The One Where They're All In A Rock Band (PG)
Title: The One Where They're All In A Rock Band
Author: Tui
Rating: PG
Summary: Does what it says on the tin.
Disclaimer: Not only do Nita, Kit, Dairine and Mela not belong to me, band!AUs don't either.
Note: This fic was brought to you by me reading too many cracked out band!AUs and deciding that this fandom really, really needed one. It's not very original, but I'm pretty OK with that. Thanks and flowers to senri for hand-holding and audiencing, and katarik for a timely and encouraging beta read (plus telling me what to do with the LP.) Remaining errors are all mine.
Spotted! Dairine Callahan of Myriad with Japanese pop royalty Roshaun, browsing shelves in a Long Island Radio Shack. A spokesperson for Myriad insists that the pair have a professional relationship - as well as providing vocals and keyboards, Callahan is famous for her involvement in every aspect of Myriad's music and performance, and is said to be consulting with Roshaun on the pyrotechnics his live show is famous for. But the notable absence of Carmela Rodriguez, a fellow member of Myriad who is fluent in Japanese and has acted as a translator for Roshaun in the past, seems to hint that the relationship is more than professional. Speaking of professional, Nita Callahan's fiery breakup with Irish crooner Ronan Nolan has stirred up more rumors of a secret relationship with bandmate Kit Rodriguez...
* * * *
Nita and Kit meet at high school. After school, Nita has tucked herself behind the drum kit in the music room and settled in when the door swings open and a short kid with a guitar case saunters in.
“Hey,” he says, “you're pretty good. Mind if I join in?”
Nita shrugs, because she's not sure. “Aren't you the kid they were ragging on at lunch today?”
The kid grins back. “Aren't you the kid they were ragging on at lunch yesterday?” Without waiting for an invitation, he swings his guitar down and starts unpacking, efficiently plugging leads into the school's amp. “I'm Kit, by the way.”
“I'm Nita.” She decides to reserve her judgement. If his playing stinks, she'll avoid him; if he's any good, well, drums do sound kind of bare on their own.
* * * *
... heard of brand-new indie pop sensation Myriad. The group features two sets of siblings - Nita and Dairine Callahan, and Kit and
Carmela Rodriguez - and you might expect the usual personality conflicts to be magnified with the proximity of familial ties, but instead the foursome seem happy and comfortable around each other. Nita is quiet, even serene, and clearly close to the laconic, affable Kit - as well as being the music-and-lyrics team for much of the group's work, the duo is rumoured to be dating; Dairine, on the other hand, is direct, intense and clearly very bright, but her approach is softened by Carmela's in-your-face, effervescent cheer. Indeed, their personalities are much as you might expect from their live show, which we saw...
* * * *
A few months later, Kit and Nita are noodling around with a tune Kit's hit on. After spending the first few weeks doing the same old covers, they'd started playing around with their own ideas, and Nita thinks this is her favorite so far, a jazzy piece in a minor key, but it's missing something.
“You know,” Kit says, glancing up, “this could use a vocalist. Maybe some keyboard.”
Nita smiles and ducks her head. “Um. My sister sings. Sort of. And she plays the piano, but... I don't...” she trails off.
Kit strums a bit, thoughtfully, before rolling back into the tune. As Nita picks her sticks up and comes in on the downbeat, he yells, “Get her to come in sometime.”
Dairine stomps into the music room one day with a mike and sits down at the piano. She listens to them play through the tune once before swooping in above them with something wordless, but catchy; it fits tightly into the tune, makes it into a song, and by the time they leave that night she's dropping chords in the right places, arguing with Kit about exactly how the tune should go, trying things out and playing around the way Nita and Kit have been.
* * * *
... Dairine's long-awaited solo album, “High Wires”, will also be released this year. Apart from her musical and production role in Myriad, the redhead is highly in demand for her technical, elaborately layered sound mixes; she's something of a renaissance woman of modern music, consulting on performance and staging as well as music. She's mixed for varied and prestigious groups, from Irish folk band Johnny and the Seniors to technosynth solo artist MOTHERBOARD, and she's famous for her outspoken and direct interviews, but she becomes as laconic as elder sister and bandmate Nita when I ask her about “High Wires.”
Rolling Stone: Dairine, can you tell us a little bit about your solo album that will be coming out this year?
Dairine Callahan: Um, yeah. It's called “High Wires,” it'll be released in September, which is a few months before we hope to have the new album out...
