Loud is How I Love You Read Online Free Page A

bass in rural New Jersey. (Yes, rural. There’s a non-ironic reason it’s called the Garden State.) You run out of options very fast, is what I’m saying. Hell, there really aren’t “options” at all. I ended up playing with Matilda the timpani player and Betina the first chair from orchestra because I convinced them boys would pay attention to them if they were in my band. And they did, but our songs were weak, and while Tilda could keep time, she didn’t hit hard enough. Betina wouldn’t even play with a pick! Popsick was a true creative labor of love, a stiff learning curve, if you will. There were no unicorns, that’s for sure.
    When we all graduated and left for college, I was determined to start a
real
band. One that would play in clubs, not living rooms and backyards. One that would even play CBGB in the city one day, and with Stars on the Floor I’ve done it several times, too. One of the crowning achievements of my career so far.
    I started Soft with Joey and Cole because I’ve known the two of them forever. Joey’s mom and my mom grew up across the street from each other in Lodi, and I seriously thought Joey was my second cousin until maybe a year or so ago. Cole is from Joey’s neighborhood, and the two of them have been best friends for as long as any of us can remember. Over the years, whenever Mom and I visited or they came down to Flemington to hang out, we would jam. So when Joey and I ended up at Rutgers together, Cole moved to New Brunswick and got a job washing pots at Old Man Rafferty’s so we could start a real band.
    We started up freshman year, and right away we pulled our sound together and wrote a ton of cool songs and started playing parties left and right as a three-piece. We wanted another guitarist to fill the sound out, and when Travis joined it was exactly what we were all hoping it would be. Not just because it sounded better (and wow, adding Travis’s Les Paul was a dose of magic for us), but because we all got along really well, and that’s even harder to find. It’s seriously like four people in one marriage, it’s so much like a family sometimes. There’s tons of quirk and eccentricity and hang-ups that have to be negotiated when you’re working so closely like that with other people. But we luck out because we all share the same sense of humor, the same taste in fast food, the same zealous thirst for rock, and it works. We work.
    But something else happens when you spend all this time with the same three guys working on music. Something important.
    For example, when Cole’s last girlfriend dumped him, Joey, Travis, and I sat up all night and watched infomercials with him and we wouldn’t let him be by himself for a week until we were fairly certain he could feed and dress himself without incident. When Joey’s dad announced he was leaving his mother for his twenty-three-year-old secretary last summer, we all went over to see him at Mama Santi’s in Lodi and got drunk on red wine and ate homemade ravioli and meatballs and cannolis and listened to her cry and curse him out all night. Joey even wrote a song about it that we still have in the set today,“Carmen Alfredo.” When Travis’s dad had a major scare last year with his heart and Travis didn’t have enough money to fly home, we gave him everything we had in the band till to get him on a plane. I called him in Omaha every day, too. Actually, I call him every day anyway. There’s always some band business that needs to get dealt with, and if the band is a family, Travis and I are basically the parents.
    When my last boyfriend, Josh the Michael Bolton fan (I know, I know), broke up with me my freshman year and I went all fetal position in my dorm room, those guys saved me, they really did. The first night when I was such a mess, they all slept on the floor of my dorm room. Two nights later when I hadn’t eaten anything but three bowls of Cheerios in two days, Joey called my mom and she came and surprised me