Page 26 of Crescendo
Lydia
Hannah looked at me like either she was insane or I was, and she couldn’t tell which.
“You’re trying to start something with me,” she said incredulously, lingering at the edge of the room, the Crescendo building quiet right now, Sunday morning after breakfast—I’d told Ella I wanted a little walk for some inspiration, and I did walk somewhere that I hoped would inspire me, but I’d left out the part about how I’d texted Hannah and Dodge asking if they wanted to meet and talk music.
Dodge had given a non-answer in a way that oh-so-subtly said he was busy with a girl this morning.
Apparently the one-week mark was when the Crescendo hookups really got started.
Hannah, though, apparently was single on a Sunday morning, and so here we were for what felt like an illicit liaison, neither of us letting our roommates know what we were doing.
It wasn’t like I was trying to keep it secret from Ella, just…
I wanted to give it a second first, see if it could become real.
This idea lived in the tenuous space where I wasn’t sure if it was even worth considering, and I couldn’t bear the thought of seeming like a failure in front of Ella, I think I’ve found my answer and then it not panning out any more than any of my work did.
“Yes,” I said, stepping into the building and shutting the doors behind me. “I’m here to start a fistfight. You know how violent Americans are.”
She gave me a skeptical look. “You’re on some bullshit.”
“I was born on some bullshit. Let’s get to a practice room.”
“You haven’t even said what you’re after. You know Eliza and I are sound.”
I suppressed a smile. “Mm-hm… very. That’s why you had to come to me and Ella for musical feedback instead of asking her.”
She scowled. “It isn’t like that. I just didn’t want to be going to her with something half-baked.”
“And I’m coming to you for the same thing.” I relaxed my posture. “I’m after some advice. How you did what you did with your song—I want to try some of it for my own composition.”
She gave me a wild-eyed look. “ You want me to help?”
I smiled wider. “Shocked that Lydia Howard Fox herself might come to you for advice?”
She scrunched up her face. “Uh—that’s not what I’m saying. Just… what’s to stop me from giving you bad advice on purpose?”
“I’m not stupid. I’ll know if you do. So? A little alliance? I think we could both work on this little… stylistic quest.”
She stared at me for a minute before she huffed. “Just because I’m curious, all right. Let’s get to a piano.”
She loosened up a little as we got into one of the practice rooms together—Sunday morning, we had our choice of rooms, but Hannah skipped the one with the Steinway grand and went to a smaller one with an upright.
I didn’t realize why, following her inside, until she unhooked an electric bass from the wall, and she held it my way.
“You know how to use this thing?”
“I’m not Paul McCartney, but I know how to play notes on it.”
She flickered a smile despite her best efforts. “Then hands off it. Play something on the piano, okay?”
I felt my eyebrows shoot up. “Oh, are we jamming? You’re very demanding all of a sudden.”
“You came to me for help, so sit the hell down and do what I say.”
Hannah really was a different person when Eliza wasn’t around. She was kinda cool. “So,” I said, settling at the piano while she tuned the bass, plucking the strings and checking it by ear. “Bassist, huh? Did you and Eliza play together?”
“We had a band up in Liverpool. Played a couple open mics, booked a couple gigs, nothing serious. My dad was a pretty serious bassist, retired but still taught classes, and he taught me since I was little.”
“He sounds cool.”
“He was, yeah. Not as cool these days.”
I paused, looking up from the keyboard. “Something happen?”
She shrugged, not looking at me, fussing with a bass string I knew was tuned just fine. “Yeah, had a stroke and died. Makes a person a little less cool.”
“Oh… I’m sorry.”
She shrugged again. “People die. He was old when he had me.”
Well, she wasn’t repressing any grief. I couldn’t even imagine the concept. I decided to poke a wound. “I bet he’d be really proud seeing you take it all the way to a big program like Crescendo.”
She snorted, hunching her shoulders, back to me. “Nah. He always hated London. Scouser through and through. Never thought I’d up and be here, but Eliza talked me into it.”
“You left the band together?”
“Band’s not much without the rhythm section, is it?”
The rhythm section. In a rock band, drum and bass. Hannah being the bassist meant something I couldn’t possibly wrap my head around. “ Eliza was your drummer?”
That got a grin out of her, finally looking at me. “She’s fucking boss too.”
