luck | harrison osterfield au

20. july

The smell of freshly made coffee and a brand new furniture filled my lungs when I stepped into the dimly lit room. Little lights were blinking at me as I sat down on a red velvet sofa and covered myself with a white blanket. The AC in this room was doing its job too perfectly for my liking. Liv, on the other hand, claimed that it was the perfect temperature for work. Yeah, if you are a member of a polar expedition.

I opened the slightly ruffled notebook from the little table next to the sofa with Liv's name on it. There were many pages filled with lyrics, crossed out words, chord progressions and some little doodles of dogs appeared in the corners of a few pages. I observed one of the pages that was decorated with the latest work in progress. The song only had a few lines and a chorus which was an amazing start. I took out the pen from my own notebook that I brought with myself and wrote a thing or two with it. Then I opened my own notebook and looked into my notes. Some words just made their way onto the paper by themselves and I got a sudden spark of inspiration. I totally missed a simple sit down with only one thing on my mind. Music. Work is so much more fun when you are not burned out.

An unholy sound disturbed my string of thoughts from the table a few meters away from me. "You shouldn't push that button during recording," Harriet adjusted the settings of the mixing table and showed Liv the way she was supposed to do it, "here, then just push this button and you can start recording," she pointed to something I was not able to see from my sitting position. Then she pushed a big red button and said, "Let's try it again, Julie. This time you could sing it with a little more lightness in your voice." Julie, on the other side of the big glass window, nodded and prepared for her lines.

Liv looked so focused on all the aspects of the production of a song that she begged Harriet to show her how to do it. When we still belonged under our old company Harriet wanted to be included in the process of making our tracks as much as she could and got the needed information first hand. I did not remember if they gave the opportunity to learn this skill to any of us beside Harriet or if we were so uninterested that this possibility had not even occurred to us. Nevertheless, Liv never had much spare time with her sport activities and now when all her sports attachments ended she decided to focus on music from a new perspective as well. Needles to say, Harriet was the best teacher a person could ask for. Thanks to her endless patience (that was built after years of constant nagging from mainly Olivia).

Julie was dismissed after few more tries and sang lines (that even rhymed, look at me mom I'm a poet) and sat down next to me. She peeked at my work and I handed her the notebook, "I tried something here, not really sure what, but I like it so far." She looked at it closely.

"Oh, I like it as well. The rhymes are very unusual for your work but they sound amazing," she handed it back to me, "keep up the good work. We can work on something together later, but now I'm famished."

"Food is in the oven," I informed her while she made her way out of the studio.

"I should get something to eat myself and you two could record Kate's part of the song," Harriet suggested after a while and added, "you can do it Livi," after seeing Olivia's perplexed look and left the room.

"Should I get ready, Miss producer?" I asked, leaving the warmth of the blanket behind and making my way into the recording room. Thankfully, this room was much warmer. I put on the headset and looked at the part of the lyrics that was marked as mine.

At first we started with the second verse that was solely sung by me. I was nervous about having my vocals on such a display in our song since I tended to hold back in our previous album. People criticized my singing ability calling me a lousy singer with a poor voice range. It got to me more than I expected and before I knew it I was refusing singing and just settling for background vocals and letting the audience sing for me at live shows. I worked through this issue with my therapist as well and now I wanted to face it.