward a common goal.” He forms a bridge with his fingers. “You, the artist. Me, the producer. My individual aspirations, people knowing my name? No, that does not matter very much to me. As long as the work gets done, I’m okay.”
“Do you hate that it matters so much to me?”
“You are American,” he says simply.
I tell him I’m embarrassed.
“Of being American?”
“Of wanting to be famous.” All because I was desperate to mold some powerful semblance of self, which could be wielded like a scepter whenever I was hurt or scared or insecure.
“Wanting to be known is normal,” he says. “We all want to be known by other people. We all want to connect.”
“I used to think I sang to escape my family. But that’s not right. I really wanted them to pay attention to me. One time I ran away from home, and the entire day went by. No one cared. I showed up for dinner and my mom had a microwave meal on the table. She was, like, ‘Oh, you’re late. Clear your plate when you’re done.’ ”
I slip back. It is so easy. And I am there, I am in the apartment again. There is the sconce that looks like an upside-down breast. There, the little Virgin Mary statue, a garage sale purchase. Mom and Greg are fighting. When I turn the stereo up, feet stomp down the hall. A fist slams into my door. Shut the fuck up, Amber, they say. Shut up. But their arrival just makes me sing louder.
“This is what I mean,” Axel says. “You wanted to connect with her. You wanted her to notice you. That’s your drive, and it’s nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s human. You are a human being, Amber.”
I’m staring down at my hands. “But I’m not. Haven’t you read about me?”
He shifts in his chair. “No, I haven’t.”
“Don’t you know what the press is saying?”
He says he’s heard a few things. Wes and I were photographed together in a hotel room, weren’t we? When I nod, he asks why we don’t tell everyone the truth. I’m not surprised he already knows Gwen and Wes were never a real couple; he’s spent a significant amount of time with both of them.
I say it doesn’t matter. This scandal is delicious, and our real lives don’t have that kind of flavor. It’s like choosing between a mass-produced candy bar and a microwaved vegetable.
“Gwen doesn’t want anyone to know,” I add. “Neither does Wes. Everyone thinks they were madly in love. It’s easier to blame me. It was all my fault, anyway.” Then I tell him the public’s idea of me is incorrect. That’s obvious. What’s less obvious is that my own idea of myself is also incorrect. I’m wrong about myself all the time. I think I’m good, then I make bad choices. Each day, I make a new mistake to bury tomorrow.
He runs his hand along his nose, back and forth along the bridge. “Have you read the poet Mary Oliver? An American poet.”
“No.”
He nods. “Okay. I will bring something for you tonight.”
At dinner, he slips me the poem under the table. The title is “Wild Geese.” Beneath this, he’s written “For Amber.” He’s clearly torn the page out from a book because it’s speckled with his coffee stains. He’s underlined certain lines in pen. Drawn squiggles to coax out the last of its failing ink. In the bathroom, I flatten the paper against the sink and water blooms across the bottom corner. I dry it off with my sweater as best I can, but I’ve given something else to the poem, some new damage.
I read it under flickering lights. I read it again and again, searching for new understanding each time, and when I’ve dried my tears, I face myself in the mirror, running my tongue over a pale canker sore on my gum. Here I am. Between me and this reflection, there are years of tension. Maybe I’ve been aimless. Maybe I’ve been afraid. But I don’t want to be that way anymore; I want to know what I’m capable of.
Streetlights reveal the contours of the cobblestones below. It is cold, and very late.
Axel walks ahead of us, and I jog to catch up. “Thank you for the poem,” I say.
“Listen.” He hums a melody. “Do you like it?”
As he stretches the melody out, we recognize its potential at the same time. His eyes are suddenly wild, frantic. His strides lengthen. “Keep up. But don’t distract me, please. If I don’t repeat it to myself, I’ll forget it.”
I’m silent the rest of the way. We all follow him up to his apartment. His place looks bare and untouched at first. A tabby cat slinks around his ankles. He scrapes wet food into her bowl with a fork, still humming, then leads us to his bedroom. Here, his life pours out. Sweaters and instruments and books. A tipped-over mug on his comforter. Unopened boxes of pasta stacked in a tower. “You live like this?” Pat asks. Yusuf settles against the wall, arms crossed, and says something to Axel in Swedish or Norwegian. I can’t distinguish between the two languages, and Axel has told me they are very similar.
