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The Folded Song
The red lamp went out, and Rosanna kept her hand on the neck of the guitar until the reel stopped turning. Beyond the glass, Joe bent over the desk. He listened to the end of the take once more, then pressed the talkback.
‘I brought the keyboard in too early beneath the second verse,’ he said. ‘My fault. We’ll do it again.’
Tony rested his bass against his leg. Sergio turned on the piano stool to look through the glass. Rosanna had thought the same thing, although she had been too concerned with getting the last words of the verse right to say so. Joe was already writing in the notebook beside the tape machine. His pencil travelled across the page in a few quick movements.
The cellar of the Podere della Cantina Vecchia had been a recording studio since late spring. They had begun work on What Never Spoke, the song Rosanna had first played for the others the previous December. By September, she no longer noticed the stone walls each time she came down the stairs. She knew where to stand for the microphone, which floorboard made a sound beneath her shoe, and how long Joe needed to rewind a reel when he wanted to hear a particular bar. It was the notebook that still made her feel new.
‘What did you write?’ she asked over the talkback.
Joe glanced down. ‘The new entrance.’
‘You wrote the whole thing?’
‘The part that changes.’ He looked up. ‘Come and see.’
She set the guitar on its stand and crossed to the control room. Joe moved aside so she could look at the page. There were letters and numbers, but most of the passage looked as though he had written it while trying to save paper: angled strokes, hooks, small marks above other marks. One line was so compressed that she could scarcely tell where one bar ended and the next began.
‘That took you about three seconds,’ she said.
‘A little longer.’
‘Can you actually read it back?’
Joe put the pencil in her hand. ‘Would you like to learn?’
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