“I’d have guessed keyboard, or lead vocalist playing guitar and trying to be the star, or… maybe the marimba or the triangle before I’d guessed her on the drums.”
“She’s changed a lot the past year and a half.” She kicked a stool up next to the piano, sitting with her bass in her lap. I decided to go for the casual-comment approach.
“You had feelings for her from then?”
She almost fell off the stool, shooting me a look. “Shut your fucking mouth about things you don’t know about, all right?”
“Shutting my mouth isn’t really my strong suit.” I had other skills with my mouth, if this morning was anything to go by. I wasn’t going off thinking about that in front of Hannah.
“Well, learn it, then, and practice it well.”
“You ever feel like you wish the old version of Eliza would come back?”
She shot me an actual dirty look, enough to make even me back down. “You keep talking shit and we’re done here.”
“All right, all right. Not another word. Still, I’d be curious to hear her drumming.”
It got her to relax a little, a small smile playing on her lips. “We got into fights with bandmates because she’d keep stealing the show as the drummer.”
“That, I believe.”
She laughed, and she settled into the stool, plucking a few strings on the guitar. “You know what makes rock, rock?”
“Vocals, guitar, keyboard, bass, drums, sex, drugs, and rock and roll?”
“That’s such a you answer. Outside the bloody instruments. It’s the groove. The rhythm. The energy. Lemme give you a bassline and you can do some classical shit on top of it. If you’re worth your reputation, you’ll see what I’m saying.”
I guess I was worth my reputation, at least a little bit, because it was obvious right away.
I wasn’t one-dimensional—it wasn’t like I hadn’t used every instrument under the sun in compositions, wasn’t like I hadn’t layered heavy rock influences into songs before.
I scored a cyberpunk-adjacent action movie once and got so into synths in the process that I’d started crafting my own sequences in the crunchiest plugins, and I’d especially used big, punchy rhythm sections in scores when I’d been on a stint of video game soundtracks, back when a franchise I’d scored for had a run of wildly successful video game spinoffs.
But it was never like this—always surrounded by geniuses and people in suits, with professional time pressures and high-quality equipment and sampled instruments.
Jamming out with someone I barely knew—and didn’t actually get along very well with—in a tiny room scattered with random pieces, not trying to accomplish anything but just seeing what happened—that was rock and roll.
Helped that Hannah transformed from Eliza’s reverb track to a human being when she played the bass, some character shining through.
Simple chord progressions on the keys suddenly felt like it was something when it was on top of a punchy, groovy bassline, and when I got into it enough to flourish and add some character, some ornamentation, I felt like a punky teenager in a garage band with that us against the world feeling.
Jamming out in secret, sneakily seeing a hot girl for mind-blowing sex, new beginnings in the big city. I mean, what could get more rock and roll than that?
“You’re not terrible,” Hannah laughed once we finished a few rounds of music, grabbing her bag and fishing out her laptop.
“I can see why you’re coming onto me so strongly, but I’m afraid I’m not interested.”
“Fuck off,” she said cheerfully as she opened the laptop. “I got my program here. I wanna show you how I’m trying to get that sense of groove in a kinda… classical, symphonic context.”
“FL Studio?” I said as she launched her DAW. “There’s a choice.”
“I did the production for our band and all that crap, and I’m just used to it. Don’t feel like grabbing a new one and having to learn it just ‘cause FL Studio isn’t posh enough.”
“Hey, I made my resolution that I wanted to try something new. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
We went over the composition piece she was working on while she showed me what she was talking about—the pared-back musicality, focusing on a strong, memorable chord progression, and the lower range focusing on groove over harmony.
I found myself pitching in a little—guiding her to the gaps she’d left in the composition by focusing on simplicity and how she could use them to supplement the contemporary flow, even if we butted heads with me trying to figure out how FL Studio worked differently from Logic Pro.
We opened up as Hannah thawed out a little, and we took a break popping out to an out-of-the-way pub far from the stomping grounds of the other Crescendo students, a place she said where London actually has some decent beers and got me to have a stout with her that, after I got past the first few sips that felt like I was choking on smoke, settled into tasting like being wrapped in a blanket in front of a warm fire in a log cabin.
She told band stories and talked shit about old bandmates, listened while I told my stories and talked shit about movie directors and symphony conductors, and when we got back to the practice room, she had an expectant look my way.