Page 14 of If Not for My Baby
The audience squeals and shrieks—clearly, they know the song he’s referring to. It’s a drum-fueled jam about getting drunk and lost in some twisted woods at night in a storm and stumbling upon your own self making love to your ex right there in the dirt—just your average breakup song, right?
Molly and I belt in harmony during the whimsically dark chorus, and I notice Halloran turn from the audience to study me as I sing. I can hear my falsetto soaring over Molly’s alto notes, and pull back just a little. Halloran doesn’t smile or nod, too consumed by his skillful manipulation of the guitar strings, but his brows knit a little.
Did I do something wrong?
I try to smile at him and get nothing in return. He’s already swept back up in the devastating swell of the chorus, stomping his feet in rhythm and tipping his head back. But I know he’s heard me. I know he’s singled out my voice.
Halloran’s full-throated vocals blast through the explosive end of the song, choking on the final lyrics in which he allows himself to die out in the rain’s cold so that this other version of him can be with the woman he once lost. I want so badly to find the whole thing heavy-handed and self-serious…but I can’t. In fact, as Molly and I hum through the somber backing vocals, and the projected tree shadows fall across Halloran’s broken face, wound tightly in some kind of excruciating rapture, I find tears nearly springing to my eyes.
The cheers from the crowd bring me back down to reality. Molly covers her mic as she whispers, “He’s something, huh?”
I watch him—his now slightly damp collar pressing against his neck. The long, Tarzan-like tresses he tosses out of his face. The respect he gives his audience with each grateful dip of his chin and huge hand pressed to his heart in thanks.
I can’t even fathom a response to her, so I nod once, eyes still on this man I’m realizing I completely underestimated. This concert—the one I’mperforming in—feels less like a gig and more like a religious experience.
And it’s not just his richly atmospheric keys and organs, or his murmurous, slow-burn of a voice. It’s the way he takes his ear monitor out to listen to the crowd sing his words back to him like gospel—the Church of Thomas Patrick Halloran. It’s how tears flood his eyes in awe at each of them. How he mutters a lowthank you very muchafter each song. It’s as if he has no idea how colossally successful he is.
By the time Grayson’s soft piano cues succeed in quieting the crowd’s roaring, it’s the last song of the show. The one the entire audience has been waiting for. The torch song thatmade Halloran a platinum artist off his first single at twenty-six years old: “If Not for My Baby.”
Molly leaves her post beside me, grabbing the mic and sauntering down to the front of the stage to meet Halloran, who’s abandoned his guitar. He greets her with a subtle nod that she returns to him, and it dawns on me that there’s a bit of playacting involved in this finale number. She’splayingthe role of Cara Brennan—the singer Halloran wrote and recorded the song with.
As Wren lays a soft and steady rhythm with her drums and Conor comes in with the melodic initial chords, Halloran’s distinctive low, sweeping voice serenades Molly.
“The oceans rise to meet the skies,” he croons. “My love just tells me, now we can be free.”
“Broken roadways, sweet rain sideways,” Molly sings back to him. “The end of days, if not for my baby.”
It’s not theater, but their performance is of a great love at the end of the world. One gone terribly wrong, looked back on with rose-colored, post-apocalyptic glasses. And as the song picks up to the chorus, I feel the devotion Halloran once felt for whoever this woman was—Cara, I’d imagine—in my own heart. My eyes are burning. My lungs, too. My vocals begin to peter out.
“I want to be lost,” Halloran begs into the mic, “not found in my aching.” He cants forward. “I’d be hawthorn frost, if not for my baby.”
All the while Molly hits her impeccable, heart-wrenching high note. A lamentation of all the reasons she had to leave, despite the love Halloran laid bare at her feet.
I’m missing my lines as I really hear them for the first time. The insatiable longing. A man who saw the world anew through his baby’s eyes, and now has to reconcile that world with this one she’s no longer in. My eyes find the spotlights and I stare into them until I remember where and when I am.
It’s a mercy when the drums crescendo and their harmony ends. The lights snap to pitch-black, the crowd goes berserk, and I try to remember what compelled me to botch that last song so badly.
It was Halloran and Molly’s moment—perhaps nobody even noticed?
When the lights flash back on, Halloran raises his hands up in thanks to the audience, and motions for the band to come and stand beside him. I scoot my way to the far end beside Grayson and feel his hand snake around my back and settle low on my hip.
We bow as one, my heart still hammering from both the exhilaration of my first successful performance and my anxiety over those errors in the final song.
Halloran bellows out one lastthank youinto the crowd, and promises to return to Memphis as soon as he can. We file off the stage to the sound of their unrelenting elation, and the endless chant of his name.
Six
“What a start to thetour, Tom,” Jen says. “Congrats, you guys. Just excellent. Now pack quickly—Lionel has dinner on the bus already and it’s a long one to New Orleans.”
I grab my things from the dressing room and walk past all the riggers and roadies down to the tour bus. All my adrenaline has vanished. I am a deflated balloon.
A soft, summer wind breezes through the nearly vacant back alley—blocked off and safe from hungry fans—and my nostrils fill with warm evening air and the scent of asphalt cooling after a day of hot sun. My ears ring despite the earplugs I wore, and the buzz of cicadas doesn’t help.
Alongside Pete’s barking at some stagehand to hold Grayson’s keyboard properly, I can just make out Conor’s thick accent behind me as he says, “Oi, Tommy, you meet the new singer?”
Despite having just performed in front of thousands of people, my entire face heats. Perhaps because I’m so tired,and I know I’m not going to be my most winning self. Or maybe it’s because after seeing Halloran perform, I’m intimidated by him. Either way, I can feel a sticky, warm flush work its way down my neck. I try to swallow and somehow fail, resulting in a cough.
“Clementine,” Conor says, turning me by the shoulder. “This is Halloran.”
