Page 53 of Best Friend Burden

Our resident drummer, Tommy Washington, was already at the kit when Natasha and I took our places. With our monitors in place in our ears, we were ready to go. Ernie counted us in and we began playing.

The chart for this tune was simple — a standard G - C - D pop song that added an E minor during the bridge. The hardest part was just not losing your place. It could get repetitive after a while.

I flipped my brain off, as best I could, and did as Natasha had told me before: just feel the music. With the song in my head (it wasverycatchy), I didn't need to look at any of the notes and could outline the chords on my bass.

After about thirty seconds, Ernie cut us off.

“Tommy,” he said. “Lay it back a little behind the beat for me, can you?”

“Not a problem.”

“And Kiefer,” he said. “Chill out.”

“Pardon?” I asked.

“You're going to drown out the vocals,” he said. “Fewer notes. Let the space between them be the music.”

I had committed the cardinal sin of musicianship — letting technical ability get in the way of musicality.

The fact of the matter was there was a reason clichés were clichés. It was because they worked. And while I could bounce off the wall, sending a million notes into a given measure — often just a few well-placed notes would be more powerful.

And so, rather than reinvent the wheel, I played what Ernie expected. A standard bass rhythm to go over Tommy's typical soft rock beat.

“That was perfect,” Ernie said at the end of the sixth take.

Yeah, I thought,but was it any good?

* * *

Jackson came by at the end of the day, and Natasha was going to stay late again, so we did the same thing we did the previous time: we got dinner.

“What do you think?” Jackson said as we walked outside. “Same place as before?”

I grimaced at the thought. Melody had just left the day before and I wasn't ready to relive memories of her.

“I guess not,” Jackson said.

“There's an Indian place up the block,” I said. “I'd rather go there.”

As we made our way there, I told him what had happened and finished by the time we were seated in our booth.

“And she just left?” Jackson asked.

I nodded. “Maybe she’ll be there when I get back home, but I doubt it.”

Jackson considered the thought. “I'm gonna be honest with you, bro,” he said. “I've never been on your end of things.”

There was a slight smirk as he said it, almost like a sense of pride.

Yeah, Jackson, we get it. Nobody’s ever broken up with you.

Fine, I'd let him have it.

“It's not the end of the world, you know,” Jackson said.

"That's easy for you to say,” I told him. Being an optimist was simple when everything in life was going your way. From what I could tell, he and Natasha were still happily together. She never came into work upset, and they always seemed happy to see each other at the end of the day.

“Yeah, well, it's true,” he said. “There are eight billion people on this planet. She's one.”

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