Rocking the Pink (18 page)

Steve said he could produce and record the album at his studio, including enlisting all the studio musicians I would need. But, of course, all of this was going to be expensive—akin to buying an economy car.

Small price to pay,
I thought.

When I got home and told Brad about it, he said it sounded really exciting. But when I mentioned the price tag, he laughed out loud and said it was out of the question.

“But, honey, Steve says my songs are really good,” I argued.

“Of course he does, babe—it's like the Barbizon School of Modeling: Anyone at all can go in there and be told, ‘Oh, yes, you should be a model,' as long as they pay the modeling-school fee. That guy would tell anyone with enough cash that their songs are good.”

I was speechless. And deflated.
My songs
are
good,
I said to myself. But, it seemed, that was that. This wasn't the kind of purchase I could make without Brad's consent, just as I wouldn't expect him to go out and buy a car (or a puppy, for that matter) without consulting me.

No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn't let it go. My determination only escalated with each passing day.

The next week, Brad and I were preparing for an upcoming family ski trip to Utah for Presidents' Day 2008. As we packed, I could barely think about what gear the girls would need for the slopes; my thoughts kept drifting to the album I was increasingly desperate to make.

“Brad, can I get a new car?” I asked, as he stuffed ski pants and goggles into a duffel bag. For quite some time, he had been suggesting that I drive something more fun than my minivan.

“Yes, absolutely,” he answered.

“Thanks, but I'd rather have an album.”

Brad rolled his eyes. I had tricked him. “Honey, why are you so focused on this? Why can't you just record some more demos with Matt now and again, whenever he's back from tour? Why do you have to go so . . .
big
with this?”

I surprised myself by starting to cry. “I don't know,” I answered honestly. “I just feel this life-or-death urgency about it. Like, I
have
to do this
right now.”
I was sobbing now. “I don't want to die without doing this, babe. I don't want to lie on my deathbed and realize my kids don't know who their mommy is!” I was a blubbering mess.

Brad was confused by my sudden outpouring of fierce emotion. “Okay, honey, but why do you have to produce the album at such a professional level? If it's just a vanity project, just a legacy to leave to the girls, then you don't need anything more than demo quality.”

I was so frustrated! I could barely speak. “It has to be the absolute best quality I can manage. It can't be demo quality. I can't explain why. I don't know why.”

Brad wasn't on board. And I was incapable of explaining this ferocious need I felt all the way down in my bone marrow. We were at an impasse.

The next morning, we piled into the car for our nine-hour road trip to Utah. While the girls happily watched
Shrek
on a portable DVD player in the back seat, Brad and I reveled in spending hours
of unfettered time together. Between the girls, work, and the daily goings-on of our busy life, we hadn't spent this much undistracted time together in as long as I could remember.

We listened to music for a while, watching the desert landscape whiz by. The girls had fallen asleep in the back seat.

“Sing me your songs,” Brad suggested.

I was overjoyed. Up until that moment, he had caught only snippets of the songs in my “collection”; he had never heard each one from beginning to end.

I sang my heart out for Brad, and then explained in excited detail the way I envisioned arranging each song.

“On this one,” I told him, “I want the bridge to come way down, sort of like this song,” and then I played a John Mayer song on my iPod. “And on this one, I want the feel to sound something like this,” and then I played him an Alanis Morissette song. As I shared these thoughts and feelings with Brad, relief and joy spread through my body. Now he could hear what had been plaguing me for so long. Now he could finally understand.

Brad seemed stunned. “Wow, those are really, really good, honey. I had no idea.”

I beamed at him. “You think so?”

“I do. Maybe I should at least talk to this Steve guy when we get home.”

I nodded. That sounded like a plan. In truth, I thought my heart would leap out of my chest like that squid monster in
Alien,
I was so overjoyed at this concession. But for the time being, I tried to push the album out of my mind and focus on our family vacation.

