The Song is You (2009) Read Online Free PDF Page A

“What’s funny?”
    “You are. I know what you mean, but you’re
wrong
. There’s loads of great happy songs. Listen to that CD. You’ll see.”
    “Why do you have to quit?”
    “Oh, baby, now you
are
going to make me boo-hoo. I’m going to be traveling too much, that’s all. Wouldn’t be fair to you or my other tinklers. I’ll still
see
you. And Sarah’s a mate—she’s a really good teacher. You’ll love her.”
    “Will she sing with me?”
    “No. In fact, that reminds me. I have to warn you. Don’t, under any circumstances, let her sing. She’s got a dreadful voice. But she can play like an angel any music you hope to hear. All of that, all of your Johnny Bach book, and all your precious Elton, too. But promise me something.”
    “I promise.”
    “You haven’t heard it yet.”
    “I still promise. That’s the way I am.”
    “Oh, good, then I won’t tell you what it was, and I can always say you promised, no matter what I ask you to do.”
    “Who tells
you
what to do?”
    “Do?”
    “Who says when you’re not practicing hard enough?”
    “That’s a good question. I suppose my bandmates.”
    “What if nobody buys your record?”
    “Wow. Well, ah, then I’ll be putting poison in Sarah’s tea in a flash and coming to see if you’ll have me back.”
    “Are you nervous? How do you know you don’t need lessons anymore?”
    “Quite a day for good questions. Well, I don’t play piano in the band. I don’t know. I suppose I probably
do
need lessons still, but a day comes when you just feel ready, you know? Oh, oh, oh, now quit that, please. If you get all teary, then I really am going to slobber on you. Here, sing this with me instead.”
4

    SOME WEEKS EARLIER , Julian Donahue had noticed that “What’s Left”—a pop song that had used to haunt his solitude and that had been playing on his stereo the cherry-blossom morning he proposed to Rachel—was, but for one consonant, perfectly composed for an approaching job.
“You left so fast, you didn’t stay to watch me cry”
required only a single alphabetical step to reach
“You left so fast, you didn’t stay to
watch me dry
,” and then very nicely described a new oven cleaner, which toiled selflessly while its people, according to the storyboard sent over by the agency, frolicked in a park and drove along a Pacific cliff-side highway.
    And so Julian spent Saturday, the day after his snowy discovery of the Rat, in a recording studio in Queens, though the rapids of melting slush delayed the engineer by two hours and the singer by three. (The band, fortunately, existed only as a computer file.) Standing in the control booth, Julian pushed a button, and his voice drifted through the glass partition into the gray, dimpled studio, carrying disembodied suggestions to an eight-hundred-dollar-an-hour vocal chameleon with the face of a zealous nun and the body of a self-indulgent monk as to how she could achieve the same tone of pained loss from the original lyric while still punching the selling word
dry
, so that any woman who purchased Spray-Go would feel the liberating pleasure of the traditionally male role, the colder heart, the one who could stalk out without regret, indifferent to the pain of whomever she left behind (her husband, her oven cleaner).
    He leaned against the back wall of the booth and watched this fiendishly proficient singer twiddle the knobs of some internal control panel until she produced a perfect impression of the song’s original voice, a two-hit pop star from twenty years earlier, just inside the target market’s musical nostalgia range. A song could be neutered as easily as this. “What’s Left,” which had long exercised a matador’s power in Julian’s headphones, could be sung by an identical voice, over a computerized but identical band, and, with the change of a single letter, be shown up as mere spattered notes and jerky rhythm, no more hypnotic than any other one-calorie jingle. “Nice, Louise. You