Chapter One
I’ve heard enough music to know that the best songs and albums come from broken hearts. Maybe there just isn’t anything to say when you’re swooning, falling, floating, chasing. Maybe when you’re deliciously, deliriously happy, nobody wants to hear about it. But if your heart’s been stomped on, your emotions shattered, your feelings maddeningly unrequited, then you stand a much better chance of writing an opus.
If anyone disagrees, I’ll just say “Layla.” And then for emphasis I’ll give you Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.” And once more just to prove my point, I’ll mention Adele’s “Someone Like You” for this generation and Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears” for days gone by.
If you still doubt me, may I now present Jane Black’s newest album, Crushed? It is the essential breakup album for the modern age.
—Matthew Harrigan, Beat, August 14
There’s more to Matthew Harrigan’s review of my fourth album, but I’ve memorized it all by now. I memorized it the very day it came out. It was the first review I read for Crushed, while standing on the corner of Thirty-Fourth Street and Lexington Avenue on a hot August morning. I’d raced down the street to buy a copy as garbage men clanged and newsstands opened. I didn’t care about the sun beating down. I didn’t smell the garbage being hoisted into the nearby trucks. All I could feel was the rush, the thrill, the absolute, unadulterated bliss of being anointed a success by the music industry’s most powerful magazine, whose reviews run on the home page of iTunes.
Finally, it had come, after years of clutching the faint remnants of the hope that I would be a rock singer, for a living, for real. I’d come so close to giving in, giving up, moving on, because I just wasn’t making it at all. Then I was kicked to the curb by my husband, the father of my child, the love of my freaking life. Who would have thought—it never occurred to me at the time, at a mere twenty-eight—that I’d wind up writing the essential breakup album for the modern age?
Now it’s late afternoon on a certain Sunday in February and our car, a ridiculously long and lush limousine—who rides in things like this for real? I never have—inches closer to the Los Angeles Staples Center, home to the Grammy Awards. I peer out the tinted window, my stomach doing a double-triple flip as I spy the sheer degree of star wattage posing along the red carpet in their metallic dresses and stylish suits. Pop superstars like P!nk and Christina Aguilera, as well as Beyoncé and Jay-Z, mingle alongside legends like Tom Petty and Eddie Vedder, and then somewhere in the distance I can just make out the unmistakable silhouette of Madonna. I am going to be in the vicinity, same building, same stage as Madonna. I am actually going to perform in front of the most successful female recording artist of all time. Because I’ve been nominated. Nominated. I must be living someone else’s life because I—a barely-holding-on little indie singer who’s never had so much as even a hit single, let alone hit album, let alone Grammy invite—have only watched the Grammys on TV.
I shake my head, then click open my purse so I can feel just for a second the wrinkled page that I ripped from Beat magazine that day in August. I’ve kept the review in my pocket like an amulet for the last six months, in a bag, inside my wallet. It goes with me everywhere as a good-luck charm. I touch the well-worn page to remind myself that somehow this is actually real, that those words were really written, that I am here and not in some mirage. Then I tuck it safely back inside my pewter-colored clutch purse that’s about the size of a passport stamp.
I smile, a crazy big grin at my older sister, Natalie, then at my younger brother, Owen, next to her, and at my son, Ethan. My six-year-old is head to toe in black tie, his blue-gray eyes ablaze with excitement, his sandy-brown hair, as usual, a veritable mop. The Beatles had nothing on my boy; his hair is thicker than a Siberian husky’s in winter.
“We’re almost here, kids. Grammy Awards start in one hour,” Owen announces, as he taps his watch with one hand while the car shuffles closer to the red carpet where the driver will drop us off.
I shake my head, barely able to speak because there’s a part of me that won’t accept that my life in this instant isn’t an optical illusion. That I will open my eyes and find myself back on the couch in my Murray Hill apartment watching the annual fete from far, far away. But I’m still here in this car, snapping my purse open and shut, distracting myself with the clicking sound from the fleet of supersize nerves camping out in my body.
Ethan fidgets with his scarlet-colored bow tie momentarily, while Owen adjusts the burnished gold one he’s wearing. Ethan insisted they wear the colors of Harry Potter’s Gryffindor house. Then I notice Ethan has taken off his shoes.
“Ethan! Put your sneakers back on.”
“Okay, but I can’t tie them.” Ethan reaches for his sneakers, a pair of black Converse shoes, and pushes his feet into them. The shoes were his compromise. He’d wear a tux—a monkey suit, he called it—if he could wear sneakers. I’ve learned to pick and choose my battles, so I said yes.
“I’ll do it for you,” I say, motherly instinct kicking in. The car stops moving so I get out of my seat and kneel down on the floor to help him. “See?” I say, holding up the laces, grateful for something else to focus on besides the jumping jacks in my belly. “You crisscross, then loop under, then make the bunny ears.”
“Jane, is now really the time to teach him how to tie his shoes?” Natalie asks, while picking up Ethan’s baseball cards and stacking them into a neat pile. Her dark blond hair is pinned up in a sexy, messy bun with jeweled bobby pins to match her dusty-pink satin strapless sheath. Her ridiculously toned arms are displayed in their full glory as she corrals the cards. “And you’re going to mess up your dress. Why are you kneeling on the car floor?”