Chapter 146: No Saints Here

Days flashed past like that, and a week and few days later Park finally understood the deeper meaning behind Viktoria’s cheerful little plan to "make use of the time before acting became busy."

His career was still on hiatus so they compasanted the free time with music.

Hiatus?

That was the word that had entered his head once, but Park immediately rejected it.

Hiatus sounded wrong when he’d barely stepped into real acting in the first place, much less paused it. He had filmed his small role in The City, signed with NX and then proceeded to wait for the entertainment industry to remember that actors required actual acting jobs.

Calling that a hiatus felt like calling unemployment a vacation because you happened to sleep late.

Whatever the hell it was, Viktoria had seen the empty space in his schedule and smelled opportunity.

What Park hadn’t known was that when she first worked out the plan with people higher up in NX, they’d already been accounting for what they thought he might really be!

If his audition wasn’t some freak event, and his singing and songwriting wasn’t exaggerated by nerves and excitement, and if NX threw enough firepower at him while acting wasn’t stealing whole weeks from his schedule, they believed they could squeeze no fewer than 30 usable songs out of him before his calendar became a nightmare.

That estimate had been made before Léonie got her hands on him and the recording engineer from Studio Five realized Park’s "guide vocals" had an irritating habit of sounding better than final takes he’d spent days repairing for other singers and the producers, composers, arrangers, recording engineers, vocal people, A&R staff and basically the entire creative machinery collectively called NX Music department started discovering that the stories coming out of Studio Five weren’t the audition-room exaggerations they’d heard!

By the third day, Park’s schedule had become something only a corporation could call efficient without being arrested.

He would begin in Studio Five in the morning, leave Léonie and her team still working on whatever he’d recorded, move to another studio after lunch, spend an hour in a writing room because somebody wanted him to hear an unfinished instrumental, then somehow end up in Studio Three or Six until evening.

More than once he checked the time and discovered it was already past 10 at night while 2 grown men were arguing over whether a bass line needed to sound dirtier, and Park was sitting between them eating somebody else’s fries; this was his life now.

He didn’t mind.

Park fucking loved it.

The many songs he’d brought with him didn’t survive long.

NX consumed the ready material with the appetite of people who had suddenly discovered that the rookie they’d signed had apparently spent years preparing for a musical apocalypse. Park still had other songs buried in notebooks, memories and the strange endless cabinet in his head, and he could easily write more, but before long the producers began throwing their own materials at him instead:

Beats. Instrumentals. Half-built arrangements. Tracks that sounded gorgeous but had never found the right melody. Songs meant for specific singers that had been sitting unfinished because the producer knew exactly how the record should feel but couldn’t find the damn words that belonged inside it.

Park discovered he enjoyed those even more than expected.

Starting with nothing meant he could build anything. Starting with somebody else’s instrumental meant the room already had walls and Park got to decide what sort of crime happened inside them.

Sometimes a beat gave him something within seconds; a breakup, a beautiful woman, an argument at 2 in the morning, somebody driving too fast because going home meant facing reality, a horrible decision made by 2 attractive people who were absolutely going to regret it and probably repeat it next Thursday.

Other tracks made him sit there for 5 minutes wondering whether the producer had accidentally given him expensive elevator music but in the end he’ll give them the melody.

That was how his song No Saints Here happened.

The instrumental had a hip-hop foundation, but not the heavy kind Park usually avoided:

There was something smoother sitting above the percussion, enough melodic space that the track seemed almost annoyed by the idea of choosing one genre and behaving itself. Park listened once, then again, then a third time while the producer watched him with the cautious expression of a man who’d heard the rumors and wasn’t yet sure whether to believe them.

By the fourth play, Park’s pen was already moving.

No Saints Here became one of the few songs from those sessions he immediately decided wasn’t leaving his hands.

It flowed through melodic pop-rap, the verses riding a relaxed rap-like cadence where some lines nearly became spoken rhythm before sliding naturally back into melody. The chorus opened wider into pop, but the song never became clean or sugary.

There was too much antihero in it for that, too much of Park’s own attitude crawling underneath the words. It wasn’t pretending he was some hardened street legend with 11 enemies buried beneath a parking lot.

Park had enough shamelessness without borrowing another man’s childhood trauma for aesthetic purposes.¹

The song was about people who knew they weren’t fucking saints, knew everybody around them was carrying something ugly too, and had stopped pretending goodness was the entry fee for wanting beautiful things.

Léonie heard the first full reference and looked through the glass at him.

"You’re keeping that one."

Park pulled one side of the headphones away from his ear. "That obvious?"

"Yes."

"Good. I was keeping it anyway."

"I wasn’t giving permission."

"Even better."

By then NX had discovered another irritating little problem with Nathaniel Park.

His voice didn’t seem to understand genres were supposed to have borders.

Modern pop sounded natural on him. So did pop-rock, R&B, softer acoustic records, dance music, emotional ballads, alt-pop and the melodic rap he’d slipped into with No Saints Here. His voice didn’t sound like some actor doing an impression of whatever genre he’d been handed that afternoon. It changed with the song itself, tone, weight, rhythm and texture shifting until it felt as though that particular style had always been his home.

Park himself still didn’t know where the actual ceiling was.

He had limits, certainly, but more and more of them were limits he’d chosen rather than discovered.

Heavy, deep hip-hop was one of those; ye he could write it frighteningly well, if the private experiments he’d already done were anything to judge by, and he could probably perform it too if he was required too.

He simply didn’t want to sing ti.

There was something deeply diseased about a pretty nineteen-year-old actor arriving in music yesterday and deciding by Friday that he was now the spiritual successor to every legendary rapper who’d spent 20 years mastering the genre.

Park had confidence.

He did not yet require medical intervention.