It wasn't hard to do: The girls were endlessly entertaining on the slopes. Sophie snowplowed down the mountain methodically and cautiously, while Chloe careened down like Evel Knievel, oftentimes duplicating the “agony of defeat” fall from ABC's
Wide World of Sports.

At the end of the week, as we made the long drive home from Utah, I looked over at Brad. He seemed in high spirits, despite having just received a speeding ticket from a pleasant policeman named Officer Malcolm. My heart bubbled over with love for my husband. I turned around to peek at the girls, sleeping sweetly in the back seat, and thought how young and innocent they were. They had so much life ahead of them, and they knew so little about the important things. I was overcome by an all-encompassing love for my family.

In a flash, my thoughts turned to worry.
What if my girls had to grow up without me?
I thought, shuddering.
What if I had only five minutes left in this world to tell them everything they'd need to know to grow up right?
I searched the car frenetically for a scrap of paper. And within twenty minutes, I had scratched out all the words and melody for a song called “Little Daughter.”

When I had finished writing, I turned to Brad. “Listen to this new song, honey.”

Tears sprang into Brad's eyes from the first moment I began singing, and they kept coming until the last line of the song. When I had finished, he wiped away the tears and cleared his throat. “Babe, that is beautiful,” he said softly. And then, to my amazement, he added three little words that sent an electric current shooting through my veins: “Let's do it.”

When we got home from our family ski vacation, Brad and I visited Steve, the producer I'd been lobbying to hire, at his impressive studio. An hour later, as Brad and I settled back into our car, he conceded, “It's not the Barbizon School of Modeling after all.”

A few weeks later, I was happily embroiled in the time-consuming (but thoroughly enjoyable) task of recording a full-length album. Up until then, I had thought a song was recorded when a band of musicians simultaneously played their instruments, all together, in a studio. As I found out through working with Steve, however, although that may have been how records were created in the “olden days,” it was not how modern records were usually recorded.

In the modern era of music production, a song is typically constructed methodically, one track at a time. In the case of my songs, we recorded my “scratch” vocals (a rough draft of my vocals,
to be rerecorded later) accompanied by an acoustic guitar played to a “click” (a computerized beat, erased later, that ensures the tempo of the song stayed steady throughout). Next, using the scratch vocal–acoustic guitar track as a blueprint, musicians recorded a rhythm bed—rhythm guitar, bass, and drums—that formed the foundational structure, the “bones,” of each song. Only when we had recorded the rhythm tracks for all twelve songs on the album did we begin to add the instruments that would give each song flesh for the bones. Over the next several weeks, a steady stream of professional musicians came in to add lead guitar, banjo, mandolin, violin/fiddle, keys, and percussion. Even Matthew came to the studio to record guitar on several tracks.

Throughout almost all of the recording process, Brad sat in the studio with me, soaking it all in and grinning from ear to ear. On many days, Dad showed up, too, equally excited to watch the songs come to life.

Many years earlier, when I was seven months pregnant with Sophie, Dad had hired me as his lawyer in a business dispute. It was a small case, but Dad had wanted to fight it on principle. And anyway, it was a chance for him to hire his pregnant attorney daughter. And that was a hoot.

I called the opposing attorney, an old-school guy who thought attorneys had to yell to make a point, and suggested we meet in person to settle the case. The attorney's tone was instantly belligerent as he doggedly demanded that Dad and I drive to his Los Angeles office for any such meeting.

“We're gonna do this my way,” he blustered.

“I'm seven months pregnant,” I replied evenly. “I can't sit comfortably in the car for a two-hour drive.”

What could he say to that? A few days later, in my San Diego office, Dad and I sat, composed, at one end of a marble conference table while the opposing attorney and his equally cranky client sat, red-faced and agitated, on the other end. Their arms were crossed.

At my opening settlement offer, the other client banged his fist on the table and shouted that we were wasting his time.

