Start Anew – Wayne 39

[For back story go here: Story so far at 30 Nov 2020 and this one.]

[Other back story through in-links.]

“What?” said Jezzy. “What the actual..? How many parts are there to this song? It’s like it just goes round in circles and changes and then when I think it’s done you’ve gone and come back to the first bit again.”

“Just fooling around,” said Wayne over the video call. “I want to experiment with structure a bit. Find out what we can do with it and how far we can push it. Like before it’s almost not a tune.”

“Believe me, boy, this ain’t no tune no more.”

Jezzy had started the ball rolling creatively by sharing a couple pretty interesting tracks and beats from his back catalogue. These had been rolling around his music hardware fore a few weeks, one of them he thought would be BarnStormerz-worthy but then with everything that had happened he’d entirely forgotten about it until Wayne asked him if he had anything in particular he thought they could work on. This came after Wayne had tried to get the ball with a looped guitar track but that had been far too far from Jezzy’s terms of reference to get any traction at all.

“Sorry mate,” Jezzy had said, “I can’t even comprehend, like, the sound you know?”

With a basic fifty-fifty split agreement in place the two musicians were now regularly collaborating and it was giving Wayne a rewarding and much needed distraction from the outside dismal world. It also gave him something he could be positive at Dave with since the latest lockdown and restrictions and nearly entirely taken the wind out of the chef’s sails. Previously Dave would use this time to experiment with different food items, but this time round Wayne was aware that there was a worrying amount of frozen goods clogging up the freezer.

“I’m just tired,” said Dave with a sigh. “Tired of everything.”

Wayne said he understood and wondered whether the Iceland-ordered steak pies could be spiced up with an interesting sauce which included pomegranates, but Dave refused to take the bait.

For now Wayne flicked his mouse across the screen and deleted a few loops and half a chorus.

“Wait a sec’,” he said to Jezzy. “I’m gonna make this more simple.”

“It ain’t simplicity,” said Jezzy. “We just want something that just doesn’t lose people before the big finish.”

Neither musician had any true idea of where this particular project would end up. For now the intention was purely to make music, to fill in the time that might otherwise not be filled in. Jezzy was finding it hard to just think some days and Wayne, while other options cruised in and out of his life, really wanted something that he had started and was about him. As Dave had pointed out, this was’t anyone else’s agenda, this wasn’t any formal response to anyone, it just literally felt like it could be a good idea at the time.

No one had spoken of the tabloid coverage for days now. Maybe it was just water under the bridge. Certainly this new lockdown - which somehow seemed to need to get tighter and tighter - was leaving no space for anything else to be thought about. In all aspects of life Wayne suspected things were escaping or just being left alone so they disappeared.

The tune was both complex and needed to be simple. Everything was complex but the act of staying in and doing nothing, of not seeing people and not moving conversations forward was simple.

“What’s this gonna be about then man?” asked Jezzy.

“Anything you like.”

“All I can think of is the plague.”

“OK, lemme send you something...”

Wayne flicked across to his email and for fun grabbed a recipe for apple crumble which Dave had sent him a while ago. A swift cut and paste and he sent it across to Jezzy. He was just about to head back to the music programme when an email in his in-tray caught us eye. 

“What is this man?”asked Jezzy staring at the email on his phone. “You want me to do this?”

“Yeah,” said Wayne, distractedly, “Whatever, however you can do it would, be, great...”

‘Whatever you say man. But this is just a test lyric right?”

“Right...” said Wayne.

And he waited for a full minute before checking over his shoulder that Dave wasn't looking at him. And then he clicked on the email, the email that said it came from Cassie and read ‘Please forgive me’.

As he read he heard Jezzy’s voice lilting over the video channel:

You gotta get the ingredients together

Find the flour, the sugar - never, ever

Let the butter be old or be cold

You make the breadcrumbs you make gold...