Page 19 of Reverb

Stone

For listening on the drive.

You don’t get an interview. You get this.

I read the text again, my slow brain finally understanding. This wasn’t just Stone’s music library—this was him. The music that he loved, that moved him, that influenced his own work. The music he listened to, studied, maybe even emulated. He wasn’t going to talk to me, but then again, words weren’t Stone’s forte. Music was. Instead of giving me an interview, he’d opened up a window straight into his brain.

I’d told Stone that I was a journalist because music was the only thing I’d ever loved. It was the only thing he’d ever loved, too.

My heart speeding up in my chest, I navigated around the app until I found the Share function. Then I tapped it and shared my own library with Stone. I only had about seven hundred songs in there—a number I’d thought impressive until a few minutes ago—but my music library was my most precious digital possession, obsessively curated and listened to over and over. It was a bold move, thinking that Stone was even slightly interested in the same kind of insight into me that I now had into him. But I made it anyway.

I had six hours to make even the smallest dent in Stone’s library. I synced my phone to the car speakers and started the drive.

* * *

Even though they’d done this many times before, the band was hitting their low point, too. I noticed it when we got to Detroit, where the heaviest rainstorm in years was beginning to hit. With my cold retreating—I’d slept for most of my stay in Cleveland—I could see the guys were tired, their moods were fraying, and the weather wasn’t helping.

The Road Kings’ first Detroit show was rougher than any I’d seen so far. The rain was bad, the crowd was rowdy and hard to please, and the band were obviously disagreeing about something. Stone and Neal were shooting each other death glares—they rarely got along, so this wasn’t new, but they weren’t having it tonight.

Still, the music was amazing, and the band played long, taking the time to completely win over the crowd. I was starting to understand not only how good this band was, how dedicated, but also how professional they were. The experience of following them from the beginning of the tour gave me an understanding of just how much it could take out of a person to do this day in and day out—and I wasn’t the one playing the shows.

Raine Baker, Neal’s ex-girlfriend who was the mother of his thirteen-year-old daughter, had joined the tour for a few days. Whether that meant she and Neal were a thing again, I had no idea, and aside from a polite greeting, she wasn’t going to talk to me. She probably saw me as a soul-stealing villain just waiting to invade her and her daughter’s privacy and write about it. The whole thing was depressing.

My mood picked up a little when I got a call from my parents an hour into the show. I wandered into a hallway backstage to take the call. “Hello? Mom?” I put my hand over my free ear so I could hear better.

“Hi, honey!” Mom said brightly. My parents weren’t night owls, but Portland was a few hours behind Detroit. “Are you at one of the shows right now? How exciting!”

“Yeah, I’m sorry if it’s loud,” I said. Onstage, I heard Axel do a familiar intro, and then Stone’s distinctive guitar soared into “Kickback.” Damn, it sounded good, no matter how many times I heard this song. The crowd of three thousand roared. “How are things?”

“Just fine,” Mom said, and with the sound of her voice I was back in their living room again, the TV on, an old knitted afghan thrown over the arm of the sofa, a bowl of snacks and a cup of tea on the coffee table. I knew it made me a loser to still be living at home at twenty-eight, but journalism wasn’t a big-money career and Portland rents were insane. My parents were the best people, and they wanted me to stay. Why would I leave?

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“Tinkering in the basement. He bought some speakers at a flea market and he’s determined to make them work. Oh, here he is—Peter! Sienna’s at a concert right now.”

There were muffled voices, then the sounds of shuffling against the phone, and then Dad’s voice came on. “Hi, honey! How are the Road Kings treating you?”

“Great. Just great, Dad.” I hadn’t told my parents anything about the band shutting me out, about being deleted from the hotel roster, about how hard this was. I certainly hadn’t told them about my strange roommate arrangement with the Road Kings’ guitarist. “Everything’s going well.”

“I read the latest piece you wrote. You’re knocking ‘em dead.” A pause as Mom’s voice said something in the background. “Your mother wants to know if you’re eating okay.”

“I’m eating great.” My diet consisted of eighty percent granola bars at this point, but that wasn’t bad, right? I was going to pretend that wasn’t bad. “I’m getting incredible experience.”

“Of course you are—you deserve it. Hey, I’ve been listening to the Road Kings and I think they’re pretty good. Did you know they put out their last record on vinyl?”

I smiled to myself, there in the dark hallway as the music roared onstage. Dad was a music buff, but anything past 1984 or so didn’t interest him. He wasn’t old—he just thought that the best music was made before Reagan was president, and the best way to listen to that music was on vinyl. He wasn’t an elitist, just a nerd who was way too enthusiastic about his favorite music.

“I think I knew that,” I said.

“Listen, if they make another record, you should tell them to release it on vinyl. It’s in fashion again, I hear. Your old man would buy a copy for sure. You probably have influence on them by now. Put a bug in their ear, would you?”

I could have laughed at the idea that the Road Kings—who wouldn’t even admit to me that they were planning a new album—would take my advice on their career direction. But Dad didn’t need to hear the truth, so I simply said, “I’ll mention it if it comes up, Dad.”

“Okay. Your mother is asking me if she needs to send a care package.”

That made tears sting my eyes. I knew a care package from my mother would include pajamas, clean underwear—she was likely fretting that my underwear was dirty—and some kind of homemade food that didn’t travel well. Soup in a jar, maybe? I really wanted that care package, but it wasn’t practical and I was trying to be a grownup here. “No need,” I said to Dad. “I’m fine. I’ll be home in a few weeks, anyway.”

* * *

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