Breakout by Kevin Emerson Page A

no way I am working on this. They may have me locked up in solitary confinement, but I will not bend to their propaganda.
    Beneath it are the lyrics from this afternoon. I think about how they remind me of SilentNoize. I sing them again in my head:
    You always tell me what I need to do
    You always tell me how I need to be
    You think that I should listen to you
    When you don’t care what’s important to me
    The melody I heard in the library is right back in my head. The words feel like a relief. They feel
true
. I think about today, this sucky night, this stupid week, and then suddenly more words are coming to me and I just grab a pen and go.
“Breakout” Is Born
    You say I’m flying out of control
    You say I can’t do anything right
    But you don’t know what I can really do
    And you don’t want me to put up a fight
    The rhythm of the syllables maybe isn’t perfect but who cares. I keep going:
    A hundred people tell me what to do
    A hundred more say, do what you’re told
    I’m like a rat inside this maze of life
    Already dying when I’m barely old

    I look up and see that time did that weird thing again where it’s almost a half hour later. I look back at what I have. I like it. I can picture the video: something like a World War II flying part for that second verse, and then like a giant maze with huge animated rats for the third verse, all red-eyed. I could fight them off with a katana sword.
    I pick up Merle and strum real quiet in my lap, humming the words over it. They all seem like verses and they all fit what I’m hearing for the Killer G part. So, what’s going to happen in the Flying Aces section? I play those chords and try each of the verses over them but they don’t really fit. That part needs something different.
    But my brain is racing along now and I remember how there are those tunes, like by SilentNoize or Arcade Fire, that don’t do the usual song structure where you go back and forth between the verse and chorus. Instead, they just stay on one part for a while, repeating and slowly building each time through, and then finally you switch to the second part for the big ending and you stay there and that’s the song. My dad says U2 did that the best. Maybe that could work for this.
    I have to try it out.
    Downstairs I hear Dad washing the dishes. Closer, Erica is taking a shower, and Mom could be lurking anywhere out there.
    I put down Merle and grab my phone. I take the recording I’d made before Mom stopped me and I start cutting up the guitar track. I take the Killer G section and paste it four timesin a row, then stick the Flying Aces section after that. I set up the drum loop so it doesn’t start until the third time through Killer G. For those first two times, I add only a kick drum that is beating on the quarter notes.
    I think of Valerie doing this and how playing live you could time pulsing stage lights with it, and Valerie would totally rock that, but then I remember how I was going to see her at Vera tonight and I feel the angry bullets starting to fly all over again.
    I grab my mic from the floor and pull my comforter over my head so that I am a lump in the corner of the bed and then there in the dark red light I hit Record. I let the first section of Killer G go by and then I start to sing my lyrics with the melody I’ve been hearing. Really quiet so the prison guards can’t hear. I sing my three verses over the second and third and fourth sections of Killer G. They whisper out of my mouth, mumbling and cracking, but it doesn’t matter because it’s just a demo and Mr. Darren says that when you’re inspired all you have to do is get the golden nugget of an idea down as complete as you can and don’t worry about the sounds or the perfection because the only thing that matters is getting that pure inspiration before it’s gone.
    I rerecord the verses a couple times, until they really sound right. Then I listen back. It’s cool. It builds. The first verse is kind of whimpery