Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vol 4

229 DELIRIOUS

DELIRIOUS

You don’t actually want to hear a lot about rehearsal, trust me. We settled on afternoon as a better time than evening, so we got there before rush hour and left after it. Most of it, well, there’s not a lot to tell. We played the songs. We played them many times. We worked on hitting our marks. I won the debate about having Candlelight in the main set. As promised, the Solar 250 indeed made it look like sunbeams came out of Ziggy’s butt.

Mr. Sunbeam didn’t push me. He was all business. That suited me and the rest of the band. He brought a girl to rehearsal once, but only once, and didn’t introduce her. I got the feeling he wasn’t seeing anyone. He hung around the house a lot, but never tried to corner me or anything, and, well, so did Bart and Michelle one or two nights a week. I guess he came and went about as often as Colin’s and Chris’s friends. Colin got him and Chris both hooked on some video game I didn’t pay much attention to. Lars was spending a lot of time at Tina’s or Tanya’s house, so we barely saw him.

All in all, things were pretty calm.

One night I was up in my room with my headphones on, working on a song with the little four-track recorder on the bed and a guitar in my lap. I looked up because the light changed in the room and realized someone had cracked open my door. I pulled the cans off and said, “Hello?”

“Hey, can I come in?” Ziggy stuck his head in.

“Sure. I was just about to take a break anyway.” Which was a lie… but maybe it wasn’t. I had a crick in my neck and probably should take a break.

“I got tired of getting killed,” he said with a yawn. “Hey, weren’t you getting new furniture?”

“I haven’t gotten around to it yet.” I yawned, too.

He came and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m half-afraid to ask what you’re working on.”

“Eh, just some riffs. I’ve got a couple of songs you should hear, though,” I said seriously. “At some point. Maybe after we get off the road.”

He shrugged. “Any reason we shouldn’t work on them now? Or while we’re out there? If we’re really the hot property everyone says we are, why wait? You know it takes forever for them to get something out, anyway.”

My turn to shrug. “I dunno. I want to be focused on the tour, I guess.”

“But you know we’re going to be sitting around doing nothing way too much.”

“Probably.” Carynne made it sound like we were going to be hustling and bustling from place to place, but Ziggy was probably right. There were always down hours at the venue after sound check, and at hotels when we were multiple nights in the same place. She’d just told me the day before that a couple of the places we were due to play had added second nights to our engagements. Which would mean traveling overnight right after the second show, but that was fine with me.

Anyway, Ziggy was sitting there, like maybe he was steeling himself to hear another earful of whatever angst he’d inspired. Fine. “You want to hear this one?”

“Sure.”

I rewound the tape, found the beginning, and handed him the headphones.

This one wasn’t quite the knife wound that “Infernal Medicine” was. It still didn’t have a title, but it was the one I was working on with the “moving parts” double meaning.

“As usual, it still needs a chorus,” I said. For whatever reason I’d gotten very focused lately on writing verses, and riffs, but choruses were sort of elusive.