Like an Ocean
Chapter 1. Like An Ocean
From the outside, Apple Road Studios looked almost exactly like a pleasant mansion, not too different from Sapphire Shore's own home. Even the hallway looked like it could belong to any rich, musically obsessed pony. It wasn't until you got down into the basement that the true nature of the place revealed itself.
The basement was really the centre of the whole place, the beating heart that kept the rest of the building alive. In most businesses' buildings, the corridors above ground were always teeming with life and the basement was the place were the forgotten things went. But in Apple Road Studios this was reversed. This took some time to get used to for the many temporary workers who came and went like in a revolving door, usually staying for only an album.
Somehow, the basement managed to be both vast and claustrophobic at once, there was plenty of room for any arrangement of musical instruments, up to and including a full string orchestra, but all space not strictly necessary was sealed off with mobile soundproof walls, giving the place a cramped feel.
There was a smaller room divided from the rest by a one-way mirror that hosted the recording equipment and mix board. The high-tech equipment gave the room a futuristic feel that contrasted with the musical instruments lining the walls, nearly all traditional acoustic instruments except for one: a large magically charged keyboard that was the object of attention for Sapphire Shores and two other ponies.
“Well, how about this melody?” Sapphire asked and placed a hoof on the keyboard. She used the other hoof to twist the thick metal knobs on t tastefully chromed control panel.
After each adjustment, she tapped gently on the keyboard and absorbed the sound that emerged from it. She took each tone in, analysed it, tasted every aspect of it and judged its flavour, before making yet another adjustment. She transformed the sound from a smooth sine-wave to a jagged sawtooth before she placed both hooves on the keyboard and started to play a simple tune.
The melody that emerged from the device sounded somewhere between a sea shanty and a playground taunt. it had a slightly childish rhythm, but was filled with old longing. While it was somewhat melancholic, there was something about the low notes grabbed a hold of your hooves and made you want to dance with frantic but slow rocking motions, like that of an ocean wave.
Once she was done playing, she looked over to her producer who was standing next to her with look of a wine connoisseur right before he spit the taste sample out into a cup.
“It’s about 50% 'Scales n Beats' by Livinr0dent and 50% ‘Rocks on the Beach’ by the Heartstrings Orchestra” he announced . “And I do detect some retro influence In there too.”
He adjusted the sunglasses he wore in order to not reveal too much of his reaction at once. They didn't do their job very well, tough. If the furrow in his brow wasn't enough of an indication, the disapproving tinge in his voice gave him away immediately.
“Sapphire, you can't create a hit song simply by copying ten year old hits,” he pleaded. “The world is longing for something new!”
Sapphire Shores swallowed the beginning of a hostile growl and nearly spat out the words over her shoulder: “And I'm giving it to them, Mistpouffer! Don't you hear it? The edge? The attitude, this is not your grandmothers pop music!”
“No, more like your great-grandmothers pop music,” Mistpouffer quipped.
His sunglasses reflected Sapphire Shore's ice-filled glance back at her. But as she turned away, the producers face softened somewhat and he hung his head down in mock-surrender.
“Sapphire, I showed you the polls, didn't I? You care classified as 'almost relevant' Almost relevant! We're slipping out of the public eye, Sapphire. How do I put it nicely?” he asked himself.
Sapphire knew full well how he'd put it, it was the same word that was buzzing through her own mind. She closed her eyes and braced herself.
“Miss Shores, the ponies think you are getting OLD!” Mistpouffer said. “Taking a style of music that was old-hat ten years ago and then make it sound even more old-fashioned isn't going to endear yourself to the public.”
Sapphire Shores snorted. “Al right,” she said. “How about this?”
Once again, she fiddled on the knobs. The sound-wave flattened and it gained an almost hollow quality. Then she placed both hooves on the keyboard and played a variation on the same melody, this time bouncier and with more staccato. Sapphire had almost completely transformed the tune, the longing and the smell of the ocean was gone, this time the melody sounded like it wanted to fight something.
