Double Minds Read Online Free PDF Page B

not,” Serene said.
    Parker flipped to a rap station. “This one’s worshiping guys with diamond grills on their teeth.” She turned it to a rock station. “A girl named Roxanne.” Another country station. “A little boy’s daddy.
    ” Butch spread his arms on the back of the couch. “That’s not worship. That little boy isn’t worshiping his daddy. He just misses him. Those songs are pointing out the human condition, and that’s not wrong.”
    “Okay, but I’d still say ninety percent of songs are worshiping something. The other ten percent are sappy cry-in-your-beer songs about some perverted version of the human condition.”
    “Where do you get those statistics?” Butch asked. “I don’t remember that question on the last copyright application.”
    “She pulls them out of the air,” Serene said. “A song can’t worship, anyway. People worship.”
    “Whatever the statistics, I want the songs I write to help fill the voids those other songs talk about.”
    “They will, Parker. They just won’t be so in-your-face.”
    “In-your-face is what got you to the Billboard charts. ‘Trying’ is in-your-face.”
    “But I need love songs. They’ll get me played on secular stations, so people will buy the albums. Then they’ll hear the worship songs.” Serene got on her knees in front of Parker. “Remember when we were kids, Parker, dreaming of being famous?”
    “You are famous. You got your dream.”
    “Not like I’d be if Jeff Standard buys my contract. And don’t get all holier-than-thou on me. You’ve auditioned twice for American Idol . If you got on that show you wouldn’t hesitate to sing whatever they told you to—from the Beatles to Diana Ross. You’d be giving it a shot like the rest of them, not balking that the songs weren’t Christian songs.”
    Serene knew her too well. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll never get on that show.” Daniel’s words tonight about her not having a voice that drew crowds played back through her mind. The American Idol producers apparently agreed with him.
    Her songwriting ability wasn’t in question, however. She liked her songs the way she’d written them. She didn’t want to change them. “Look, I know this is a big thing for you, and I don’t want to shoot you down. But if I rewrite them, would I still be able to perform the original ones?”
    “Of course you could,” Butch said.
    Parker pictured herself in front of a youth group—or a church full of people—singing the songs the way she intended them. Even if she told them how songwriting worked—that you wound up being a surrogate mother, delivering the songs over to someone who would perform them the way they wanted—wouldn’t they think her version was cheesy? If Serene’s version was what they knew, her performances of the originals would fall flat.
    “What if I wrote some new songs for your album?”
    “There isn’t time to rerecord everything. We’ve already recorded the musical tracks. It has to be these songs.”
    She leaned her head back on the seat and looked up at the ceiling. “Then you could rewrite them without me.”
    Serene smirked. “And you’re willing to split the royalties with another songwriter, or give them up entirely?”
    She hadn’t really thought of that. She did need the money, and she deserved to have those songs added to her catalog. Why couldn’t Serene just be happy with them the way they were?
    Butch sat next to Parker. “Your song ‘Double Minds’ could easily be a love song if you changed a few words. The story about the guy looking for light in a dark bar could be about a guy mourning a lost love.”
    Parker winced. When she’d written that song, she’d thought of her father, trapped in darkness. How could she massage it into something else? “But I thought that was the title song. You named the album after it.”
    “We can still keep that title,” Butch said. “If we could just go over the songs again, you could rewrite the lyrics in a