The truth was Lindsey hated this music.
Tusk had been his brain child, his experiment testing boundaries as a musician. He felt greater artistic ownership over that album, and he'd certainly taken the fall for it. So here they were, back again, their task to make the real follow-up to Rumors. And it fucking sucked. In only five years, the mainstream sound had changed so rapidly, even the industry itself was changing. And he was left to crank out an album of overproduced electronic pop lacking the intensity of Rumors or the fervency of Tusk. The rawness was gone.
Not to mention he'd been stuck here for months, and the continually grey skies were finally getting to him. Even so, he could appreciate the silence and solitude of this dark castle. LA was great until you actually had to get work done. There were always too many distractions. Especially for their more distractible band members. Of course, the alternate location hadn't stopped Mick from having his fun.
But, more than that, his true frustration came from an absence of inspiration. No matter what he wrote, his songs seemed to float aimlessly, unable to penetrate the surface—in a word, they lacked substance.
If he was honest, their lacking quality hadn't bothered him nearly as much a week earlier. He hadn't been overly proud, but he'd been satisfied. They were recorded, polished, tracked. And then he'd listened to her demos.
The pure emotion and desperate longing in her voice evoked a kindred feeling in his own heart. The sense of an impossible yet eternal return.
He jolted, the sound of shattering glass penetrating his thoughts.
"Stevie?" He called. The house was empty apart from the two of them.
No answer.
"Stevie!" Again, louder.
John had flown back yesterday to spend the holidays with Julie, and Christine had decided to take a much needed break somewhere in the English countryside. While Mick had mentioned a promise to visit the girls for Christmas, his current location was anybody's guess. Lindsey personally hadn't even considered going home to see his mother. Greg and Jeff would be there, and despite missing the sunshine, he wasn't exactly eager to return to his life in California.
He gripped the arms of his chair to stand, when she fluttered into the doorway, ribbons of her pointe shoes woven between her fingers and sheer ballet skirt floating behind her.
"God, Lindsey—what is it?" Her face was absent of any makeup, the bags underneath her reddened eyes on full display.
"Did you drop something?"
"Did I what?"
"Nothing, I just- there was some kind of crashing-" His head swung to the side, his sentence interrupted by the sound itself. Turning back, he found Stevie looking over his head, eyes fastened on a small window. He followed her gaze, but the view was a white blur. He looked away disinterested.
Having assumed he would be alone, he'd been shocked this morning to hear soft footfalls and creaking floorboards from beyond Stevie's door. He'd taken it as a foregone conclusion that she would fly back to Phoenix. In all the years he'd known her, she had never wasted the opportunity to spend the holidays with her parents.
He stared at her, her own eyes still fixed on the frozen grounds.
"-the icicles."
"What?"
"That sound. It was icicles falling."
Oh. He'd already forgotten about the noise.
"So- is that it?" She asked impatiently at his silence.
