Unwritten (Woodlands 5)

I give her a look. “Landry,” I say with exaggerated patience. “You always tell the girl you’re with that she’s the best you ever had.”

“Even if you don’t mean it?”

“Would you want to hear something else?”

“Yeah, I think I’d want the guy to be honest. If we were dating and he thought that his third girlfriend was his best girlfriend ever, then I’d want to know.”

“And you’d do what with that information?”

“Well, I think I’d throw a pot at his head and storm off, telling him that he might as well be with his old girlfriend if she was so awesome.”

I die laughing at her honesty.

“What do you think of the other bands?” she asks when I get my act together enough to wipe the tears out of my eyes.

“Besides TA, the other three bands are chaff. They’re fine for filler, but no one’s paying a fee to see them in the future. They’re bar bands, at best. But TA isn’t going anywhere, either.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “How can you say that? They have a hit single.”

“Exactly. A single.”

“So this is the beginning of great things for them.”

I give her a pitying look. “Is that what Man Bun is telling you?”

“Sort of?”

I lean forward, elbows on the table. I know things about music. Maybe it’s because I’ve been part of the scene since I was born. Since I was a twinkle in my dad’s testicles, even. But I know music. I know it like I knew Juilliard would bore me to tears. Like how I knew my first two bands were duds. I have an ear or feel for what is going to be successful and what’s not. The best A/R folks in the industry have it, too.

“Subconsciously, we all like familiar things.” I point to our plates. “We order the same thing every morning. We have our favorite pair of shoes or favorite jeans. We, as a general rule, aren’t fans of change. People want that feeling from their music. They want something that sounds familiar. Did you know that nearly all the songs that have been hits in the last few years have the same chord procession? C, G, A-minor and F. There’s a YouTube video on it. Look it up.”

“What does that have to do with TA? Their music sounds like what’s played on the radio.”

“Exactly. TA’s writing music that’s indistinguishable from what’s already out there. They do a good job, and Keith’s a good front man, but his music is uninspired. Have you heard of the band Outkast?”

“It sounds vaguely familiar.” She makes an embarrassed face. “I’m pretty music dumb.”

“That’s okay.” Not why I like you, baby. I hum a few lines from “Hey, Ya” for her.

“Okay, yes. I’ve heard that before.”

“When that first came on the radio, it was a failure. A total dud. People were changing the station before the first verse was out of Andre 3000’s mouth because it didn’t sound like anything they’d heard before. Radio execs from Arista Records paid to have the single placed between songs from artists like Celine Dion and Smash Mouth to get people to actually listen. Speakerboxx/The Love Below is ranked one of the ten best albums of the 2000s. It changed the music scene. It changed what people wanted to hear.”

“And you want to do that?”

I toy with my fork. My personal dreams sound fucking pretentious when I talk about them out loud, but Landry’s inexperience with music makes me more comfortable. Landry has already had her own unbelievable success. Big dreams probably seem normal to her.

“The Beatles pretty much invented the modern band. They were one of the first who wrote their own music. The Rolling Stones melded blues and rock in a way people hadn’t experienced before. Black Sabbath did for metal what the Stones did for rock. Grandmaster Flash blew them both up with his rhymes and swag.” I point the fork at her. “ Yeah, I could write a hit tomorrow for this band. Use my dad’s connections to get it played on the radio, make a top hundred song, but then what?”

“I don’t know? One-hit wonder?”

She takes me seriously in a way that no one really has before, not even my dad who wants me to drop this whole band nonsense and come back home and enjoy the fruits of his labor.

“One-hit wonder,” I confirm.

“You aren’t worried that all the best stuff’s already been done?”

I shake my head. “No. The best songs have yet to be written. They’re out there, waiting for someone to find them.”