My voice came out of that little phone speaker, soft and a little off key, humming the melody. Then me singing the first verse, with the same lines Danny had just sung to two thousand people. Then a pause, and the voice of our drummer, Chris, from the back of the practice room, saying that is the one, man, that is the song.
The date on the memo was two years earlier, a week before Danny ever heard the song.
He stopped grinning. The beer went down on the amp.
Chris set down his cymbal case and said, yeah. I was there. He wrote it in about twenty minutes on a Tuesday.
The label rep had been standing ten feet away the whole time. Her name was Nadia. She walked over, asked me to play it again, and listened with her head down.
Two years of being the bitter one, and the truth had been sitting in my phone the entire time, waiting for somebody to press play.
Nadia asked me how many songs I had written for the band. I said nine of the twelve we played that night. She asked if I had recordings like this for all of them. I said most of them. She handed me her card and asked me to send them to her by Monday.
I did. She called me Tuesday.
She said the label was interested in the band, but they were more interested in the songs. She walked me through how songwriting credit actually works. How to register my songs with a performing rights organization under my own name. How the money from a song follows the writer, not the guy holding the microphone. I had no idea. I had just been writing because I could not stop.
We had a band meeting that weekend. It was not fun. Danny said he thought everybody knew he was just the face and I was the writer. He said he never meant to take anything. Chris asked him why he told the fans he wrote them. Danny did not have an answer.
He left the band a month later. No shouting. He just said it was not working anymore.
We found a new singer in the spring, a girl named Sam who plays rhythm guitar and has a voice like warm gravel. The first time she sang one of my songs at a show, she stopped in the middle of the set and pointed at me. She said this next one was written by our bass player, and it is about his grandmother.
It is. It always was. Danny used to say it was about his ex.
We signed with the label Nadia worked for that summer. My name is on every song I wrote. The first royalty check was small. I framed it anyway.
Chris still has the same drum kit. He says he wants to be buried with the practice room couch, where he heard that song for the first time.
I told him I would write a song about it.