Different Circles

They ended the tune with an extended solo that transitioned into a dual guitar outro of the main riff. They then silenced their instruments and looked at Jake expectantly, Matt with that expression of defiance on his face once again.

Jake simply nodded. “I like it,” he told them. “That riff on the verses is amazing, Matt, especially with the variations you lay down. You definitely have not lost your touch.”

Matt seemed surprised by the praise. “Oh ... thanks,” he said. “I saw you jotting shit down though. Any ideas yet?”

Jake shook his head. “Not really,” he said. “I’ll need to hear the tune a few more times before I start pondering anything solid. We’ll get together at the end of the week, have a beer or two, and then talk it over.”

“Really?” Matt asked, his voice nearly dripping with cynicism.

“Really,” Jake assured him. “What’s next?”

They went through all twelve tunes they had put together, playing them one by one. This took a little more than an hour. Jake was very impressed with six of the tunes and moderately impressed with two of the others. The remaining four, he was not so sure about. Maybe they would grow on him after he heard them a few more times. Maybe he could direct a little polish on them to shape them better. He kept his misgivings to himself for the time being, but did make a point to praise each of the tunes he liked on first listen, always offering a specific reason why he liked each individual tune. It was far too early to tell for sure at this point, of course, but he was getting a good feeling about this project (he had already named it Project Tisdale in his mind).

“That’s what we got so far,” Matt said after the final piece—it was called Without a Doubt and was one of the ones that Jake liked the most on first listen—came to a close. “What do you think?”

“I think you got the makings of a good CD here,” Jake said.

“Really?” Matt asked, as if he thought Jake was just fucking with him, or telling him what he wanted to hear.

“Really,” Jake assured him. “We’ll need to polish everything up some, naturally.”

“The overdubs and the engineering and all that shit,” Matt said, though with resignation instead of hostility, which was a vast improvement over the last time Jake had worked with him.

“That’s right,” Jake said. “We don’t want to put out another Next Phase here. Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked your riffs and solos on Next Phase. It was good, solid music. The reason it wasn’t radio friendly and didn’t appeal to anyone but your hard-core fans was that lack of engineering—that and the fact that the tunes tended to be too long.”

“Yeah, I have acknowledged that shit multiple times now,” Matt said sourly. “I made a mistake with that one.”

“We all make mistakes, Matt,” Jake told him. “Even you. Even me. My point is that the engineering and polishing is a necessary part of producing a quality CD that is going to not only satisfy your core demographic, but have some crossover into the other demographics as well. Does that make sense?”

Matt thought that over for a few moments and then nodded. “Yeah,” he agreed. “It does make sense.”

“You guys up for going through everything again?” Jake asked them. “I’d like to hear it all for the second time and make a few more notes.”

“Yeah, sure, we can do that shit,” Matt said.

“Excellent,” Jake said. “And at some point, I’m afraid to say, we’re going to have to bring the Nerdlys in to hear your set as well.”

Matt sighed. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

Jake alternated his days that week between the KVA studio where Celia was working up her tunes and the Stonehurst warehouse where Matt was working up his. Tuesday was with Celia, Wednesday with Matt, Thursday with Celia again. On Friday, things went a little differently. Jake still spent the day with Matt and his band, but this time the Nerdlys came with him. They were reluctant to leave Celia and the rest to their own devices (“who will supervise the sound check?” Nerdly cried. “Who will inscribe any changes to the master score sheets?”) but finally agreed to let them work on their own for just one day.

In preparation for the visit, Jake had instructed Matt to transcribe all of the tunes onto clean musical score sheets for the Nerdlys to peruse and make notations on. He had also leased a copy machine and a computer with internet access and a scanner so the Nerdlys could forever enshrine digital copies of the scores and notes.

“You are actually getting along with him?” Nerdly asked Jake as they made the drive that morning.

“So far we have had no major problems,” Jake said. “Things were a little tense at first because he thought I was going to come in and start ordering him around.”

“That would not be the best way to facilitate progress when dealing with Matt Tisdale,” Nerdly observed.