CODA

Seventeen

Double update! Read 16 if you haven't.

"You girls ready?" Jaydan asks, brushing down some frizz on Olive's head.

"A real interview, for our EP! I can't believe it comes out in a week." Carter nods.

"You girls deserve it. I'm glad to be part of the team that gets to help CODA reach it's highest potential. Go out there and kill it." Jaydan grins, ushering them into the radio room.

"Welcome girls." The host stands, introducing herself as Ray and going over what to expect from the interview. Something that definitely helps calm Carter's nerves. She's a little bit terrified of making a complete fool of herself or the band.  She's already treading lightly on thin ice over a vat of lava with Ava, why make things worse now? Delanee and Olive keep breaking up small argumemts between the two before they can get larger, trying to keep the band in working order until tempers fall, but Carter feels like the pressure is building and she and Ava are more likely to explode than simmer down.

"Alright," She is pulled from her thoughts again as the interview actually starts, the sound of the stations jingle ringing through their headphones before Ray dives right into welcoming them.

"Okay, so CODA, Carter, Olive, Delanee, Ava. A band name that includes a piece of all of you. I love that, but I also hear rumor than CODA is more than just the first letters of all your names. What else is CODA?"

"Us." Delanee grins, this is her favorite question to answer. "We are CODA, the band, the combination of our names, and our identity from the day we were born. Coda is a acronym for Child of a Deaf Adult. Which is what brought us all together in the first place. Carter is an only child, her dad is Deaf, as are my parents. Her dad and my mom are coworkers, and my dad would babysit Carter when we were young. My three brothers are all deaf as well, but my sister is hearing like we are. Olive and Ava grew up near us, and we met them in Kindergarten, the four of us were in a resource class to help with speech, we all had, up to that point, used sign as our first language. Our family and community all used sign and we were struggling with English due to that. So when we formed our band when we were sixteen, we decided it was the right name to use, and then we started working hard to make a difference for our family and community through music."

"Wow, so English is your second language?" Ray asks.

"Sort of." Olive laughs, "We all use sign in daily conversations between ourselves, and with our families, and yes we did use it more in our early years. But we all live in the hearing community too, and especially after leaving Maryland for LA, English is much more our most used language. We are bilingual from birth, so both are our first languages I guess you could say."

"So you said you want to make a difference for your families with music, how is that possible if they can't hear the music?"

"That is what we can help with." Carter chuckles, shaking her head softly, "There are more ways to experience music than just with our ears. As hearing people we forget that we do experience it otherwise too. We can feel it, through the vibrations in the floors, through the sound waves moving through the air. My dad is my biggest fan, our biggest fan. Growing up, when I asked for music lessons, he would sit right beside me as I played my guitar, resting his hands on the amp or the body, depending on which I was playing. He would close his eyes, resting his hands like this" She demonstrates, laying her hands flat, palms down on the table top, "And he would grin, laughing at me when I would do things just so they would change the vibrations he was feeling. He moved my piano from against he wall into the middle of the room just so he could stand behind it and do the same when I played it. He was the first person in the world to experience River of Tears, and he knew without using his ears that it was a sad song, that it was full of pain and heartache. So that is what we want to show, that music is something everyone does enjoy, that even those who can't hear, can hear the music. They have favorite bands, they have favorite songs, and they enjoy attending concerts and events focused on music."