Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Stacy laughed once to herself and looked at Ronald for a second and said, “Well, I began as an intern while I was at Columbia—”

“Did you work with Dan Freedman there?” Jane asked.

“Which department is he in?”

“Creative.”

“Oh!” Stacy laughed again. “I’m so sorry, I meant Columbia University, not Columbia Records. I interned for a few indie labels when I was a student there. Econ major.”

Jane smiled but didn’t say anything, so Stacy talked about how she’d gotten a job in the industry after she graduated and then became Ronald’s assistant and worked in creative at another label before Ronald poached her.

Ronald grinned with his crooked old-person teeth like he was her father and they were used to joking around. “ Enticed, Stacy, I enticed you back,” he said. “Stacy’s got a gimlet eye for spotting talent and knows how to position artists better than anyone else at the label.” I was trying to figure out if gimlet eye meant the same thing as Jane’s drink, but didn’t want to interrupt Ronald, who added, “The opening group that’s filling in for the rest of the tour, the Latchkeys? Stacy found them.”

“I haven’t had a chance to give them a listen yet,” Jane said.

“They play edgy rock, literate lyrics. The front man, Zack Ford, dresses in a vintage suit,” Stacy said. “Stones meets the early Strokes.”

“Doesn’t seem like a fit with Jonath — Jonny’s sound,” Jane said.

“It isn’t, exactly, but they have a big teen-girl fan base, which loves Zack,” Stacy said. “They’ll catapult off and age up Jonny’s listenership. And they’ll certainly fill more seats in the Midwest than Mi$ter $mith.”

Whenever Jane’s studying the career longevity of pop stars, she’s like, Thank God you’re not black.

Jane sort of cleared her throat and took a sip of her gimlet. Ronald said, “Stacy also helped develop Tyler Beats — though, obviously, not for us,” and Jane looked up and asked, “Really?” and Stacy told her how she saw videos of Tyler singing on YouTube before anyone knew who he was, the same way I was discovered, and she got her label to sign him right away, and Ronald said she was instrumental in packaging him, especially overseas.

So Stacy actually did have a gimlet eye for spotting talent, which was what made her different from the fakes on those reality shows that pick singers who have no originality, and made her really different from the people who watch those shows who have no clue what makes a good singer and vote mostly on personality and song selection. People who don’t have any talent themselves always want to believe they can at least spot good talent, like that’s a talent itself. But they usually can’t except when someone’s a singing and dancing freak, like with MJ. Or Tyler Beats, though maybe it wasn’t so obvious when Stacy signed him. My skills were raw before the label groomed me.

Stacy excused herself to the restroom. “Is she even thirty, Ronald?” Jane asked. Ronald sighed and said yes and that everyone in this industry is young and you know that, and Jane was like, “I’ve simply noticed you tend to promote a lot of young women who’ve worked for you, is all,” and Ronald said she wouldn’t have gotten the job if she weren’t extremely qualified, and they had some fresh ideas they wanted to bring up with us and Jane would be well served to listen with an open mind. She picked up her menu even though she always gets the grilled salad.

When Stacy came back she asked me how the tour was going.

“It’s good. A lot like the last one.” I didn’t mention I was seeing a few empty seats this time around. She’d already know anyway.

“Any fun stories?”

I was starving and tore off a piece of walnut-raisin bread. Jane wouldn’t say anything in front of them about it. I repeated what she’d coached me to say if they asked about the tour: “No, we’ve been working super-hard, so we don’t have much time for messing around. But the shows are hella fun.”

Jane’s been trying to get me to say hella more in interviews to make up for any conversational accent I have left from St. Louis, so I knew this would please her and make her forget about the bread.

Ronald laughed and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Kid’s got a work ethic like a Korean immigrant,” and Jane laughed with him, but Stacy looked down at her drink and half smiled.

They gossiped about which musicians and execs were going to rehab or were out of rehab and whose careers were crashing or stalling or supernova-ing. When our food came, Ronald said, “So let’s get down to brass tacks,” and Stacy took a folder out of her bag whose cover page said

JONNY VALENTINE 2.0 BRAND-EXTENSION STRATEGY

Stacy said, “Peruse this at your leisure. It’s a comprehensive overview of the market, Jonny’s salability and performance strengths and stumbling blocks, and what directions we can go in. I’ll touch on the main bullet points.”

She discussed the record industry for a little while, but I tuned out and ate my lamb burger and drowned my fries in ketchup and thought of the opening lines to “Guys vs. Girls” the way I always do when I see a burger now, even a lamb burger from the Ivy: “Girls and guys, burgers and fries, all gets ruined with a coupla lies.” It was the same stuff about shrinking sales and a contraction in concertgoers from the recession and media fragmentation and limited control over talent perception that Jane had been complaining about a lot the last few months.

Then Stacy said, “We think, after this tour, it’s time to reassess Jonny’s image and his music.”

Jane’s fingers gripped her fork tighter but she kept her voice calm. “What do you mean, reassess?”

“Ish. Reassess-ish,” Stacy said. “I don’t want to step on any toes here, but Jonny’s second album hasn’t done nearly as well as the first even though we poured in marketing resources for it and he had the shoulders of a major platform to stand on.”

I pictured a huge platform with a pair of shoulders and no head that I was standing on.

Jane said, “Debuts traditionally outperform sophomore albums, if you’ve had the kind of market penetration Jonny had.”

Stacy looked to Ronald for the thousandth time, and he was like, “Jane, we know that, but please hear us out.”

“Jonny, you turn twelve in two months, right?” Stacy asked. “So the deliverables for your last album under contract would, best-case, be ready later this year, and when it hit shelves, you’d be around thirteen.”

I wondered if anyone else noticed she’d said last album under contract, not next album. Stacy talked quickly, though, and turned back to Jane. “That’s the perfect time to make him a tad more… adult. Nothing drastic — we’re just talking clothes, hair, and songs and videos that connect more with the teen audience and not so much the tween demo.”

“Once you do that, you’re competing with everyone else,” Jane said. “No other singers own the tweens like Jonny does. We’ve still got a few years.”

“We have to think about the future and evolve,” Stacy said. “They’re not going to stay little kids forever. And neither is Jonny, you know?”

Jane stirred her gimlet with her straw and picked a mint leaf out and chewed on it. “What are you suggesting?” she asked.

“For starters, how do you feel about Jonny dating someone? Someone famous, obviously.”

For a second the only famous person I could think of was Madonna, and how weird we’d look as a couple but that I could always say I once dated Madonna, and then I realized she meant someone my age. Jane’s eyebrows moved together and wrinkled up her skin in this one spot over her nose. She calls it her thinking wrinkle. Botox can’t get rid of it.