After the show, the bar looked like a crime scene where no one bothered to move the bodies. Cables everywhere, glasses smudged, PA emitting a low hum as if it had PTSD from the encore. Arnie was packing up, running on cold fries and adrenaline, when a figure emerged from under the red exit sign. The man clutching an ancient vinyl record, stepped into the half-light and said, in a tone people use when they open a will no one wants to read, “Remember this?”
Arnie recognized the album instantly. His second record. The one people tattooed lyrics from. The one critics called “feral brilliance” before turning on him like sharks who dislike the smell of creativity.
“I saw you back then,” the man said. The Rivoli. Those songs rewired my brain. Saved my life, maybe.” Arnie braced for the punchline. It arrived. “But these new songs…” The man grimaced like he was chewing a lemon dipped in disappointment. “Like you abandoned the universe I was living in.” There it was, “You’ve Changed”.
Arnie considered several responses:
a) fake a seizure,
b) accuse the man not growing up,
c) explain gently musicians are not frozen yogurt flavours.
Instead he asked, “What did the old songs do for you?”
The man hugged the vinyl like it might try to escape. “They made me feel like you were screaming the things I was too scared to say.”
Arnie nodded slowly.
“Yeah. It’s true. I was screaming because everything hurt. If I wrote those songs now, it’d be acting.” The man blinked. Acting? That was not on his bingo card. Arnie kept going. “I’m not there anymore. I crawled out. Bloody, confused, older. The new songs are from the hilltop, not the foxhole.”
The man winced, caught between nostalgia and an existential crisis.
“So you’re saying I’m stuck down there?”
“No,” Arnie said. “I’m saying I have different maps now. You just don’t understand those roads yet.”
The man took this in like medicine with questionable side effects. He didn’t pretend to like the new songs, but something in his posture softened, like a guard dog remembering it used to be a puppy. He extended the vinyl and handed him a black sharpie. “You’ll still sign it, right?” Arnie signed it with monk-like care, adding a small sketch of what might have been a wolf or a very confused cat. The man nodded, satisfied. And the PA hummed approvingly, like the whole bar understood the deal, evolve or die, but try not to lose your audience entirely.