With the faintest suggestion of a swoon, I held one hand up in the air and my other hand on my swollen belly. “I simply cannot be subjected to this vitriol,” I declared delicately. And to the attorney, I said, “We'll step outside while you get your client under control.” With that, I marched out of the conference room belly first, with Dad trailing dutifully behind me.

After Dad and I had made our way down the hall, into another room, and had safely closed the door, we dissolved into laughter.

“This is so much fun,” Dad said, and hugged me.

And now, sitting in Steve's studio, soaking up every moment of this wild ride, Dad's elated face made it clear: He was just as proud of his singer-songwriter-dream-chasing-sword-swallowing daughter as, if not more so than, he'd ever been of his fast-talking-attorney daughter. It was an epiphany for me: Dad didn't care if I was a lawyer, a singer, or the sword-swallowing bearded lady; he just wanted me to find passion and be happy. All those years of trying to garner his approval in a “respected” profession, and—I'll be damned!—he was a card-carrying member of the Laura-the-Dreamer Fan Club. He just . . . loved me.

 

 

Once all the instruments had been recorded, it was time for me to record my vocals. There was a steep learning curve to singing in a studio, as opposed to onstage, I learned, but Steve was very patient with his inexperienced recording artist. When I sang with my live band, my voice competed with so many other sounds that an off note wasn't fatal. But on a studio recording, every nuance and quirk in my voice was laid bare for all to hear. Singing for a recording, I soon figured out, required the utmost subtlety—something that had never been my strong suit.

It was right then in the recording process that a girlfriend of mine emailed me to tell me about a music contest put on by country superstar Kenny Chesney. Chesney was working with radio stations across the country to find the Next Big Star who would open for him at his arena concerts. All a person had to do to enter the contest was submit a recording of his/her original song.

“You should enter one of your songs!” my friend wrote to me.

I decided to submit my song “Mama Needs a Girls' Night Out,” a decidedly country ditty, but we didn't have the background vocals recorded yet. The deadline for submission to the contest was fast approaching, so we had to move fast.

Steve was game, and came up with a great idea for a sing-along feel to the song.

“Can you get a group of your friends here this Saturday to record background vocals?” he asked.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in late April 2008, the Bunco Girls crowded into the recording studio, thrilled to serve as the
(country-flavored) Pips to my Gladys Knight. It was a case of life imitating art, or maybe the other way around. As Steve checked the microphones and set the sound levels, the Girls guzzled champagne, giggling and hooting like bridesmaids at a bachelorette party.

When it was finally time to record their vocals, the Girls snapped pictures of one another and shrieked with glee as they put on their fancy studio earphones. It was like herding cats, they were so amped up.

Finally, the group sang together: “Moms gone wild! Mama needs a girls' night out!” Their faces were a picture of unadulterated joy. As Steve and I watched them from the producer's booth on the other side of the Plexiglas, we couldn't help but laugh out loud.

When Steve turned his head away at one point to adjust a dial, one of the Girls quickly lifted up her shirt and flashed me, causing me to scream in shock and clamp my hand over my mouth.

Steve snapped his head up, not having a clue about what had just happened, and looked around. “What'd I miss?” he wanted to know.

I just shook my head and laughed.

Some of the Bunco Girls could sing pretty well, actually, while others were completely tone deaf. But vocal chops were not necessary to sing along to this particular song. Only exuberant energy and a soul connection to the song were required. And these girls had both, many times over.

Within a couple of days, Steve had expertly integrated the Bunco Girls' voices into the song, and I submitted it to the Kenny Chesney contest. The top four finalists would be chosen after one week of online
voting by the radio station's listeners. For that week, word spread like wildfire among my friends, and their friends, and theirs, that a local mom/attorney had entered this big contest. When I picked the girls up from school, fellow moms shouted to me, “I voted for you!” and flashed me a thumbs up. Every time I checked the radio station's website that week (which probably amounted to over four thousand times), I was clobbering the competition. I couldn't sleep a wink at night from the excitement, and yet I wasn't the least bit tired by day. In fact, I felt thoroughly energized.