Page 7 of Sounds Like Love

My phone buzzed with a text from my manager, Rooney.HAVE FUN ON VACAY! ;)

I replied with a margarita emoji. She knew about my stuckness. She had to. She was also the only one who did.

When I first went to LA eight years ago, I had these big dreams of being a songwriter. My mom taught my brother and me piano and raised us in the Revelry, so how could Inotwant to make music, too? And even in that first year—which was rough, waiting tables and working dead-end catering jobs—I wrote. I couldn’t stop writing. I chiseled out time for it wherever I could, during ten-minute “smoke breaks” and inside bathroom stalls.

About a year into subsisting on ramen and Popsicles, I met a woman smoking out back by the dumpsters of one of my catering jobs. She was about a decade older than me, with a blunt platinum blond bob and sharp eyebrows and a scowl that could make grown men wither. She overheard me singing to myself as I sat on an overturned mop bucket, scratching out a song.

“The true tragedy of this city,” she had told me in greeting.

I’d been immediately confused. I’d looked around and guessed, “The full dumpster?”

“A young person with caviar on their work shirt, writing a song while catering a music exec’s ten-year-old’s birthday party,” she clarified.“And the kid’ll probably get on the radio before you.”

“I’ve been on the radio,” I replied easily, returning to my little bent notebook. “College. I took a midnight slot as a DJ and played my own demos between the top hits.”

The woman had barked a laugh. “Anyone find out?”

At which I finished my lyric and grinned at her. “No.”

She seemed impressed. “Singer, too?”

“Just a songwriter,” I replied.

“Pity.” She dropped her cigarette and crushed it under her Louis Vuittons.

“Why?”

“You probably could make it big if you sang them, too. It’s a tough industry. Your biggest fan has got to be yourself.”

I stood and closed my notebook to face her. “I know that, but I want other people to sing my songs. I want to give them words they didn’t know they had in themselves. And I don’t care about making itbig—I just want to make it. I’d rather be ten people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s tenth-favorite thing.”

The woman gave me a long, considering look, before my phone beeped, signaling the end of my break. I stashed my notebook in my pocket and politely said goodbye. As the party ended, the woman found me and slipped her card into my caviar-stained shirt. Her name was Rooney Tarr, and she was a music manager—one of the biggest in the industry.

“Send me a demo,” she told me, and walked away.

The next morning before my shift at the local coffee shop, I did just that, and we’ve worked together ever since. The first few years were rough. I poured my heart into demo after demo, but the critiques were all the same—the sound was too similar,the lyrics were too emotional, the chords too complicated, they had too manylove songsalready.

So I adapted, and once I found what I was good at—pop-rock anthems about best girlfriends and endless summer nights and living like that Tom Petty song—the rest just came naturally.

Rooney Tarr touted that I could write anything, and I could.

But I excelled at writing the kinds of songs you didn’t see coming. The unexpected. The new. I was a wheel constantly reinventing myself, searching for something perfect.

Something rare.

I wrote songs and scraped by on the royalties because, despite popular belief, songwriting royalties were awful even if you wrote hits. After a while, with enough songs and a foothold in the industry, I should have gotten comfortable, slowed down, but I never did. I just kept writing more and more and more—

Then Mom got sick.

And now I couldn’t write anything at all.

“It’s a curse,” I mumbled to myself, watching the same four suitcases rotate around the carousel until—finally—mine creaked around the corner. I hauled my beat-up neon-pink suitcase onto its wheels.

A moment later, my name echoed down baggage claim like an ominous siren—“JOOOOOOOOO!”

I turned around.

And there, sprinting toward me in a pickle costume and waving a sign that readyou’re a real big dill now!was my best friend.

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