Songs in Ursa Major

by Emma Brodie

“Viper twisted in your nest, Wearing wallets for your skin, Apple green as original sin, How much like a girl you are, Lounging breezy in your denim, Killing love with words of venom.”

tinctures,

moxie.

“She goes down easy after it’s done, Gale force winds and blistering sun, She starts at a hundred, ends back at one, A lightning storm at the touch of a thumb. Shock comes quick, a wave in the dark, This will make it better, this little spark.”

disturbed. This was something that would have happened to her mother. Jane had given the song to her band in an attempt to dispel its effect on her, and this had mostly worked; still, she had refused to write lyrics ever since.

“Oh, I know shadow follows light, I know clouds are only water in the sky, I know everybody has to say goodbye, I just didn’t know this was your time.”

Willy shook his head. “I don’t know what’s happening,” he said. “I’ve never seen him act like this.” “I’ll tell you what’s happening,” said Rich, his voice shaking with anger. “Jane’s a girl, so he’s treating us like we’re a joke.” Willy blanched, but Jane nodded. “Yes,” she said. “That is exactly it.”

He put Beggars Banquet by the Stones on the turntable and turned up the volume until the opening rhythm of “Sympathy for the Devil” bounced off the tall windows. As Alex began to adjust the lighting equipment, he heard Jane Quinn harmonizing with Mick Jagger under her breath. Alex felt a chill; she definitely had the careless talent of a rock star.

no matter how Jane tried to convince herself she was fine, part of her knew she wasn’t. The album might have been something. Jesse might have been something. Was she so afraid of losing control that she’d sabotaged both?

it struck Jane that over time Rich’s words had come to resemble her more than Maggie. “Oh, living in your bubble, You think that I am fine, But darling I am trouble, My code’s hard to define, And I am never going To put it all on the line, For you or anyone…so, Run. Run.”

inscrutable

Everyone in music was male—from the booking agents, sound directors, and lighting technicians to the record execs, journalists, and photographers. Outside the protection of Bayleen Island and her tribe of Quinns, Jane had been disturbed to discover that many men initially reacted to her with condescension, skepticism, or dismissiveness. She stepped onto the bus without Archie’s realizing she’d left the conversation.

In a soft, gentle voice he sang: “Let the light go, Let it fade into the sea. The sun belongs to the horizon, And you belong to me.” Jane got very still. “That’s pretty,” she said quietly. “It’s yours,” said Jesse. “Mine?” said Jane. “I mean, I wrote it for you,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Listen, Jane. A lot can…go wrong. But whatever happens, between us, whatever…happens…that song will always be for you.” For a moment, Jane was quiet. Then she said, “Is there more?” She smiled in the dark.

Willy had been touring every year since he’d turned twenty-two, and if there was one thing he’d learned, it was that success split people apart and failure brought them together. The Breakers wanted so badly to impress Jesse’s band that they were repelling them. Willy wasn’t worried. Sooner or later, something would go so wrong that they’d have no choice but to bond.

Jesse seemed peaceful. Jane was alert. On Sunday, the Painted Lady bus headed back down the coast to San Francisco, the radio tuned to Casey Kasem’s new program, American Top 40. The group had their first surprise at number thirty-eight, when “Spring Fling” came on the air. As the opening notes of the intro twanged, Jane’s eyes widened. The whole bus began to shout.

catatonia.

“What would I do if you were violet and not blue? If I let my colors show, could we both be indigo?”

“Jane, we can’t pick and choose who we are,” said Elsie. “The best chance any of us has is to embrace the whole picture and try to make some sense of it. If you cut yourself off from your mother’s bad traits, you will cut yourself off from her good ones as well. You can’t tear a light from its darkness.”

“Don’t run from your pain. Put it to work for you,” said Elsie. “This struggle—to be able to struggle—is a gift your mother never had. The question is, what will you make of it?”

There were seven among them, new songs clustered together in a dense mass of sound and light. Jane’s sense of abandonment had cracked her album wide open, and the tracks she had been gently easing into existence were now bursting forth all at once. She didn’t have time to indulge in self-pity or self-doubt. There was peril in this cacophony; if she didn’t get this music out of her body, it would devour her. Her urgency gave her focus.

Elsie had been right: by freeing the words inside of her, Jane had been granted access to a deeper kind of music, the core sounds and themes that emanated like a wellspring from the bedrock of her being. As she played and wrote and played and wrote, she had the sense of raising a sunken ship from the ocean’s floor.

Rich shook his head. “Don’t get me wrong, Jane,” he said. “There are aspects of it that are brilliant. But…sometimes you sound like you’re in agony. It’s too much. You should keep some things to yourself.”

Jane had expressed the need for total privacy, and from those first basic tracks, the sessions had been locked. Simon understood why. She was like an artist creating a self-portrait in the nude: each day, she came into the studio and stripped down all of her defenses until her emotions were bare. Then they began to record.

intransigent

Even when they didn’t have to be there, Huck, Rich, and Kyle would sit in the booth with Simon, keeping vigil, as Jane crossed into another realm, retrieving melodies, and transporting them back to earth. In these moments, it was as though her spirit expanded to fill the whole room, stretching beyond the limits of her own consciousness. And yet, if you were to speak to Jane between takes, she was as lucid and focused as she had been standing over Huck with the güiro. The part of her that was creating the album and the part of her that was producing it coexisted within her like two sides of the same coin, spinning endlessly around and around but never meeting.

ingenue

“Now’s the time to be alive, they say, Their tones as sharp as knives, When, hidden in your crescent, You’re just trying to survive.”

troubadour.

as Tommy Patton flashed her an artless grin, doubt began to roll around inside her like a pinball. Charlotte’s mental state had been deteriorating toward the end—was it possible she’d made the whole thing up?