Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 10: The Notebook
The bus was moving east on the I-80 corridor, which meant somewhere in Indiana, which meant the flat dark that went on longer than it seemed like it should. Dash had given up on sleep at 12:40 and gone to the lounge.
He’d been on a lot of buses. Fourteen years of buses, give or take, dating back to the early tours when they’d driven a van with a broken heater and slept in shifts. He no longer minded the movement — the particular vibration of highway at night had become neutral, a condition rather than a thing. What he minded, currently, was the notebook he’d been avoiding looking at since he’d sat down.
He’d brought it from his bunk. That had been intentional. He wasn’t sure what he’d intended.
Three years without a real lyric. He was precise about this in his own accounting. The last thing he’d believed in completely was “Cathedral” — track two on Peripheral, which he’d written in one sitting in a studio kitchen at two in the morning when everyone else had gone to the hotel. He’d known it was good while he was writing it, which happened sometimes, the feeling of something arriving rather than being assembled. That was the last time he’d had that feeling.
Since then: craft. Good craft — he was not going to call the last three years’ work bad, that would be dishonest. He’d written things the band played well, things the label liked, things that got radio play and charted where they were supposed to chart. He’d done the job. He had also, alongside the job, stopped believing in what he was building, and those two facts had coexisted for long enough that he’d begun to accommodate the second one as a permanent condition rather than a temporary problem.
He opened the notebook.
He wrote for forty minutes without stopping. He was aware, while he was writing, that this was the feeling he’d been missing — not inspiration as a concept, which he distrusted, but the specific physical sensation of writing toward something rather than around it. The difference between looking for a word and finding the word.
He finished.
He looked at the window for a while instead of the page.
Then he looked at the page.
He read it through once. Twice. He was aware of what it was — what it was about, specifically, which was: a woman in a stairwell who hadn’t asked him to stay but hadn’t asked him to leave. The particular quality of sitting three feet from someone who was managing something alone and not requiring anything from you. A setlist change he’d suggested and the way she’d said you were right about the set order, which was the voice of someone not performing gratitude, just stating a fact, with the same directness she had on stage when she stepped up to the microphone.
He did not make it abstract. There was no way to make it abstract.
It was two pages. It had the quality of something found — the thing he’d been failing to manufacture for three years had come in while he wasn’t trying to build it, which was, now that he considered it, extremely inconvenient. You could not do much with a song you’d written about someone you were not going to pursue, someone the label had specifically and professionally reminded you, just today, was covered under a policy that existed for good operational reasons.
He stared at the notebook.
He thought: this is a problem.
He thought: I’m not going to solve it tonight.
He wrote three more lines. They were good also. He closed the notebook on top of them.
The bus hit a grade change — a long, gradual rise that he felt in his back against the seat. Outside, nothing had changed. The Indiana dark went on in every direction.
He went back to his bunk. He lay on top of the blanket with his hands behind his head and did not sleep for a while. He thought about the stairwell, the cinder block, the particular quality of the light in there. He thought about the set order and the twenty-two thousand people going quiet, and the sound of it reaching him in the wings — not the way a crowd sounded for the band, familiar and expected, but the way it sounded for someone else, someone you were watching receive something.
He thought about the label policy for approximately four minutes.
He was aware that he was thinking about it.
He noted this as information and set it aside.
He thought about the notebook instead, the two pages, the three additional lines. He thought about what you did with a song that was the best thing you’d written in three years when writing it was, by any reasonable accounting, a problem you had made worse for yourself.
He didn’t have an answer.
He went to sleep eventually, the bus still moving, Indiana giving way in the dark to something else.
He woke up in Illinois, which was no help at all.
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