“Where is it?” asks Axel, throwing aside a pair of sneakers and a blanket. “Ah.” He holds up a tape recorder. His cat settles at my feet, and when I lean down to rub her head, she arches in pleasure.
Axel hums, his foot tapping against the floorboards. He already has the chorus and a partial verse.
“Is that going to be our hit song?” Sonny asks.
“Yes, most likely,” says Yusuf, cross-legged on the floor.
Axel turns to me, brow raised. “What do you think?”
Together, we listen to the playback.
“We need more layers in the second verse. It’s too sparse, a letdown.”
He nods, twisting in his chair. When I enter the booth to record, time passes, and I don’t notice its weight. Then I am lying on his soft rug, smacking a pen against the lyric sheet we’ve printed, Post-it notes scattered around my legs. “Do you like, Won’t show you what’s inside my room? Or, no, actually, The room is mine, won’t show you what’s inside. That’s way better.” I cross the first one out.
“You answered for me.”
I fiddle with a knot on the rug. “Axel?”
He makes a gentle noise, so I know he’s listening.
“How do you come up with this stuff?” It seems miraculous to me—“Bubblegum” while riding his bike, this new melody walking home from the bar.
He shrugs. “Not sure. I’m always listening, I guess. Listening to silences, wondering what could fill them. How do you?”
“What?”
“Where do your ideas come from?”
“Which ones?”
“You had one just now.”
“Axel, you don’t have to be polite.”
He clicks his pen. “Polite how? You have many things inside you to say.”
What a thing to hear, after a lifetime not hearing it at all. If he’s right, if there was a well inside me once, when did it run dry, rust over? When did I decide the water was all polluted? He turns back to his computer, shakes his mouse. Staring at the screen, he asks, “What is your mother doing now? She doesn’t travel with you.” This last part an observation, not a question.
“She’s at home.”
“Is she very proud of you?”
“No, I don’t think so. She felt I should do something more responsible, something I couldn’t fail at. She always wanted me to go to college.”
He bites his tongue, which he does when he’s concentrating. “It’s funny. My father said something like this to me.”
“I hope he knows he’s wrong now.”
He scratches his head, smiling. “Maybe.”
“I don’t think she saw anything in me. My mom, I mean. I think she knew that to succeed in this industry, as an actress, a singer, whatever, you have to have something extraordinary. Eyes have to be drawn to you, instead of all these other people next to you, for whatever reason. She didn’t think I had it, so she tried to discourage me.”
This makes him frown. “Come here. Listen.”
He pulls a chair over for me and hits the space bar.
“Is this the second verse?”
“Yes.”
It is so much fuller now, a buildup that sweeps us right into the next chorus. We exchange a look. He raises his hand, I high-five it, and the gesture feels juvenile, but in a nice way.
What’s the time? Given the pearly light, it must be morning. This time of day makes me understand what he’s said about listening to silences. They hum with potential, waiting for some impact. And sometimes, when your instinct is right, you don’t need to fill them at all. They can stretch on and on. Every time he’s quiet, I know something wonderful must be churning inside his head. If only I could be seen in such a way, too: as a mind brimming, about to spill over.
My memory is heavy or light, depending on the thickness of the paper. Sometimes ink can’t leak through time. Sometimes everything is transparent, as if held up to sunlight. During these two weeks in Oslo, I remember: Axel’s hair hanging in front of his eyes, his fingers brushing it away. Yusuf’s tentative laugh, and Oskar’s booming one. Being afraid, at first, to suggest an idea, then the joy of approval. The joy, the joy. Hours passing without glancing at the clock. Circling the room with Axel, throwing ideas back and forth as if they are corporeal. Pinwheels of inspiration twisting from his brain to mine. Axel asking for my opinion and listening when I offer it. Burning with a new kind of desire—creation, something that begins in the mind and ends in the body. Forgetting to call Wes because all the space in my head is taken up by this album, and there’s no other room. Waiting for the muses. Working all night even when they don’t arrive. Axel’s eyes fixed on mine in the vocal booth, the same gray as early mornings here. Again, he says. Try again. You can do better, Amber, I just know it.
And the night before my flight back to America, Axel says we’re going to a club so we can test out the rough mixes.
“This is where we find out the truth,” he insists. “This is the real world.”
