Different Circles

It was Matt Tisdale. He was standing there and watching Jake’s performance.

While the crowd cheered the ending of Highway, Natalie made her first appearance on the stage, trotting out and taking her position just in front of the drum set. One of the crew came out and plugged her output cable into the box strapped to her waist. The box picked up the output from the microphone on the bridge of her violin. Meanwhile, another crew member came out to Jake’s position, carrying his Fender acoustic-electric in his hands. Jake turned the volume button on the Les Paul all the way down to nothing, unplugged the guitar cord, and unslung the instrument from around his shoulder. He handed the Les Paul to the crew member and took the Fender in its place. He slung the new guitar over his shoulder and plugged into it before twisting its volume button all the way up. As the crew member retreated backstage, Jake stepped forward to his microphone.

“How’s everyone doing out there in the desert tonight?” he asked the crowd. They roared back at him in a manner that suggested they were doing pretty good. “God damn, there’s a lot of you out there! I hope those of you in the back can see the show. Anyway, we’re really happy to be up here in front of you all to play our set. I hope you’re enjoying it so far.” Another roar of approval indicated they were, in fact, enjoying it so far. “We’re going to do a song now from my second solo CD, a little more mellow of a piece, called The Life I Lead.”

The crowd roared again—the song was the biggest hit from the second CD—and Jake began to play out the melody on the acoustic, strumming in the key of G major while Natalie provided backing melody with the violin and G added some gentle fills with the piano. It was a song about traveling through life, dealing with the bad times and enjoying the good times, about navigating around pitfalls when you could and driving straight through them when you couldn’t. Like Down, it was a piece that changed tempo throughout, slower on the verses, faster and with more distorted electric guitar during the choruses and the bridge. There was no solo of any kind in the song, just a brief instrumental portion between the bridge and the final chorus. They played it almost exactly like the studio version, only extending the outro for another twenty seconds or so and then transitioning that into a finale that ended with an drawn out note of the violin being allowed to finally fade.

The applause washed over them once again. Jake thanked the crowd for it, flipped his guitar pick into the seats, and then resettled his guitar and pulled out another pick while everyone except Natalie, Phil, Pauline, and himself left the stage. Jake was feeling very good, very confident now, knowing that he was doing his job and entertaining people. He could feel the energy and love from the audience surging through his soul. It was a very good feeling, right up there, as he had told Pauline earlier, with sex (but not quite better). He strummed a few open chords on the guitar and then grabbed a G chord and began to play the primary melody for Insignificance, his biggest hit as a solo artist. The crowd erupted once again as they heard it. They then settled in to watch, listen, and sing along as Jake waxed musical poetry about the essential meaninglessness of life. The song featured only the guitar and the violin for instruments. Natalie stood next to him as he played, her bow moving up and down and creating the sweet, melancholy accompaniment to the guitar melody. Phil and Pauline added their voices to the choruses, just as they had in the original studio version.

When they got to the violin solo, Natalie stepped forward to the edge of the stage and Jake stepped back, giving her the spotlight. The solo had been originally composed by Mary Kingsley, Jake’s mother (the first solo she had ever composed), and Natalie did it justice, reproducing it perfectly with only minor variations that could be attributed to individual phrasing. The crowd cheered her as the solo wrapped up and the two of them had to go through one full rep of the primary melody before Jake could start singing the final verse or they would not have been able to hear him. He sang out the verse and the final chorus and then he and Natalie played out the outro together, ending the song after Jake gave her his cue by adding a small flourish as he approached the end of the final repetition.

“Thank you!” Jake said. “We got Natalie Popanova on the violin! Let’s hear it for her!”

Another enthusiastic cheer erupted. Natalie smiled at the crowd and gave a nod of acknowledgment before stepping backwards and resuming her normal positioning. Once she was there, G, Ben, Ted, and Lenny all came back out, Lenny now holding his drop-D tuned Brogan. The crew member in charge of Jake’s guitars came out as well, letting Jake switch from the acoustic-electric to the sunburst Les Paul, which was also in drop-D tuning.