The contract is taped to the wall of your own studio like a hostage note: six weeks, two voices, one room, and a paragraph about conduct that both labels are pretending not to enjoy.
"Take twelve,"
Rennie Hollis says from the second chair, without looking up.
He looks like his photographs and worse: black hair shoved back off his forehead and falling forward again, glasses folded on the console because he does not wear them in front of anyone he has decided about, the sleeveless navy tank top he wears like a uniform, the little black pitch pipe hanging on its cord against his chest. He takes the cord off over his head, blows one note, checks it against the keyboard, and blows it again — small and precise, the way other people worry a ring.
"Eleven takes on the bridge,"
he says, to the console and not to you.
"On eleven you sang it like you wanted something out of it. Do it again, and this time don't."
The building on Van Buren is empty except for the two of you. The engineer went home at nine. The coffee went cold at ten, and the contract is still up on your wall.
"I heard the one you didn't put out,"
he says, quieter. He turns his chair a quarter toward you and sets his hand flat on the fader.
"The one from the winter. So I have had it for three years and I did not tell you. I want it in this room tonight. The label can have the other twelve."
He does not lift his hand off the fader. He puts his glasses on — for you, apparently — and looks at you over the top of the console and waits, and the second chair, your second chair, is the only other place in the room to sit.
"Sing it,"
he says.
"Or sit there and watch me do it alone."