Chapter 279 - 279: 279 | Conor's Show (1)

<🎧 Song Recommendation: Where Have You Been by ERABREAK, Resilience, Nathalie Blue>

...

The final recording session started shortly after one.

Most artists wouldn't dream of finishing a record inside an arena on the same day they intended to premiere it, but that kind of schedule had become almost normal for them during the tour.

Patch remained back in Miami, controlling the main project remotely while a direct encrypted connection fed him audio from Seattle.

Conor went first.

They replaced his normal concert kit with a tighter recording setup around the snare and tom microphones before he ran through the second half of the song several times. The first two takes were technically clean, but Conor didn't like them.

The third was more aggressive.

His restrained playing through the first half gradually opened up as the song progressed, until the final chorus broke into heavy live drums without losing the intimacy of the acoustic opening.

When the last cymbal faded, Patch's voice came through the studio monitors.

"Keep that."

Conor pulled one side of his headphones away. "Third take?"

"Third take."

"Thank God."

Alex was already waiting nearby with his guitar hanging from his shoulder.

His own part was more complicated.

When You Leave the Room wasn't supposed to end with another chorus. Instead, the final vocals gradually dissolved beneath Alex's guitar, allowing the instrument to finish the thought that none of the singers could completely say.

He recorded one pass.

Patch immediately rejected it. "Nahh, too clean."

Alex frowned. "What does that even mean?"

"It sounds like you trying to toast Von and all of 'em playing guitars. You gotta stop doing that."

Max, who was sitting on the edge of the stage watching, burst out laughing.

On the second attempt, Alex stopped thinking about technique.

He let several notes drag slightly longer than they should have, allowed his fingers to scrape against the strings, and bent one sustained note near the end until it almost sounded uncomfortable.

He held it.

The note trembled through the empty arena before gradually falling underneath the returning acoustic progression.

There was silence in the monitors for a few seconds.

Then Patch spoke. "That's it."

Alex pulled off his headphones immediately.

"Finally."

Von's own vocals were already complete from Oakland, so after that, there was nothing left for the three of them to do except wait while Patch assembled the final master.

They used the time for soundcheck.

By three-thirty, most of the night's technical cues were locked. Von had already walked the stage, Conor's main drum kit had been returned to the riser, and Emily was reviewing the final show timeline when everyone's phones buzzed at almost the exact same time.

Patch had sent the file. Conor opened it first.

[WHEN YOU LEAVE THE ROOM]

[CONOR PRINCE ft. VON VARLEY & ALEX HALL]

[FINAL MASTER]

He stared at the screen longer than necessary.

Seeing his own name shouldn't have felt strange. It was his record. He had written most of it, carried the lead vocals and built the foundation of the arrangement before Von and Alex even joined.

But most of Conor's career had been spent somewhere behind someone else's name.

Session guitarist, session drummer, touring musician, featured artist.

Even after Project: Star made millions of people recognize his face, the biggest songs attached to him still belonged to Von.

Thousand Miles featuring Conor Prince.

Happy For A Moment with Conor Prince.

This time, the order was reversed. Conor Prince, then everyone else.

Von was sitting on the edge of the stage drinking from a bottle when he noticed the expression on Conor's face.

"Don't start crying."

Conor looked at him. "I'm not crying."

"You look emotional."

"I'm literally just reading."

Alex walked over and looked at the screen too.

"He's definitely emotional."

"Both of you can go to hell."

Von laughed before turning toward Emily.

"The distributor has everything?"

Emily nodded, swiping through the release dashboard on her tablet.

"The metadata is approved, cover art is loaded, publishing splits are signed, and the file is already being delivered to Musify and the other platforms. I scheduled it for midnight Eastern, but I can push the release forward once the performance is over."

Conor looked toward her.

"So it really drops tonight?"

"That was the whole point," Emily replied. "The second the performance clips start spreading, there'll actually be a streaming link for people to click this time."

Her final words were directed more toward Von.

Von immediately held up both hands. "Why are you looking at me?"

"You know why."

He smiled innocently.

Conor looked between both of them before turning his attention back to the cover art.

There was no elaborate design.

Just a dark photograph of an empty room with the doorway left open, cold light spilling in from the hall. But what made it remarkable was the artistic typography of the song title.

For a moment, he still couldn't believe it.

"Seriously, man," Conor muttered, looking toward Von. "I owe you."

Von shook his head.

"You don't owe me shit. It's your song."

"You know that's not what I mean."

Von understood perfectly.

His name alone would drag an enormous audience toward the record. The Uncrowned Tour had become one of the biggest entertainment stories in the country, and every new song performed during it immediately flooded social media.

But instead of taking the record himself and putting Conor beneath him as a feature, Von had insisted Conor remain the lead artist and also gave him most of the revenue as well.

They eventually moved on from that topic and began describing their plan for the show once more.

By seven-thirty, every empty seat Conor had looked at that afternoon had disappeared beneath people.

The Seattle show carried a different atmosphere from Oakland.

Von kept the heavy special effects restrained and leaned much harder into the live band, letting Alex's guitar and Conor's drums sit higher in the mix than usual.

Several songs from the album were rearranged around live instrumentation, while the colder blue and white lighting gave the entire stage a darker feel.

The crowd loved it.

They screamed through the familiar records, lost their minds when Von switched into some of his heavier rock material, and matched him loudly enough during Don't Stop that he stopped singing part of the chorus just to let the arena take it.

Conor played through all of it with more energy than usual.

A few times, his eyes drifted toward the sections where he knew his old friends were sitting.

He couldn't actually pick most of them out beneath the lights, but he knew they were there.

That was enough.

Nearly two hours into the show, Von finished another song and walked toward the front of the runway with a towel hanging around his neck.

Usually, that was the point where the crew began preparing whatever new record Von planned to unveil for the night.

Instead, the lights across the main stage faded.

Conor noticed his own drum riser remaining illuminated. A warm white spotlight surrounded him.

The crowd immediately started screaming again, assuming something big was coming.

Von looked back toward the riser and smiled.

"Seattle, I need you guys to make some noise for somebody."

The response was a large scream that filled the arena.

Conor laughed and shook his head behind the drums.

"Most of you guys know this man because you've spent the last month watching him beat the absolute shit out of a drum kit behind me."

Conor raised both sticks over his head, earning another burst of cheers.

"But what a lot of you probably don't know is that some people in this city knew him long before any of this."

That caught Conor slightly off guard.

Von started walking back along the runway.

"Before either of us had millions of people watching what we were doing, Conor spent years working sessions around Seattle. So basically, this is his second home."

The cheering changed.

It wasn't louder at first, but scattered voices suddenly started rising from different sections of the arena.

Conor's head turned.

A group somewhere on the lower left side stood up and began shouting his name. Another pocket farther back followed them.

Von watched his reaction with a grin.

"So tonight, we're changing things around."

He reached the base of the riser and looked up at Conor.

"I'm not the lead artist for this next one."

The arena erupted at the unexpected statement.

Von pointed toward him.

"He is."

A second spotlight opened over Conor.

He sat frozen for half a second before laughing in disbelief and pushing himself away from the kit.

"Seattle, make some fucking noise for Conor Prince!"

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A/N: 🫠 This author is shamelessly begging for your Golden Tickets! Please~! 🫣