Featured extract
Don't Call Me Rosie
One morning she set the guitar aside and said, almost casually, ‘I’d like to sing a song in French.’
Phil looked up. ‘All right.’
She smiled faintly. ‘Don’t look so alarmed.’
Then she leaned into the microphone and sang, Il y avait des mots que je n’entendais pas…
Her voice changed without quite changing. It was still Rosanna, but more interior, more self-contained. By the time she reached Entre les lignes, entre les heures… Phil had already decided that the arrangement would need restraint.
‘No one gets to overplay on that one,’ he said.
Rosanna nodded. ‘Exactly.’
At the other end of the scale, Still Standing Here arrived with a riff before it had a complete shape. Rosanna took up the electric guitar, struck the opening figure, and the room changed around it. The drums came later, hard and live. She sang, I’m still standing here / Through the break, through the fall, through the years… and when Phil listened back, he said only, ‘That one has to sound like control, not fury.’
Rosanna gave him a quick look of approval.
‘Yes.’
Then there were the stranger turns.
One afternoon she walked in carrying a bouzouki case.
Phil stared. ‘What on earth is that?’
Rosanna set it down carefully and opened it with obvious pleasure. ‘A very good idea. I bought it in Greece. And don’t make that face — I can play it.’
‘Can you?’
She picked out a bright, metallic phrase in answer, then let it run into the opening of Where the Light Stayed.
There was a shore that held the morning
Before the day had found its heat…
The instrument sat beneath the song like sunlight on stone. Later, when they reached the middle section, she played longer and with more confidence, the bouzouki carrying the tune while acoustic guitar and mandolin moved around it. Phil listened from the desk, smiling despite himself.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I withdraw the question.’
Read the full passage →