The Weeks Between • HS

Week 17 • Harry

We've been in the studio for a week now. The first few days here were really about getting organized and pulling notes and coming back together to connect about life and about everything that's been happening. Doing this in the middle of a pandemic made it feel even more incredible to sit in the same actual room as these people while catching up.

It wasn't until the end of our second day here that we really started to work on new stuff, having tweaked Boyfriends as far as we wanted to at the time. I don't know if you could even really call it work, though. Maybe a better way to say it is that we started to create new music. This has always been my favorite part of the process of writing music; the moment of birthing a new song.

"I have these notes about a song I want to start..." I say, as I flip through my well-used notebook.

"H, you've already sent us voice notes on like five songs. Should be work on one of those first?" Mitch asks and I roll my eyes at him because I know exactly what he's doing. All of those songs are about Nola and Tom and Tyler don't know her as well as Mitch does, for obvious reasons.

"I started this one last night, and I really want to run with it," I tell them and I grab my guitar and start messily playing though the lines I have down.

Six hours later, we have a working chorus, a bridge and the verses are getting there, but it needs a little more work and it's become painfully obvious that we are all stuck. Let's take a break. I'm starving," Tyler says and I agree that leaving the room for a bit would be good for everyone.

As we drive to the restaurant, I try to focus on anything but the song we were just working on, but I can't. Then, out of nowhere, Tom sings a line and I open my voice notes. "Do that again. That's fucking perfect," I tell him recording it for later. He sings "Won't let go, won't let you go. Won't let go, won't let you go. Won't let go, won't let go." I sing the main chorus against it and it fits perfectly, plus the words are exactly what I was trying to find.

We sit down at a patio table outside the restaurant. "This girl really has you by the dick, doesn't she?" Tom says and Mitch starts laughing.

"She owns every body part," Mitch replies for me and I nod.

"I can't even argue that," I say, shoving a chip smothered in guacamole into my mouth. "We will be writing quite a bit about her over the next few weeks."

"When you told me you were seeing someone, I assumed we would get some new music, but this shit it deep, H," Tyler says. Tyler and I have talked the least about Nola, so I fill him in on what I've already filled Tom and Mitch in on. By the time we finish our food, and we are on our second round of margarita's, Tyler says, "I've never seen you like this."

"Me either," Tom adds.

"To neighbor Nola," Mitch says, holding up his margarita glass.

"Neighbor Nola," we all cheer before finishing the beverages and heading back to work more on Something I've Been Waiting For.

•••••

"I need to take this," I tell Tom and Tyler, turning the screen around do they can see the girls picture. As promised, I continue to read to them every night that I've been gone, except for a two nights when I couldn't. We are nearing the end of the Frog and Toad book that we started, so I don't know what's going to happen when we're done with it, but we have three chapters to figure it out.