Inside, there are dancers on platforms. Chartreuse lights and artificial smoke create a dark, seamy swamp. Darude’s “Sandstorm” is playing, but then it melts into a song I don’t recognize. When I tell him I like whatever it is, Axel says, “It is ‘Heut’ Ist Mein Tag’ by Blümchen.”
“Do you know every song ever made?”
He snorts. “Of course not.”
Axel goes off to hand the mixes to the DJ, a friend of his. The rest of us sit at a corner table, sweeping crumpled napkins and crumbs off the surface. When he returns, he slides into a chair between me and Yusuf. He tells me he was raised in clubs like this in Stockholm. As a teenager, he would ride on the handlebars of a friend’s bike through the city—toward the music, into which he could disappear. He felt its power as something vaguely religious. Something to be experienced in congregation, with other people.
“Everyone here,” he says, indicating the crowd, “will stay until closing, until they are forced to return home to their beds. Then they will come back the next night, and the next. Tell me that’s not worship.”
One of my songs begins to play, and the dance floor shimmers like light on fish scales. A couple grinds against each other, moving like it is their last night on earth, surrendering to forces greater than themselves. Total abandon. A basic, primal instinct: lose yourself, and you will be found again through release.
Axel is watching the couple, too. “Look,” he says. “This is how your music feels, how it makes a crowd move.”
It is too much. I have to be inside of it. “Come on.” I reach for his hand.
“What are you doing?” he asks. But he doesn’t drop my hand, just looks down at it, confused.
“We’re dancing.”
Yusuf points at Axel’s panicked expression, laughing with Oskar.
“Why are you just sitting here?” I ask.
“I need to watch!”
“Well, I’m not watching anymore.” I release Axel’s hand, but his sweat remains on my palm until it dries up. The crowd parts for me. The beat pushes my hips one way, then another. My hands float above my head. I am molten; parts of me break off and flow away. In this moment, my voice gushing from the speakers, my body transcending its barriers, I just think: I’m alive, I had forgotten and now I remember, I’m so grateful.
Outside in the cold, I hug my coat tight against my chest, jumping up and down, then light a cigarette. I know it is bad for me, but I always want the wrong things, the things that heat my blood.
Pat comes outside to join me, threading his hands through his jacket. “I sent the rough mixes over to Lyle and the other execs,” he says. “They were nervous, and I wanted to assure them the sessions were going well. They like it. I think they’ll want it all on the record.”
They like it. Slowly, this sinks in.
He continues, “I hope we can get the first single and video out in the winter. We can’t know for sure, but I think we’ve done it. I think we have hits here. And you know what? Everything that happened back home with Wes and Gwen . . . Look, I think people will be interested in you. It’s low-hanging fruit.”
I consider this. “Do you know that myth?”
“What myth?”
“I don’t remember the king’s name. But his eternal punishment is to stand in a pool of water he can’t drink, beneath a tree with all kinds of fruit he can’t eat. They are dangling just out of reach.”
“Are you the dead guy or the fruit in this scenario?” Pat asks.
“The dead guy,” I say, but later I change my mind. I am the fruit.
PLEASE DON’T DISTURB
Amber YoungTrack 1 on Amber Young
Produced by
Axel Holm & Yusuf Hassan
April 3, 2001
[Intro]
See that sign on my door?
Won’t let you disturb me anymore
No!
[Verse 1]
I heard you talking about me
You think I asked for it (Oh!)
Won’t wait and see before judging (No!)
How can I clear up the misconceptions?
You’ve got too many damn questions
[Chorus]
See that sign on my door?
Please don’t disturb me anymore
It’s closed now, the room is mine
Won’t show you what’s inside
[Verse 2]
Get out of my ear
You’re calling me this one that one (Oh!)
Won’t wait and see before judging (No!)
How can I clear up the misconceptions?
You’ve got too many damn questions
[Chorus]
See that sign on my door?
Please don’t disturb me anymore
It’s closed now, the room is mine
Won’t show you what’s inside
[Bridge]
I’ve got to be honest . . .
Something’s going down in this room
But what’s it to you?
[Chorus]
See that sign on my door?
Won’t let you disturb me anymore
It’s closed now, the room is mine
Won’t show you what’s inside
ABOUT
Genius Annotation |
3 contributors |
“Please Don’t Disturb” is the opening track and second single from Amber Young’s eponymous album Amber Young (2001). Fans have speculated it is about what was going on in the press at the time surrounding Young and ETA’s Wes Kingston, which Young has subsequently confirmed.