RS: So it must be nearly finished? What can we expect from it?
DC: Yes, yeah, it's finished... Uh, there'll be some stuff that's come out of some mixing I've done for other people, Roshaun is featuring on one of the tracks, Nita on another one - I got Nita to sing, which is a bit of a coup...
RS: So it's a family affair?
DC: No, no, it's very much my own direction... it probably won't sound much like the Myriad album, I don't know. I needed to go off in my own direction for awhile.
RS: I hope that doesn't mean you're leaving the band!
DC: No way. I'll stomp on that rumor right now. Myriad is my home, it always will be.
* * * *
Things change fast after that. Dairine acts like a catalyst for the band, wandering in one day with a keyboard she's borrowed off call-me-Mike Pallas, the music teacher, and messing around with the settings. “Piano's great and all, but you can do so much with a keyboard if you know how to use it,” and she gets about fifty books out from the library and reads them all, trying to find out. She hooks up her laptop to it, and a big set of speakers to that, and suddenly there's stuff going on in the background, behind Dairine's voice and Kit's guitar, settling above Nita's steady beat and urging her on, making her more creative.
Then Dairine insists that they really need a bassist, and Kit finds himself heckling his sister as she learns to play a six-stringed bass guitar. Carmela doesn't get as into what Dairine sarcastically calls “the creative process” as the rest of them do, happy enough to play along and add in backing vocals with Kit, but when she comes along suddenly they're a four-piece band and they sound like one, and Carmela wants them to pick a name.
* * * *
* * * *
They go through a couple of names before they settle down. Dairine, of course, comes up with “Dari and the Baby Robots”, and is insistent enough about it that they entertain it for awhile. But although Dairine is responsible for much of the band's sound, Nita and Kit are writing the songs, and Dairine herself is the one to drop it in the end. Carmela comes up with a number of silly suggestions, plus one - “Hempstead Presents” - that they all kind of like, and nearly go for. But in the end, and not very surprisingly, it's Nita who comes up the name.
“Myriad,” Nita says, shoving her hair out of her eyes. “It fits our sound, it's short, it's indie but not pretentious.”
There's a pause, and Dairine blinks. “I actually like it.”
Kit just smiles - he's been vetoing everything without bothering to suggest much, and his silence speaks louder than words.
Carmela grins. “Thank god! It's unanimous. Our meteoric rise to fame starts now!”
Unexpectedly, it did.
* * * *
Myriad - a Discography
2007 - My Sister Went to Mars
The band's first album; quirky, even humorous, and characterised by a sparser sound than any other album; fans suggest that this is because Dairine, who would take responsibility for most mixing, was still nominally attending high school during this time, and had difficulty seeing her bandmates at college in the city. Singles: “Dark Manhattan”, one of the album's more sophisticated efforts musically but lyrically naïve, and “My Sister Went to Mars”, a bright pop tune that ironically references the band's difficulties in maintaining contact while spread over two different colleges and a high school.
2009 - Strange Journeys
Their sophomore album; Dairine Callahan's musicality is much more in evidence. The occasional unpractised touch that charaterised the first album is fast vanishing, but a youthful, adventurous feel is retained, and serves well to rejuvenate “Running Alone”, as Steve Perry cover. The album is also notable for the phenomenal success of two singles, both collaborations with sometime rival one-man-band Lone One: “Central Park”, a rollicking tune, and “Reconfiguration”, a vital and searing song that stayed at #1 for two months. Despite these successes, the collaboration was never repeated.
2010 - Lie Whole
A melodic and aurally lush album. Nita Callahan's distinctive lyrical sensibility seems organic to music composed by partner Kit Rodriguez and arranged by her sister. Singles: “Whalesong”, not originally intended to be a single but which became extremely popular during ecological protests in early 2011, and “The Art”, a mysterious and opaque song that never made it past #23 on the charts.
2013 - Clown on a Unicycle
This album is generally believed to be heavily influenced by the death of Betty Callahan, mother of Nita and Dairine, in late 2011. It is characterised by eerie, haunting tunes, and an exploration of the individual sounds of each band member alone. Much of the album is experimental - one song features an increasingly frantic drumbeat while spoken-voice poetry from the rest of the band is layered over, while another is entirely wordless - but whimsical single “On the Moon” was nevertheless popular.
