Barry Blume had been in the music business long enough to turn hope into profit and talent into something you could skim. He cut corners the way some people bite their nails, almost absentmindedly, almost innocently. If a singer’s travel budget was a hundred dollars, Barry wrote down a hundred and fifty and kept the difference. If a venue paid in cash, well, some of it evaporated on the way to the artist’s pocket. Strange how these things happen.
“Margins,” he called it. “Everyone takes margins.” He didn’t feel bad about it. Barry liked to remind people that the music industry wasn’t the Wild West. It was worse. Leah Sommers was a twenty-three-year-old singer-songwriter with a voice like a new moon. She had the moral clarity of someone who had never learned to be afraid. Barry signed her because he sensed she’d make money. He didn’t realize she’d also become his undoing. Leah wasn’t naive, but she asked questions. She read contracts. She took notes during meetings. Worst of all, she believed people could be good if you gave them directions. Barry found her exhausting.
“Why do you want to see the venue receipts?” he asked one day.
“Because they exist,” Leah said.
“Why do you need to know the merch numbers tonight?”
“Because I sold shirts today.”
Barry felt a small part of his soul shrivel. He had never met anyone who insisted on daylight the way Leah did. It was like being followed around by a very polite flashlight. Then one night after a show, Barry found Leah sitting on the curb outside the club, her guitar case still open. The crowd had left. The street was quiet. She looked tired, the kind of tired that doesn’t come from singing. Barry sat down beside her without asking.
“Tough show?” he said.
“Tough world,” she replied.
She didn’t elaborate. For the first time in a long while, Barry felt something in his chest that wasn’t greed or scheming or strategy. Guilt. Heavy, sudden guilt. Like someone turned gravity up a couple notches. He thought about her trust and diligence. He thought about every seventy-dollar bill he’d written down as ninety-five.
He went home that night and opened a spreadsheet he had sworn not to show anyone. A masterpiece of half-truths and artful omissions. Stared at it for an hour. Then, with the caution of a man defusing his own bomb, he began to correct the numbers. He returned imaginary travel expenses to their proper totals, adjusted merch sales, erased the almosts and the maybes and the little fudges he previously was so proud of.
The next morning he handed Leah a printed copy.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“The real accounting,” Barry said.
She looked up at him with an expression he had never seen on a musician’s face directed toward him. Respect.
“Thank you,” she said simply.
Barry felt the strangest sensation. He found himself doing more small honest things. Answering questions directly. Passing on all the merch money. Giving correct dates instead of convenient ones. Telling artists when he didn’t know something. It was uncomfortable at first, like wearing someone else’s shoes. But over time, Barry discovered something very amazing, musicians trusted him more. Venues returned his calls faster. His accountant recommended him to more respectable clients.
And years later, when Leah won a major award and thanked him in her speech, he never forgot it, “Turns out shouting at someone does not do much, but believing in them can twist their compass just enough to change their destination.”