“I was thinking this with a heavy beat,” she announced. “A hoof-stomping kind of beat.” The producer buried his face In his hooves.
“Congratulations,” he said. “Instead of sounding like ten years ago, you only sound like nine years ago... Have you even LISTENED to any current hit records?”
“Yes,” she snapped back. “Because last time I checked the hit-list, I had at least five singles on there. I'm still on top Mistpouffer, I think I know what I'm doing.”
The producer made a sound from deep down his throat that sounded like an advancing army. “Does the words 'downward trend' mean nothing to you?” he asked. “Once things start to slide, they'll just keep on sliding, unless we do something to stop it. Sapphire, I mean it, we need something NEW!”
“Fine!” Sapphire shores said, gazing at her producers through narrowed eyes. “I'll give you something new!”
She twisted all the knobs to their maximum setting and she pressed down as many keys as she could hit into one loud pseudo-chord. The edges of the synthesizer lit up as the magic roared and sparked inside. The notes blended into a discordant mess that moved rapidly between the sound of air-horns and startled animal-howls.
“So? Did THIS sound fresh and new enough for you, darling?” she asked, voice dripping with sarcasm.
Smoke was practically coming from the ears of Mistpouffer and Baritone, the sound engineer. If there still was a hostile glint in his eyes behind the sunglasses, it didn't show in the rest of his face. The noise seemed to have flushed away the anger of the producer, and instead of being enraged, he just looked drained.
“Allright,” he said . “I think we all need a break. Ten minutes. You need anything, Sapphire?”
“A glass of wine, a bed with silk sheets, a good romance novel and some peace and quiet,” Sapphire said under her breath. “Or failing that, at least a cup of herbal tea.” She gazed at the keyboard as though it was her mortal enemy.
Mistpouffer was still reeling from the after-effects of the musical assault, but after he brushed his moustache back into shape and adjusted his collar, he was soon back to his old self.
“Herbal tea it is, then.” he concluded. "I'll ask Mjölna to get it."
Sapphire slumped down into a bean bag and before her eyes a brief image flashed of her taking every single knob in the universe and putting them into a large bonfire. It was a pleasant image and at the moment much more soothing than her usual meditative fantasy, which consisted of a vast empty beach, with waves crashing over it.
Mistpouffer, Baritone and the junior engineer, Noteworthy, were still working around her. The producer was syncing up her guiding vocal with the rough mix to one of the album tracks and the sound engineers were re-recording the drum-parts together with a studio musician, a surprisingly young male pony with drumsticks duct-taped to his hooves.
Sapphire Shores strongly suspected that “let's all get some rest” meant “let's try to get as much work as possible done before Sapphire decides to go all pop diva on us again...”
She closed her eyes in a demonstrative manner, she did her best to shut out the incessant rhythm of the studio musician banging his drums with mechanical precision and the esoteric jargon exchanged between Baritone and Noteworthy about cables, sound levels and microphones. Not only did her ears get assaulted, but her nose as well; the studio smelled of ponies more focused on their jobs than personal hygiene.
She briefly considered asking for a bottle of perfume and spray it around in the air, but decided against it. The only thing that would accomplish would be to change the smell from “week-old socks” to “week-old socks covered in expensive perfume,” which wasn't exactly better. It would help if the studio had any actual windows she could open instead of narrow slits covered with foam, only really visible from the outside.
The clock on the wall pointed its arrows on two numbers, but they were almost meaningless. The deadline was looming and their schedule had long ago stopped being set by the actual progress of night and day and instead by how long they could go before Sapphire started to rant about beauty sleep.
Sapphire held a hoof against her palm and felt a nerve pound underneath her skin. Even this beat seemed to match the song she was working on, like not even her own body was going to let her forget about it. Sapphire emitted a sigh of resignation. 'We're still missing a verse on this thing, might as well work on that', she thought.
“Noteworthy!” she called out and the pony in question winced noticeably at the mention of his name while the studio musician punctuated her request with a loud out of place crash.
“What is it ma'am?” he said, trying to mask his annoyance.
“Are you busy?”
