Page 48 of Verses

Fortunately, Marv wasn’t tending bar today or he likely would have made us quit. Instead, it was Lucy, the gal who was glad to pick up a few extra hours.

When we finished the song the first time, Pedro said, “Balls on fire, Hayley! Corey Taylor would be proud.”

I laughed. “I doubt that. But I tried to sing it the way I thought Maria Brink might have if she’d covered it onBlood.”

“Goddamn. Hearing you sing it makes me realize there’s a whole lot more we can do in this fucking band. You’re my hero, Hayl.”

“I didn’t say Iwantedto sing that way all the time. I was just doing my homework.”

“Still…”

“How do your vocal cords feel?” Wolf asked. “Did you strain anything? Does anything hurt?”

Oh, he was so sweet. Out of all my band members, he seemed to be the only one worried. “I’m good. I think I could do it a time or two more.”

“Awesome!” Pedro riffed on his bass as if to punctuate his excitement.

“This is a taxing song, though,” Wolf said. “What about the rest of you guys? Adrian, you holding up okay?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t want to play this way 24/7, but it’s a nice stretch.”

Pedro laughed. “I put Band-Aids on two of my fretting fingers.” He held up his left hand to show them off.

“Yeah, this is, uh,taxing, to use your word, Wolf,” Kyle said, “but I have to agree with everybody…that it’s kind of fun to play something different.”

“Honestly, guys,” Pedro said, “I want us to play harder shit. Nothing against Liam, ‘cause the man was a hell of a composer, but did you fuckingfeelthe energy just now? And that anger? Goddamn, Hayley, I felt like you were gonna rip my balls off. And it wasn’t just your singing. It was all of us together. That raw shit is so…so…”

“Primal?” Wolf asked.

“Hell, yeah!”

I wasn’t sure that writing those kinds of lyrics or screaming through an entire song would ever be a forte of mine—but this particular song cemented us as a band in spirit somehow. And, after playing it two more times, we decided we were good for now, but we planned to come back to it every week for a while.

When we were taking a five-minute break, Kyle said, “So are we good doing ‘We Die Young’ and then the rest of the setlist next?”

Wolf said, “I wrote a little something. Would you guys care if I played it for you first…then go through the rest of the setlist?”

Pedro, as he often did, spoke for all of us. “Hells, yeah. I can’t wait to hear it!”

Wolf slipped off the guitar he’d been using and set it in a case at the back of the stage. When he got his other guitar out, he started strumming, turning a couple of pegs to tune it.

I had no idea what to expect, but I was eager to hear what he’d written. Would it sound like Van Halen, one of the bands he used to cover? Or would we instead hear something like Rage Against the Machine, his personal choice for the songs we’d cover as we tried to develop a new sound? Would it be like one of Liam’s songs?

I didn’t know…but I was holding my breath, waiting for him to start.

He said, “I just wanted to know if this sounds like something you guys would wanna work on—or if I’m not even in the ballpark.”

Wolf still didn’t seem to understand that, without Liam, we were rudderless. Anything he came up with was more than any of us had.

“Uh…this is kind of a ballad. I figure every great rock band needs one—and Hayley could knock something like that out of the park.”

Aballad? Holy shit. We’d never done anything like that. We’d always said we wanted to be hardcore—but when you’re hemorrhaging, you’ll use anything as a bandage.

Not knowing what to expect, I held my breath again until he began playing the tune. It was soft, to be sure, but it had a haunting melody that immediately grabbed my attention. I closed my eyes, imagining how it might sound with all of us playing.

Then, as if they could hear my thoughts, the guys slowly joined one by one as they learned the tune. Adrian first with a soft, gentle drumbeat gave the flesh of the song a heartbeat. Then Pedro added a bassline that gave it some bones. Last, Kyle began strumming, a tune that sounded like it was a combination of Pedro’s bass and Wolf’s guitar.

It was only then that inspiration filled my veins. All those poems and half-written songs in the notes app in my phone…what had I been saving them for all this time?

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