Riven (Riven 1)

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, what is it this time? Got an email you need help composing? A story you want to tell me that wouldn’t be the same over the phone?”

My voice sounded sour even to me and I dropped my chin, hands on my thighs. Rhys was my oldest friend. We’d played music together since we were twenty years old, and he knew me better than almost anyone. He was quick to anger, quick to forgive, and loyal to a fault. He’d stayed my friend even when I was a fucked-up mess, and he’d forced his way back into my life after, when I’d isolated myself from everyone, pushing firmly and steadily, like a knee between the thighs, until I let him settle there.

“Hey, now.”

He set a heavy hand on each of my shoulders and tugged me around to look at him.

“What’s got you all messed?”

The wariness in his eyes killed me. It was a wariness I was familiar with—of course it was. You couldn’t disappoint people over and over again without being very fucking familiar with that expression.

I patted his hand and tried to smile.

“Sorry, bro,” I said. “Just in a mood. I’m glad to see you.”

Rhys’s grin was bright and immediate.

“Great, ’cause I need your help. Not”—he cut me off—“with an email, no. With a song. Well, a couple songs.”

He fumbled with his phone as I dumped the food onto two plates and herded him to the kitchen table.

“What…is this, exactly?” he asked, poking at the food with a thick finger.

“Eggs.” He raised an eyebrow. “With stuff in them.”

It wasn’t as if Rhys wasn’t fully aware that I was a shit cook. He squinted at his plate for a minute, then shrugged, dowsed it with hot sauce, and started shoveling in the food with one hand while pawing at his phone with the other.

He finished eating in the time it took me to take about five bites, so I let him explain as I ate.

He was working on a new album—his first solo album—and he wanted me to co-write and record four of the songs with him.

No, was my first thought. A strident, uncompromising no that left no room for error or regret. My addiction was a slippery slope, and music had always been inextricable from the initial nudge that sent me careening down it.

But I’d helped Theo with his song the other night, and all I’d felt was a kind of tickle in the places where the music had always lived, like the first tingle of waking up. Besides, this was Rhys. Chances were he was more likely to mother-hen me to death than expose me to anything that wasn’t squeaky clean.

I stayed silent long enough without dismissing his request that Rhys saw his opening.

“You’ll be perfect, man. I want to play you some of the stuff I’ve got so far, okay? But this stupid thing—” He banged his iPhone on the table. “Shit doesn’t work.”

I grabbed the phone from him before he broke it. Rhys’s electronics—well, most of his possessions, actually—were forever falling victim to his accidental brutalities.

“It’s not your phone, it’s that we’re in the middle of farm country and there’s not a good cell signal out here. Use my computer.”

“Oh, right.”

He woke the computer up and I cleared the dishes while he found whatever he was going to play me.

“Uhhhhh, you know I don’t like to judge, bro, but your newest obsession is a little…different?”

“My what now?”

He tilted the computer to show me the embarrassing number of tabs open to Riven videos and articles.

“I—that’s not—I don’t have obsessions.”

Rhys’s laugh was the deep one where he threw his head back and rested his palms on his belly.

“That’s so ridiculous,” he wheezed. “Of course you do. You find a new band and you pick them apart to learn everything about them, then you strip them for usable parts and throw the rest to the sharks. It’s what you do. You’re the most obsessive motherfucker I’ve ever met. Well, except for Matty.”

I frowned at his characterization.

“You found Matte Black Disco, and you got that cool thing where they layer a minor chord under every bridge in major. Pickle Barrel, it was the accordion as the percussion beat on ‘Limelight.’ From Divisadero you picked up the steel guitar. Oh, and that steel guitar player—he was something, huh?” He shook his head. “Nothing wrong with it, bro, I’m just saying, you like to dig in.”

When he put it that way, I supposed Rhys was right. Matte Black Disco had opened for me when I toured behind my third album and I had found myself tweaking my songs at the bridge because the combination of chords just lit up my ear.

It was one of the reasons I’d loved touring so much, keeping the songs living, shifting things. Yes, there was the version of them that was on the album, but that was just the way I’d laid it down that day. Onstage, on tour, in different cities, the songs came alive. It was a dance, a call and response, an ongoing conversation. And every song, every band, every sound I encountered had the potential to transform a song, give it another version of itself.