“Sorry.” Marc shook his head and stepped into the trailer to help him after subtly readjusting his cock.
“You’ve been spacing out a lot lately. All good?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Just tired.”
“Tired of what?” The tech laughed. “All you do is play on stage and drink.”
“Am I not helping you right now?”
“Oh, excuse me, your highness,you’re helping. Be careful not to break a nail.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” Chris clipped as he approached them. “You wouldn’t be making any money if it weren’t for us.”
Noah was an outstanding friend and drum tech. They would actually pay him—all of them—more if their own paychecks were bigger. But of course, this prick had to tease him.
“Says fuck boy, as if there weren’t any more bands out there willing to offer great checks for my services.”
“Fuck you,” Chris said.
“Sadly, wifey is back at home. But thank you for the offer.”
The guitarist laughed, glancing at Marc for a second. “You’re very welcome.”
“Now, can we finish loading this shit?” Noah asked.
“Yes, sir.”
The rest of the morning passed by pretty fast between setting and tuning all the instruments and the soundcheck. They were almost done with warming up, too. Though Marc didn’t want it to end.
Not that he wasn’t eager to go out on stage. Fuck, no. That was his favorite part of the day. But, while Erik and Chris isolated themselves to enterthe zoneand get their minds and bodies ready for the show, he did this with Leah. It was easier to warm their voices together as he finger-picked his bass. She had technical training on the matter and knew how to help him prep his cords so he didn’t harm himself doing the backing vocals, which were always growls.
However, he could sense her need to vomit a bunch of questions that had probably been swirling in her head since the night before, and he didn’t know how to answer.
Once they’d finished stretching, shrugging their shoulders, twisting their waists, and rolling their heads to the sides, back, and forth, to release the tension in their muscles, the forced yawning and funny faces followed.
As stupid as all this might look—Marc laughed way too hard the first few times they had done this—it was really helpful. Singing wasn’t like playing an instrument. Of course, he needed to be in a certain mental and physical state for that too, but it was different. Having back pain made playing bass uncomfortable, but that exact same thing wasn’t only painful when growling, it actually affected the quality of his voice. Same happened with the neck and the tension everyone, apparently, puts on their jaws, clenching them unwillingly throughout the day.
They also did scales with the different vowels and syllables for diction, adding distortion progressively until they were doing low growls.
Finally, after twenty minutes, the alarm went off, announcing the end of the warm up. Leah insisted it was important to do this, but overdoing it could be counterproductive. Funny she said that when she’d skipped it more than once in the past. Marc was pretty sure she did it here to temper the nerves preceding playing in front of such a huge crowd. Though, he’d noticed both of them were performing a lot better now.
“How was it then?” she asked, grabbing a bottle of water while he sat on one of the chairs they kept in the gear tent.
Marc chuckled. “Not even a second, Jäger?”
“It’s been an entire night and part of the morning.” She mischievously grinned, sitting criss-crossed in front of him on the ground. “Tell meeverything.”
“It was okay.”
“Just okay?”
“It was different.”
“Meaning?” She tilted her head after taking a sip of water.
“As we told you last night, we’ve done it before.”
“Yeah.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You sneaky bastards…”
