Page 57 of Best Friend Burden

I cut her off. “Natasha, just let the song speak for itself.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay.” And then she pressed play.

I closed my eyes so I could focus.

I could tell what she meant about the roughness of the cut. The vocals were recorded through a laptop's built-in microphone and so came across as sounding somewhat tinny. The instrumentation was slightly cheesy and lifeless, owing more to the samples included in the software she was using than any particular choices she was making.

But none of that could disguise the soul of the song, which was pure and came straight from the heart.

One thing about songwriting that almost nobody ever tells you is that most of the best songs were thrown together quickly. You can't force a masterpiece — you just need to be there when it comes to you. And trying to force genius out of an uninspired idea almost never happened.

It may have helped that I knew Natasha and understood where the song was coming from. The opening verses were soft and delicate, almost meek, as she spoke of a “silken love,” but when she fell into the chorus, her voice pushed itself into its upper registers and was in danger of breaking; that’s when the song moved from touching to outright devastating as she sang of the “uncertainty of a new beau” who could “turn into my true foe.”

The bridge, often a weak point for even the best songwriters, added a flavor of optimism to the song that was clearly about the fear of heartbreak and the uncertainty of a new relationship, ending with a line that hit me harder than I expected:

Don't make me love you

And pretend

If, in a week or two,

It's 'let's be friends’

After which, it returned to that chorus and faded out.

I opened my eyes and saw her eager face and quivering hands. I wanted to answer her, but my mind was processing, and I wondered if it was just because I was in an emotionally difficult place that the song hit me so hard. This was the kind of thing I could see myself listening to on repeat back when I was in my emo phase, but that was nearly fifteen years ago. Songs didn't hit me the same way anymore because they all felt so mechanical.

And while I could appreciate the mechanics of the song — particularly her use of unusual chord choices taken from a jazz vocabulary — it hit me right in the gut in a way that mere chord changes or note choices couldn't explain.

As such, I nodded. “It's really good.”

“Really? You’re not just saying that?”

This was the problem with dishonesty in the music business. When you’re genuinely blown away by something, nobody knows whether to believe you or if you’re just being polite.

“Seriously,” I said. “Reallygood.”

“You mean that?” she asked. “Because I’m thinking of letting Ernie listen.”

“No!” I said, so quickly that I almost startled myself.

“Oh,” she said, looking defeated.

“Not because it’s bad,” I said, “but because it’s good. You give this to Ernie, and he’s going to make it sound like Taylor Swift.”

“I like Taylor Swift…” she said.

“So do I, but was that what you were going for?” I asked. “Musically, I mean?”

“No,” she said. “I was thinking more like Queen by way of Billie Holiday.”

“Yeah, and I heard some Radiohead and Hendrix in there too.”

She blushed. “Maybe a little.”

“The first thing Ernie’ll do is take all of that out in an effort to make it a single. And then it’s going to sound exactly like every other song out there that’s trying to be a single.”

If she wanted her original vision, she could have shown up at the studio a couple years ago, but Ernie had become more cynical since then. It's hard to come up with something genuinely new that doesn't scare away new listeners, but it's what all the great artists have managed to do. You can get a good single out doing an imitation of someone else, but to have real staying power? You need to have a truly original voice.

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