“Not right now, no,” he lied.
“Could you be a dear and fetch me my notebook?”
Noteworthy sighed and disappeared from the studio. When he returned, he was holding a cobalt-encrusted notebook in his mouth, like a dog playing fetch.
“Thank you darling,” she said as he gave it over to her.
“No problem ma'am,” Noteworthy said, trying to be polite. “Now can I please go back to doing my job?”
“Sure you don't wanna stay and hold me company?”
“Sorry, I gotta go nag on the drummer some more. He's making the crashes too loud, the mike's amplification spell can't handle it, it keeps turning into the sound of whistling birds!”
A quirk of the magic used to make recording equipment is that if the sound became too loud, the magical charges would interfere with each other and transform the sound into random noises. Some of the more experimental modern musicians had started to use this to their advantage tough. A whole genre had recently emerged out of taking the sound of a single magic guitar and transforming it into a whole orchestra worth of non-musical sounds. It took a pony with a sharp ear and a strong stomach to fully appreciate the subtleties of the genre.
However, magical distortion was still a huge problem for more conventional music, like the brand of baroque pop Sapphire Shores played, and it took a dedicated effort from the two engineers to keep it to a minimum and knowing what paid the bills, Noteworthy was eager to continue this struggle. He looked almost relieved when an increasingly impatient Baritone started waving him over.
“Come on,” he hissed to him. “If we don’t get this fixed before Mistpouffer notices, he might start doing the thing... y’know where his moustache puffs out, it’s really creepy.”
“I’m coming!” Noteworthy replied and went behind one of the foam-padded walls where Baritone was waiting for him, leaving Sapphire alone.
She looked down towards her notebook. The wire that coiled trough the pages of the notebook had uncoiled itself at the top and it protruded in a rough spiral and Sapphire couldn't help playing with it, she pushed the impromptu spring down with her hoof and let it shoot up a centimetre or two. Once that became boring she finally opened the notebook and started to read trough her neat all capital letters handwriting.
“IT'S HARD ENOUGH TO FLY
FOR A PONY WITHOUT WINGS
I CAN'T KNOW EVERYTHING
I CAN ONLY TRY TO SING
FOR ALL THE SONGS THAT WE MADE
WE'RE STILL LIVING IN THE SHADE
BUT WHAT THE TIDES WASHED ASHORE
IT'LL HELP A LITTLE MORE
BUT LIKE A WHSIPER, IT'S”
“It's what?” She muttered to herself. “It's bad, that's what it is.”
This was too early in the process to worry much about fine details such as having the song actually be about something. Right now, she was just trying to get the rhythm and flow of the words right, but this draft didn't even do a good job with THAT.
She wasn't a genius songwriter by any means, even she had to admit that the her most popular song, “Like an Ocean” was less regarded for the lyrics and more for the music. Also, the controversy surrounding it leading to a legal dispute with the “Concerned Parents of Equestria” certainly hadn't hurt its notoriety.
The trick to her song writing was that nine out of ten verses she wrote was absolutely horrible, and only one was actually worth keeping, she just had the good sense to scrap the rest. So, just like a hundred pages before it, this page got torn off, crumbled up into a ball and tossed towards the trash-can. It danced around the edges for a while before loosing momentum and fell down just next to the can, in a pile of half a dozen others.
Something was written on the edge of the trash-can, it took Sapphire Shore a while to notice. “Need help? I can get a songwriter! - MP” it said in a tall art-deco script
“Smartass,” she muttered to herself, and then looked around, in case there was any donkeys around who could potentially be offended. She began to long for something that could take her mind off her writers block.
Baritone and Noteworthy where finally figuring out some of the problems with the audio, something esoteric involving dynamic range compression and Noteworthy was halfway into coming up with a solution when his thoughts was interrupted by a shrill, all-too-familiar voice.
“Noteworthy!” Sapphire Shores shouted from her corner of the studio. He ground his teeth together and let out an annoyed growl.
