#bsumarley

AJ ROSE

After setting up her makeshift home studio (that took her an entire year of gigs and odd jobs to afford), the procrastination of the creation of her EP (among other things) was finally over. Ava Jane Rose finally had the drive to do something. Chalk it all up to the new leaf she was trying to turn, maybe she finally got her wake-up call—who knows? The point of the matter was the fact that she was finally doing this after keeping it on hold for so long.

Honestly, this new song started out as a mere word: broken. That’s it. And then she thought about other things that could be broken. Hearts, bones, promises, the law… the list went on and on, but suddenly, it developed into something more than just a list of stupid things. It became actual lyrics which really wasn’t that big of a deal except for the fact that, holy shit, AJ was sober. For reals. And that never happened because, let’s be real here, when was AJ ever sober? Nine times out of ten, she was always at least a .025 at all times, and that was nearly a third of the legal drinking limit. That’s when her creative juices started flowing, that’s when the words started making sense, that’s when the memories didn’t hurt so much to the point that she can actually think about them.

This was a major thing for AJ, sure. But even more so was the song. For Pete’s sake, she wrote it just to write. Ain’t no way in hell was she about to sing it too. Fortunately, the Rose family was a talented one, and she knew just the person whose pipes matched the song perfectly.

Marley.

The more she thought about it, the more excited she got. Typically, the more she thought about how talented and accomplished her sisters were, she grew more and more bitter about how horribly she turned out. It wasn’t that she blamed Alice and Marley. If anything, she blamed herself for not being more like her siblings. She lacked the motivation, the drive, aspirations to be something great. Instead, she was just AJ; rowdy, obnoxious, belligerent.

But this time, every time she thought about the song and how great Marley’s voice would be on it, she sought comfort in the possibility of this being her sister’s shining moment. She was positive that this was going to be the biggest window of opportunity, and AJ wanted to get a start on this as soon as possible.

Impatiently, she sat in her bedroom and tinkered in her studio corner (which, admittedly, took up a third of the room), playing the major sevens, minor nines, augmented, and diminished chords that she’d haphazardly strung together, grinning from ear to ear as she heard the melody of her original composition play in her mind.