Page 40 of Shame Me
Sure enough, as I finished the second chorus, Zack’s voice flooded my ears. “Stick with the beat, Dani. The time for improvising is past.”
Jeff said something I couldn’t hear and then he and Zack started talking—but, again, I was clueless as to their conversation. So I took off the headphones, set my sticks down, and walked into the control booth. By the time I got there, Zack was shouting while Jeff was customarily silent—and the engineer was tucked into a corner, pretending he wasn’t there.
Zack continued his diatribe, saying, “It would have been fine if she’d done this before we came into the studio. It’s like she’s trying to fucking sabotage this album.”
“I’m not, Zack,” I said, loud enough to make him turn around. “This is your band and I’m honored to be here—but the drumbeats before weren’t mine. They wereyours. And they were good—but this album is going to be the final definitive sound. And I’m sorry, but I want them to bemine.” After a second, I added, “Actually, I’mnotsorry. All of you guys would feel the same way.” Even that wasn’t entirely true. I didn’t know if Braden felt the way I did. I knew he loved playing with the band, but I didn’t know if he felt creatively confined. Unlike Cy and Zack, we didn’t have solos to show off our individual talents.
“You’re missing the fucking point,” Zack said, his green eyes nearly on fire. “For the overdubs, we need you to match what you’ve already played. Why is that so hard to understand?”
I was going to let all his meanness go, knowing that he was struggling emotionally because of his dad, fighting addiction to alcohol, and wanting desperately for this album to be perfect—but I wasn’t about to back down.
Fortunately, Jeff’s experience ensured he was an expert diplomat. “Look—we’re losing time arguing here. Dani, whydon’t you play through all the tracks once however you want to, and then we’ll have you go through them again playing them as close to the original way as you can?”
That seemed reasonable to me, so I agreed. Zack’s mouth was clenched shut but he gave a short nod to Jeff, and I walked out of the booth and back into the live room.
It didn’t take me long to go through all ten songs, adding the creative flourishes I wanted to hear on the final album—but it was difficult going back. Even though I’d played all those songs one way for the first two years I’d spent as a drummer, I was having a hard time reverting. It reminded me of one time when I’d been at my grandma’s and she’d told me about how, as a young girl, she’d learned to type—on a typewriter, not a keyboard. She said that they used to put two spaces after periods and question marks—but that had changed at some point with the internet, and she’d had to learn how to type just one space after a period. “I thought all those decades of doing it one way would have made it hard to do, but it wasn’t hard at all. And now I can’t do it the old way.”
Becoming a real artist instead of a mechanical rigid drummer felt the same way to me. There was no going back.
But I tried. Because Jeff had backed me up and stopped a volatile exchange between me and Zack, I owed it to him. But I also wanted to try for Zack, because I knew how much this meant to him.
My hands and feet—and brain—couldn’t quite settle back into the old groove. And, at one point when I was playing the second song, Zack’s voice exploded in my ears. “Play time is over, Dani. Play it the way it was written.”
“I’m trying.”
“Bullshit. Try harder then.”
Jeff’s voice was much calmer. “What can we do to help you with that, Dani?”
“I don’t know. I promise I’m trying.”
“Okay. Just do your best.”
By the time we moved on to the third song, I noticed how red Zack’s face had become, as if he’d swallowed a Carolina Reaper pepper and was struggling to keep it down. For his sake, I was trying, but it was as if my body refused to go there again. At the end of that song, Zack said, “You’re not taking this seriously” and stormed out of the control booth.
My muscles tensed, expecting him to come into the live room…but he didn’t. I had no idea where he’d gone. When my eyes met Jeff’s, I could see he felt the same way I did: Zack’s emotions weren’t just about this album. There was something deeper troubling him—and I didn’t know that we could help him through that until he was ready.
I just hoped we could get the album finished before he went off the deep end.
Three weeks later,over budget and time, the album was done. Jeff and the label both finally told Zack that it might not be done to the exact way he wanted it to be but it was good—and, more than that, it was past deadline. They promised that, if this album took off, they’d give us more time in the studio for our sophomore album.
For now, though, we had to move on. And we weren’t done with our band obligations. We now had to record a video for the song chosen to be the single off this album.
Once again, we had several fights on our hands. For the single, Zack had wanted the last song on the album, a longer one he called “Absinthe,” to be the one, but the label had said it was “too moody,” “too long for radio play,” and “too depressing.”“It’s not indicative of your band’s overall sound. Remember, we’re trying to cast a wide net—and we can’t with ‘Absinthe’.”
Which meant that “We’re Gonna Rock You” was the natural choice for a single. The label execs said this would tell the public just what kind of band we were, and it displayed our high energy and catchiness. Zack didn’t hate the track, but he didn’t feel like it was the best artistic representation of what we were all about.
“You wanna hook ‘em, kid. Then, once they like what you’re selling, they’ll come back for more. But you gotta hook ‘em first.”
The label also asked us to share our passwords and admin rights to all our social media. We would still be allowed to post if we wanted to like always, but they had a team who would be handling all the marketing and, for that, they needed access.
And they redesigned our logo. It still had the upside downAthat resembled a heart, but it looked way more polished and professional. I liked how they’d updated it, and I appreciated most of what they posted on our social media. On both TikTok and Insta, they had small “Meet the Band” profiles, where each day, a short video with several stills highlighted one of us, giving a short bio in the caption.
The bios, of course, were curated—meaning the marketing team didn’t want to tell the whole truth. They didn’t talk about our families or anything like that. They didn’t even mention Nopal. They just said we were from Colorado, making it seem like we’d lived in Denver our whole lives.
But I kept telling myself these guys were professionals. They knew what they were doing. They’d done it hundreds of times before and knew what worked.
Besides, it kept that work off our plates.