“I'm not your personal assistant, Sapphire. I'm just here to set up the microphones and make sure that the audio works. FIND SOMEPONY ELSE TO ORDER AROUND.”
He said the last part into a microphone and the loudspeaker amplified it tenfold until it was like it was written in letters the size of small houses. The sound was mostly clear and crisp, but it did sound a bit like a whale was singing along to his outburst in the last few syllables. The sudden chock did put Noteworthy's mind back on track however, and he turned towards his co-worker with an urgent expression.
“Wow, this one works great! It sounds a little flat the lower registers tough, do we have a magic flux-divider?”
Baritone checked inside a small box labeled “Misc. and portable holes” but found nothing, he announced this with a quick shake of his head. From her corner, Sapphire Shores looked a bit more humble as she smiled towards the outspoken sound engineer.
Am I being too bossy, darling?" She asked. "If Mjölna is out," she said at a louder volume, "I guess I'll go and get them myself."
The last part sounded almost like a magical incantation,and the words seemed to summon her producer, who appeared from behind the two sound-engineers.
“Go get the bloody fanletters, Noteworthy, I need her here,” he demanded. Mike sighed and disappeared out the narrow door.
Mistpouffer sat down next to Sapphire. As he looked over, her facial muscles tensed up and she did her best to try and ignore him.
“Are you ready to talk about your single?” He asked with an unnecessarily polite voice, tough it was clear from his demeanour that break-time was over. “I'm all for taking things easy, but the earlier we get this one done, the better.”
“You really have no concept of taking a break, do you?” Sapphire snapped from the side of her mouth.
“No, I don't,” Mistpouffer admitted. “Maybe you can rest on your laurels, but I have to work my flank off.” His demeanor softened up somewhat as he continued.
“I've looked trough your suggestions and drafts and..” he paused, desperately attempting diplomacy. “They are great... as album filler, but they just aren't hit single material.”
“What do you mean? I worked hard on those, and I've seen lazier songs on the hit charts. I've HAD lazier songs on the charts...” she admitted.
“It's not that,” Mistpouffer said. “Some of these may be a decent single for some other band, it's just not a single for you, it doesn't fit your image.”
“Which image?” Sapphire Shores asked. “I've had several: a singing cowgirl, a glamorous space alien, a femme fatale, an old-school cabaret singer, a pink burlesque dancer, and the less said about my “Luchadore”-period, the better...”
Mistpouffer’s face distorted in something that resembled pain, like an actor trying too hard to emote. The memory of the more regrettable periods of Sapphire’s carrier flashed trough his mind, embarrassing enough to show on his face.
“I mean your normal image, not any of your... characters I guess you call them. Ponies know you from the song “Like an Ocean” and that's what they want to hear. This isn’t anything like that.”
This hit a sore spot and Sapphires ears tensed up noticeably. Mistpouffer twiched, half-expecting Sapphire to attack him, but instead she just dropped the notebook, which landed on its edge, causing one of the gemstones to pop out.
“I can't write that one AGAIN” she said. “'Because I already wrote it once, and if I DID write it again, you'd complain bout that, wouldn't you?” Mistpouffer met her accusatory with a blank face behind her sunglasses.
“Well, yes,” he said bluntly. “'cus I don't want ANOTHER Love by Moonlight, I just want something that somepony who listens to that song would also listen to, do you get what I am saying?”
Sapphire Shores just snorted and the room fell into demonstrative silence. Breaking the silence was the creak of the basement door as Noteworthy returned, dragging four large bags overflowing with letters, and slightly dusty from being pushed trough the dingy basement corridor. He let go of the bags and one of them flopped down with forlorn 'flupp', leaking stray fan mail down onto the floor.
“Mjölna sorted them,” he announced. “And she labelled the ,which would have been extremely helpful... if I could read runes.” He gestured towards the cryptic letters written in black marker directly on the fabric. It took Sapphire a solid minute to realize that the strange markings was supposed to be a language, and even then it was impossible to decode.
“I think this one says “stalkers,” Noteworthy informed her. “And this one is “creepy”, this one is 'the baffling', this one contains the misspelled and all around clueless ones, and this last one contains the hate mail.”