2017 - Hempstead Presents
Taking its title from one of the band's early tours, Hempstead Presents is a retrospective album and represents a return to the band's low-tech musical roots, but with the sophistication granted by a decade in the music business. About two-thirds of the album is comprised of remixes of earlier tunes with the instruments they played when the band met in high school. The remainder is new songs in a similar style: simple but sophisticated. Singles: “Trees and Tall Buildings”, a sweet-but-not-syrupy romance, and “Wizard Holiday”, a fantasy pop tune.
* * * * End ***
Afterwords and Notes, longer than the fic itself:
1. Carmela canonically can't sing. I sort of like the idea of her Dylan-ing it out anyway, but hell, it's an AU, she can sing if I want her to. Also, all the dates here are completely random and based on absolutely nothing.
2. Want to know why they play the instruments they do? Of course you do! Nita on drums was an obvious choice for me. She's the rhythm section, the glue, and she also isn't expected to play to the crowds. I nearly put Kit on bass guitar for the same reason - reliability and a quirk of humour - but I became too enamoured of the idea of Carmela as six-stringed bassist (less reliable but a lot more showy), and I do like the idea of Kit as lead guitar. It's such a versatile position, and I think Kit is a versatile character. He has depths. Dairine - well, she is the only character canonically interested in music (she's in the choir), and I already knew I wanted to have her sing and play piano (because, no offense to pianists out there, she's precocious and kind of an asshole.) But I also don't see Dairine as content to let other people handle the direction of their music in a production sense, so I wanted her to be involved in that; I wanted her to be involved in the production of their sound, and to apply a good proportion of her brilliance to the music. So the clippings for this story became much more about Dairine than I had intended for what was supposed to be an all-cast piece.
3. Myriad sounds like a cross between the Barenaked Ladies (the whole range, from “When You Dream” and “What a Good Boy” to “One Week” and “Shoebox”), The Feeling, and Death Cab for Cutie. [Yeah, they're indie, sue me.] Dairine's solo album sounds like a cross between The Postal Service and Joan Jett.
4. This wasn't what I intended this story to look like, and I have some ideas for further scenes - a story where Carmela's accused of drug trafficking! a story where we find out that Carl's their manager! a story where Nita and Kit have a Sekrit Engagement and then elope!! Rivalry with one-man-band Lone One! However, I just couldn't make this one go there. I still hope to write the other scenes, but should inspiration strike you... ;)
Author: Tui
Rating: PG
Summary: Does what it says on the tin.
Disclaimer: Not only do Nita, Kit, Dairine and Mela not belong to me, band!AUs don't either.
Note: This fic was brought to you by me reading too many cracked out band!AUs and deciding that this fandom really, really needed one. It's not very original, but I'm pretty OK with that. Thanks and flowers to senri for hand-holding and audiencing, and katarik for a timely and encouraging beta read (plus telling me what to do with the LP.) Remaining errors are all mine.
Spotted! Dairine Callahan of Myriad with Japanese pop royalty Roshaun, browsing shelves in a Long Island Radio Shack. A spokesperson for Myriad insists that the pair have a professional relationship - as well as providing vocals and keyboards, Callahan is famous for her involvement in every aspect of Myriad's music and performance, and is said to be consulting with Roshaun on the pyrotechnics his live show is famous for. But the notable absence of Carmela Rodriguez, a fellow member of Myriad who is fluent in Japanese and has acted as a translator for Roshaun in the past, seems to hint that the relationship is more than professional. Speaking of professional, Nita Callahan's fiery breakup with Irish crooner Ronan Nolan has stirred up more rumors of a secret relationship with bandmate Kit Rodriguez...
* * * *
Nita and Kit meet at high school. After school, Nita has tucked herself behind the drum kit in the music room and settled in when the door swings open and a short kid with a guitar case saunters in.
“Hey,” he says, “you're pretty good. Mind if I join in?”
Nita shrugs, because she's not sure. “Aren't you the kid they were ragging on at lunch today?”
The kid grins back. “Aren't you the kid they were ragging on at lunch yesterday?” Without waiting for an invitation, he swings his guitar down and starts unpacking, efficiently plugging leads into the school's amp. “I'm Kit, by the way.”
“I'm Nita.” She decides to reserve her judgement. If his playing stinks, she'll avoid him; if he's any good, well, drums do sound kind of bare on their own.
