Page 25 of Your Echo
7Afraid || The Neighbourhood
ACE
I haven’t leftmy apartment in two days. There’s a greasy pile of pizza boxes sitting on my counter, and not even the open door of the balcony is enough to clear the stale and stagnant air in here, but I can’t leave. Not yet.
I’m almost done writing ‘Nevermore.’
I didn’t sleep that night I came back here instead of going out on Saint-Laurent. I put a Muse album on and lay on top of my mattress, kicking the blanket away as the heat of the night clung to my skin, trying to drown out the sounds of the city with electric guitars and Matt Bellamy’s wails.
It didn’t work. I could still hear all the hungry laughter in my head, still see the shadows of passing headlights grow like monsters on my walls until I was shaking so much there could have been a metro line running right below my head. I knew that even if I did fall asleep, the dreams would be ten times worse than being awake.
So I got up and sat cross-legged on my floor like the world’s biggest idiot, and I forced myself to breathe. I forced myself to chase that moment in the meditation room—just a few brief seconds of fleeting sensation I’m still not convinced I actually felt—when I understood why people do this. Surrounded by smoke and the rhythmic exhales of the other meditators, I sunk into the kind of nothingness I’ve been chasing for years.
I’ve glimpsed it before, in the height of the high that comes from drugs and good sex, but only music had ever made me able toclaimit like that, to find it in myself instead of some exterior stimulus. Only being on stage gives me that single-minded sense of purpose where everything falls into place. You don’t think. You don’t feel. You justare.
I wrote for the rest of the night. I filled up pages and pages of blank paper with scribbled lyrics and chords. Half of it wasn’t even for ‘Nevermore.’ It felt like I was pulling something out of myself—a thorn buried deep in my side—and I couldn’t stop to question what was happening or I’d lose my grip on it forever.
The dawn broke, and I slept for a few hours. When I woke up, I shoved some food in my mouth without even tasting it. Then I started writing again. I shut my phone off, surrounding myself with guitars and banged-up volumes of Edgar Allan Poe. The ideas were all taking shape faster than I could keep up with, growing in that wild and violent way I hadn’t felt in so long.
“Fuck!” I shout, as my pen runs out of ink in the middle of jotting down a set of chords for a potential bass line.
I take a moment to lean back on my elbows where I’m sitting on the floor, blinking at the light filtering in through the window and catching on the swirls of dust in the air.
I have no idea what time it is.
Thinking that I’m probably due for another pizza by now—and hoping it’s late enough in the morning to find a delivery place—I switch my phone back on and instantly regret it. The thing is blowing up. I scan through the texts and missed call notifications and start to draw together a picture of what’s going on.
I missed a meeting with Atlas Records, an important one we’ve known about for months. They flew a bunch of executives in from Toronto, and when I didn’t show, they just moved on to the next band on the list.
It’s bad enough we didn’t even have the ‘Nevermore’ demo we were supposed to show them, Matt’s latest text reads.We need you for shit like this. You know that, Ace. Atlas doesn’t give a fuck about us unless we have you. Do you want them to fucking drop us?
He’s right about that. We rarely bring it up, but we all know it’s true: in Atlas’ eyes, I’m the face of this band. I’m the one magazines slap on their covers and I’m the reason fans pay overpriced premiums to get access to meet and greets. I usually see it as a kind of safety net, but Matt seems pissed enough that I could be wrong.
I dial his number. He doesn’t even say hello when he picks up.
“Where were you?”
“I was—”
“Oh, wait. I forgot that I don’t give a fuck.”
“Matt—”
He ignores me. “I don’t think you realize the kind of shit you’ve just put us in. That meeting was our ticket to the future of our career. I despise working with this label as much as the rest of you—much more than the rest of you, actually—but I’mtryingto make the best of a bad situation, and you getting so fucked up you can’t even—”
“I wasn’t fucked up, man,” I cut in. “I was writing. I’m almost done with ‘Nevermore.’ I’ve had this...breakthrough, and—”
“You’ve been ‘almost’ done that song for two months, Ace. We’ve had extension after extension after extension. Atlas isn’t going to wait.”
“They don’t have to. We can start recording on Monday.”
That shuts him up, for a few seconds at least.
“Well if that’s true, that’s great,” he tells me, a hard edge still present in his voice. “The only problem is that we’re banned from using their facilities until you prove you’ve cleaned up your act.”
“Cleaned up my act?” I repeat. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means they’re not going to let us record with them until they’re convinced you’re no longer a ‘loose cannon’—their words, not mine; I would have called you something worse—and since our contract states we have to make two more fucking albums with these assholes before we release music with anyone else, this is kind of putting a stalemate on our career.”