“Give me the last one,” Sapphire Shores demanded. “Leave the rest anywhere.”
“So, you don't want to be lavished with praise today?” Noteworthy said with an evil grin.
“I don't NEED praise, I already KNOW that I'm fabulous, I just need to figure out what I'm doing. Besides, these are usually the most entertaining ones.”
It was with a gleeful, almost sinister smile that Sapphire Shores opened the letters. Getting fans is easy; most ponies have a loneliness inside of them, things they shout to themselves inside their own mind that most other ponies just never seem to get.
Most art has an ability to get past our mental defences and reach the part of us that would otherwise be left lonely, so if you can smuggle any degree of individualism past the likes of Mistpouffer, you're bound to find at least somepony who connects with your music.
It wasn't until you got haters that you knew you've made it big. If you can reach the kind of ponies whose mind is like a wall, even if it's just to annoy them, you've become more than a celebrity, you've become an icon. Sapphire didn't read most of the letters, but she skimmed them and her mind picked up on the recurring words and phrases.
The phrase 'indecent' popped up a lot, her excessive amount of clothes and make-up was thought to be dangerously provoking and corrupting. Some even went so far as to accuse her of being an outright liar and a fraud since she hid her true looks behind fashion and cosmetics, but these ponies obviously didn't understand glamour.
She skimmed trough most of those letters only to toss them over her shoulder. This was something she already knew, heck, her entire carrier was pretty much based on the fact that some ponies found too much clothing offensive. What she really wanted to know was if her little stunt with Photo Finnish had ruffled some feathers, and she was pleased to find out that was indeed the case.
The ponies were kinda strange when it came to mare-on-mare. On one hoof, close personal friendship at a young age where expected, even encouraged, but as soon as you grew old enough to settle down, you where expected to find a nice stallion.
'Bad example for the youths,' 'Decadent celebrities,' the accusations piled on, each more delicious than the last. This was way more fun than the friendly rivalry they had a while back. The best part about it was that it was self-sustaining. The more the two mare's would deny it afterwards, the more ponies would believe it.
The idea was conceived like most of their shenanigans, during an evening of yahtzee/unpaid counselling over at Photo's tastefully cubist mansion. It was her little “gift” to Photo Finish as thanks for her invaluable fashion advice. Somehow, that mare knew what would become popular at least a year before it actually caught on. If Sapphire didn't know better, she'd swear Photo was a unicorn. Photo had undeniable talent, but she had trouble recovering from that fiasco with the shy small-town Pegasus photo model.
She needed to “clear her name”, so to speak, a little carefully engineered scandal to stir the ponies who liked to make a big deal of this kind of thing, allowing her to start over with a blank slate the next time she had some mad brilliant idea to rock the fashion world, such as putting a pony with a blue jeans vest on the cover of her magazine.
One letter was accompanied by a note from Mistpouffer saying 'Mjölna put this in the 'misspelled' bag, but I'm not sure if it's even written in Pony'. This confused Sapphire, because at first, the mouthwriting on the letter looked like the same runic alphabet that Mjölna used. But on a closer examination, it'd appear that this was actually supposed to be Pony.
The letter rambled at great length about the things the writer was sure the two celebrities where doing behind the scenes, because she had “heard about it somewhere.” As Sapphire read trough the letter, her eyes widened noticeably.
'Wow, I'd never have thought about HALF of these!' Sapphire thought to herself and she made a mental note to play this up for her stage persona somewhere in the future, something like her androgynous space alien, 'Ziggy Starhooves', but with hints of bisexuality and BDSM.
This had all the makings of a good alter ego, it was naughty, bordering on perverted in some ponies' mind evidently, but it was still only naughty in a “'safe' way. It was far enough outside most ponies comfort zone for it to ruffle some feathers, but not far enough outside it that ponies will be genuinely put off.
'Plus, I bet Photo Finish already have a studded leather collar somewhere that I can borrow,' Sapphire Shores thought to herself.