Different Circles

Another new form of technology that Celia and the band would be using for this tour were the in-ear monitors, called IEMs for short. They, like the video screens, were all the latest rage in high-end live music performances. Each one of the band members, Jake himself, and all of the sound technicians had a small plastic, wireless electronic device that was custom fit to slide into each of their respective ears. The biggest benefit of the devices was that they protected the hearing of the musicians and the crew from being blasted with high-decibel sound from the speakers night after night—and professional musicians and sound techs needed to be able to maintain reasonable hearing to continue practicing their art (Beethoven being the notable exception to this rule). They neatly blocked pretty much all incoming sound, even the bass drum strikes, even the high-pitches of the E-string notes. But hearing protection was only one advantage. They were also receivers and speakers themselves. They could play whatever instrument or combination of instruments into the ear of the individual musicians or techs that was required. Jake’s IEMs, for instance, played everything, and he had a microphone installed in his that he could use to talk to everyone without anyone in the audience hearing. Celia’s would primarily play the rhythm instruments and the melodic instruments and allow her to hear her own voice and her own guitar when it was played. Coop and Charlie would hear the melodic instruments and Celia’s voice so they could keep in perfect time and volume. They were actually game changers in musical performance and Jake and even Matt’s skepticism of them had disappeared almost instantly the first time they tried them out.

“Let’s do the sound check,” Jake said while pushing the microphone button on the handset on his belt. “It’s me today and not the Nerdlys, so this shouldn’t take long.”

Everyone had a chuckle and then went to work. And, true to his word, they had acceptable sound to Jake’s ears in only twenty minutes. True, it did not sound as good as it would have had the Nerdlys been there, but it was good enough for their purposes.

They went to work.

June rolled on and soon the 30^th arrived. By this point, Faithless, the song, had been getting saturation airplay on hard rock stations all across the nation. Rock fans and program managers were very enthusiastic about the tune. And, as Jake had hoped, many who had not particularly cared for Matt Tisdale’s music before found themselves very impressed by the song. It quickly became the most requested hard rock song across the board, neatly dislodging Metallica’s Fuel from that position. Even the progressive rock stations and a few of the pop stations started playing it as well, sometimes in the same set as Celia’s The End of the Journey. There was, of course, a small but vocal cadre of Matt Tisdale fans who accused him of being a sellout for putting out some radio friendly crap designed to cater to the unsophisticated masses, but this was not a new phenomenon. Matt had been accused of this in various forms for all of his CDs after Next Phase.

Celia’s new release, The End of the Journey, was enjoying even greater success. People from all walks of life, all demographics, went absolutely apeshit over the tune. It was quite obvious, even to the musically unsophisticated (which Jake knew was the majority of the American music consumers) that she was singing about the bitter end of her relationship with Greg Oldfellow. But the lyrics were not mean or spiteful, did not cast blame or make accusation. She simply sung about the painful, emotional turmoil that ending a long-term love caused, using simple analogies that hit directly in the heart. Those lyrics, along with the exquisitely engineered musical accompaniment, made for a powerful, memorable tune that people wanted to hear over and over again. By the time the CD was released for sale, Journey had already debuted high in the Top Forty chart and was moving rapidly upward. Pop stations and progressive rock stations was where it could be heard the most, but even the hard rocks and the easy listening stations that catered to older people spun the track with regularity. Entertainment reporters waxed philosophical about the meaning of the tune and tried to get Celia to appear on their shows or give statements for their columns (she refused all requests). One reporter managed to corner Greg Oldfellow at a pro-am event at his Oregon golf course and asked him what he thought of Journey. He told the reporter that he thought it sad and regretful that something that he had done had compelled Celia to write a song like that.