* * * *
... heard of brand-new indie pop sensation Myriad. The group features two sets of siblings - Nita and Dairine Callahan, and Kit and
Carmela Rodriguez - and you might expect the usual personality conflicts to be magnified with the proximity of familial ties, but instead the foursome seem happy and comfortable around each other. Nita is quiet, even serene, and clearly close to the laconic, affable Kit - as well as being the music-and-lyrics team for much of the group's work, the duo is rumoured to be dating; Dairine, on the other hand, is direct, intense and clearly very bright, but her approach is softened by Carmela's in-your-face, effervescent cheer. Indeed, their personalities are much as you might expect from their live show, which we saw...
* * * *
A few months later, Kit and Nita are noodling around with a tune Kit's hit on. After spending the first few weeks doing the same old covers, they'd started playing around with their own ideas, and Nita thinks this is her favorite so far, a jazzy piece in a minor key, but it's missing something.
“You know,” Kit says, glancing up, “this could use a vocalist. Maybe some keyboard.”
Nita smiles and ducks her head. “Um. My sister sings. Sort of. And she plays the piano, but... I don't...” she trails off.
Kit strums a bit, thoughtfully, before rolling back into the tune. As Nita picks her sticks up and comes in on the downbeat, he yells, “Get her to come in sometime.”
Dairine stomps into the music room one day with a mike and sits down at the piano. She listens to them play through the tune once before swooping in above them with something wordless, but catchy; it fits tightly into the tune, makes it into a song, and by the time they leave that night she's dropping chords in the right places, arguing with Kit about exactly how the tune should go, trying things out and playing around the way Nita and Kit have been.
* * * *
... Dairine's long-awaited solo album, “High Wires”, will also be released this year. Apart from her musical and production role in Myriad, the redhead is highly in demand for her technical, elaborately layered sound mixes; she's something of a renaissance woman of modern music, consulting on performance and staging as well as music. She's mixed for varied and prestigious groups, from Irish folk band Johnny and the Seniors to technosynth solo artist MOTHERBOARD, and she's famous for her outspoken and direct interviews, but she becomes as laconic as elder sister and bandmate Nita when I ask her about “High Wires.”
Rolling Stone: Dairine, can you tell us a little bit about your solo album that will be coming out this year?
Dairine Callahan: Um, yeah. It's called “High Wires,” it'll be released in September, which is a few months before we hope to have the new album out...
RS: So it must be nearly finished? What can we expect from it?
DC: Yes, yeah, it's finished... Uh, there'll be some stuff that's come out of some mixing I've done for other people, Roshaun is featuring on one of the tracks, Nita on another one - I got Nita to sing, which is a bit of a coup...
RS: So it's a family affair?
DC: No, no, it's very much my own direction... it probably won't sound much like the Myriad album, I don't know. I needed to go off in my own direction for awhile.
RS: I hope that doesn't mean you're leaving the band!
DC: No way. I'll stomp on that rumor right now. Myriad is my home, it always will be.
* * * *
Things change fast after that. Dairine acts like a catalyst for the band, wandering in one day with a keyboard she's borrowed off call-me-Mike Pallas, the music teacher, and messing around with the settings. “Piano's great and all, but you can do so much with a keyboard if you know how to use it,” and she gets about fifty books out from the library and reads them all, trying to find out. She hooks up her laptop to it, and a big set of speakers to that, and suddenly there's stuff going on in the background, behind Dairine's voice and Kit's guitar, settling above Nita's steady beat and urging her on, making her more creative.
Then Dairine insists that they really need a bassist, and Kit finds himself heckling his sister as she learns to play a six-stringed bass guitar. Carmela doesn't get as into what Dairine sarcastically calls “the creative process” as the rest of them do, happy enough to play along and add in backing vocals with Kit, but when she comes along suddenly they're a four-piece band and they sound like one, and Carmela wants them to pick a name.
* * * *
* * * *
They go through a couple of names before they settle down. Dairine, of course, comes up with “Dari and the Baby Robots”, and is insistent enough about it that they entertain it for awhile. But although Dairine is responsible for much of the band's sound, Nita and Kit are writing the songs, and Dairine herself is the one to drop it in the end. Carmela comes up with a number of silly suggestions, plus one - “Hempstead Presents” - that they all kind of like, and nearly go for. But in the end, and not very surprisingly, it's Nita who comes up the name.
“Myriad,” Nita says, shoving her hair out of her eyes. “It fits our sound, it's short, it's indie but not pretentious.”
There's a pause, and Dairine blinks. “I actually like it.”
Kit just smiles - he's been vetoing everything without bothering to suggest much, and his silence speaks louder than words.
