“Then I got nothin’,” I said, and, in an effort to avoid sounding like a petulant child, I added, “I like all the songs at first listen.”
“Yeah, me too,” Braden said.
“Same,” said Cy. “Do you have any ideas of which ones you want to axe?”
“No—that’s why I was asking you guys.”
“Here’s an idea.” Cy got up and pulled a Diet Pepsi out of the cooler. “Why don’t we work on all of them. Maybe some of them we’ll decide later don’t work.”
“And if they don’t?” Braden asked.
“Then we make the label choose,” Zack said. “We could let them listen to demos of the other songs and ask them to choose however many they wanted to fill out the album.”
Remembering seeing Zack mouthing words on a couple, I asked, “Do you have words for all of them?”
The grin that spread on his face was classic Zack, reminding me of how excited he used to get about talking all things music. “Yeah.”
“Well, we can’t cut any that way then.”
“I really liked the song that was in the middle of them all,” I said. “It had a super bluesy feel with a long, mournful solo.”
Cy laughed. “You could say that about most of them.”
“Yeah, but the one I’m thinking of was complete—and the end faded out instead of ending clearly.”
“I think that was ‘Freezing’.” Zack was already clicking and the song started again.
Just one guitar note and I knew that was it: a mournful tune, played slowly, evoking all kinds of emotions in me. Through his music, Zack communicated to me on a deeper level, and I could feel all his suffering just through that song. I was afraid that, when I heard the lyrics, I’d start to cry.
Damn it. I still loved him. I loved him to the depths of my soul. How could I ever stop?
Cy asked, “Is that a synthesizer?”
“Yeah. Cool, huh?”
I had no arguments. “I vote for this one to be one of the ones we keep no matter what.”
Zack grinned. “Okay.”
“If we’re voting on keepers, then I vote for the second-to-last song,” Cy said. I wasn’t surprised. That song was so good—and was probably the one out of the fifteen that sounded most like our first album.
Braden echoed that sentiment. “Yeah, I agree.”
“Okay, so we have a core five. You guys wanna start practicing those?”
“I’d like to get familiar with all of them,” I said.
“I can send you guys all these recordings so you can get a feel for them—and then when should we start practicing? Bray, Cy, how long you need to practice by yourself?”
“I got nothin’ better to do,” Cy said. “I only need a few days.”
“I thought you were seein’ Teegan.”
Oh. Cy was dating someone from high school—if I wasn’t mistaken, because I only knew one Teegan, and she’d been in a grade higher than ours. But I was pretty sure she’d gone to college.
“One date. That was it. And you managed to write all this shit with the same concerns.”
Zack ignored him, focusing on Braden. “What about you?”