Carmela grins. “Thank god! It's unanimous. Our meteoric rise to fame starts now!”
Unexpectedly, it did.
* * * *
Myriad - a Discography
2007 - My Sister Went to Mars
The band's first album; quirky, even humorous, and characterised by a sparser sound than any other album; fans suggest that this is because Dairine, who would take responsibility for most mixing, was still nominally attending high school during this time, and had difficulty seeing her bandmates at college in the city. Singles: “Dark Manhattan”, one of the album's more sophisticated efforts musically but lyrically naïve, and “My Sister Went to Mars”, a bright pop tune that ironically references the band's difficulties in maintaining contact while spread over two different colleges and a high school.
2009 - Strange Journeys
Their sophomore album; Dairine Callahan's musicality is much more in evidence. The occasional unpractised touch that charaterised the first album is fast vanishing, but a youthful, adventurous feel is retained, and serves well to rejuvenate “Running Alone”, as Steve Perry cover. The album is also notable for the phenomenal success of two singles, both collaborations with sometime rival one-man-band Lone One: “Central Park”, a rollicking tune, and “Reconfiguration”, a vital and searing song that stayed at #1 for two months. Despite these successes, the collaboration was never repeated.
2010 - Lie Whole
A melodic and aurally lush album. Nita Callahan's distinctive lyrical sensibility seems organic to music composed by partner Kit Rodriguez and arranged by her sister. Singles: “Whalesong”, not originally intended to be a single but which became extremely popular during ecological protests in early 2011, and “The Art”, a mysterious and opaque song that never made it past #23 on the charts.
2013 - Clown on a Unicycle
This album is generally believed to be heavily influenced by the death of Betty Callahan, mother of Nita and Dairine, in late 2011. It is characterised by eerie, haunting tunes, and an exploration of the individual sounds of each band member alone. Much of the album is experimental - one song features an increasingly frantic drumbeat while spoken-voice poetry from the rest of the band is layered over, while another is entirely wordless - but whimsical single “On the Moon” was nevertheless popular.
2017 - Hempstead Presents
Taking its title from one of the band's early tours, Hempstead Presents is a retrospective album and represents a return to the band's low-tech musical roots, but with the sophistication granted by a decade in the music business. About two-thirds of the album is comprised of remixes of earlier tunes with the instruments they played when the band met in high school. The remainder is new songs in a similar style: simple but sophisticated. Singles: “Trees and Tall Buildings”, a sweet-but-not-syrupy romance, and “Wizard Holiday”, a fantasy pop tune.
* * * * End ***
Afterwords and Notes, longer than the fic itself:
1. Carmela canonically can't sing. I sort of like the idea of her Dylan-ing it out anyway, but hell, it's an AU, she can sing if I want her to. Also, all the dates here are completely random and based on absolutely nothing.
2. Want to know why they play the instruments they do? Of course you do! Nita on drums was an obvious choice for me. She's the rhythm section, the glue, and she also isn't expected to play to the crowds. I nearly put Kit on bass guitar for the same reason - reliability and a quirk of humour - but I became too enamoured of the idea of Carmela as six-stringed bassist (less reliable but a lot more showy), and I do like the idea of Kit as lead guitar. It's such a versatile position, and I think Kit is a versatile character. He has depths. Dairine - well, she is the only character canonically interested in music (she's in the choir), and I already knew I wanted to have her sing and play piano (because, no offense to pianists out there, she's precocious and kind of an asshole.) But I also don't see Dairine as content to let other people handle the direction of their music in a production sense, so I wanted her to be involved in that; I wanted her to be involved in the production of their sound, and to apply a good proportion of her brilliance to the music. So the clippings for this story became much more about Dairine than I had intended for what was supposed to be an all-cast piece.
3. Myriad sounds like a cross between the Barenaked Ladies (the whole range, from “When You Dream” and “What a Good Boy” to “One Week” and “Shoebox”), The Feeling, and Death Cab for Cutie. [Yeah, they're indie, sue me.] Dairine's solo album sounds like a cross between The Postal Service and Joan Jett.
4. This wasn't what I intended this story to look like, and I have some ideas for further scenes - a story where Carmela's accused of drug trafficking! a story where we find out that Carl's their manager! a story where Nita and Kit have a Sekrit Engagement and then elope!! Rivalry with one-man-band Lone One! However, I just couldn't make this one go there. I still hope to write the other scenes, but should inspiration strike you... ;)