WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Potter
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ My Fired Uncle Is a Genius Guitarist? ◈
Chapter 39: You Write Songs for Other Bands Too?
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“I’ll live on my own.”
Even after Cha Sion said it, her father did not speak for a long while. As the stew on the table grew cold, the only sound between them was the low hum of the refrigerator.
Her father broke the silence first.
“You can’t live alone.”
“Why not?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
With a small sigh, he brought up the practical concerns.
“Fine, say you can handle meals and laundry yourself. But what if you get sick? What if the school needs a guardian? What if something happens at night? What are you going to do alone?”
“I can handle everything myself.”
“Your aunt lives in Cheongju, but she can’t come up every day to look after you. That’s no different from living alone.”
“...”
“If something happens while I’m away, is there an adult nearby who can come right away?”
Her father asked in the hope that his daughter would give up on her own. He wanted her to realize that a high school student could not handle every situation alone.
But after thinking for a moment, Cha Sion quietly spoke.
“There is.”
“Who?”
“Taerin’s uncle. Our guitarist.”
“The office worker you mentioned before?”
“Yes.”
“Does he live nearby?”
“I don’t know where he lives. But the rehearsal room is right next to the school, and he comes by often in the evenings.”
She did not say he came every day. Even Cha Sion knew that an office worker could not be tied to a rehearsal room every evening.
Her father studied her face.
“Is he trustworthy?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think he’d help if you asked?”
“...I can ask him.”
Her father looked at his daughter for a while as if weighing her answer, then slowly spoke.
“Then let’s meet him.”
“...What?”
“Let’s meet him once, then talk again.”
“...Okay.”
It was not complete permission. But he had not flatly said no, either. Now, all that remained was for him to see this uncle for himself.
Her father got up and carried the empty bowls to the sink.
“It’s late. Go to bed.”
Cha Sion remained seated at the table for a moment. Then she carried the remaining dishes to the sink.
#
On Saturday afternoon, before I had even reached the metal door at the bottom of the old basement stairs, the faint sound of drums was already leaking through from the other side.
Clank.
When I opened the metal door and walked in, Yun Taerin was swinging her drumsticks with earphones in. Across from her, Bae Somi and Cha Sion sat side by side in folding chairs, drinking canned beverages and looking at their phones.
In the corner, the dehumidifier let out a low hum. The things we had brought in less than a week ago had already settled naturally into place, as though they had been there for years.
“When did you get here?”
As I set down my bag, Yun Taerin pulled out an earphone and answered.
“Since this morning!”
“Why are you making such a fuss this early?”
“The recording’s coming up soon!”
Beads of sweat dotted her forehead. They were proof of how she had shown up at the rehearsal room every day for the past few days and wrestled with the click track. I clicked my tongue, suppressing the pride I felt inside as I took out my guitar.
“All right. Let’s start with ‘Footsteps.’”
“Okay!”
The sticks struck together.
Tap, tap, tap, tap.
Yun Taerin’s drums started first, in time with the click I could not hear. Her hands were still overly tense and stiff, but at least the rhythm did not tangle and fall apart anymore. We finished playing without any major corrections.
“How was that?”
“That’ll do.”
“Really? I didn’t mess up even once, right?”
“For ‘Footsteps.’”
“Uncle, you’re way too stingy with praise!”
Maybe I was. Maybe that personality was why the others had disliked me in my previous life too.
But what could I do? It was in my nature. Still, I should at least try to change little by little in this life.
“Good. Let’s do the next song.”
“RUN” was different. In the existing arrangement, the instruments dropped out completely during the pre-chorus, leaving only the drums to play a fill before the chorus came in. The drums rushed just slightly ahead of the click.
“Stop.”
I raised my hand, cutting off the performance.
“You’re fast.”
“I wasn’t!”
Bae Somi glanced around and quietly added from beside us.
“...You were a little fast.”
“No, even you, Somi?”
“S-Sorry.”
“What are you sorry for? You’re right.”
At my words, Yun Taerin pouted and put her earphones back in.
“One more time. I’ll play like a machine this time.”
The second try made it through the troublesome transition into the chorus. But when the same section came around in the second verse, the drums jumped ahead again. This time, Yun Taerin stopped her sticks before I could raise my hand.
“Ah, damn! I know! I was fast just now, right?!”
“As long as you know. Again.”
The third try. The fill came in, we passed through the chorus and into the second verse without a hitch. The drums stayed locked perfectly to the click all the way through. After the final measure, Yun Taerin yanked out her earphones and lifted her chin with a smug expression.
“How was that!”
“That one was okay.”
“Right? I’m totally...”
“But doing it once and doing it every time are different. ‘Footsteps’ is fine now, so focus only on ‘RUN’ until recording day.”
“How much more nagging am I going to have to listen to?”
“It’s a hundred times better to hear it from me here than get chewed out by the engineer in the recording studio.”
“I don’t want either!”
She stuck out her tongue and picked up her sticks again, but I stopped her with a hand.
“Take a break. Unless you want to ruin your wrists.”
“They’re still fine.”
“They can go all at once.”
Cha Sion took drink cans from the mini fridge and handed one to each of us. As I opened mine and drank the cold carbonation, Bae Somi’s finger froze over her phone screen.
“Um...”
“What?”
“There’s a Crimson Rabbit fan cafe...”
At that one sentence, Yun Taerin choked on her drink.
“Crimson Rabbit? Who’s that?”
“...Us, isn’t it?”
When Cha Sion answered indifferently, Yun Taerin’s eyes went wide.
“We’re Black Rabbit!”
“That’s what people were calling us in the video comments... That must be why nothing came up when I searched. I only looked up Black Rabbit.”
Bae Somi cautiously turned the screen toward us.
A photo of the Finals stage filled the center of the screen. Three high school students dressed in all black, and behind them, a potbellied middle-aged man awkwardly standing there in a red padded jacket.
It was obviously us.
“...It really is our fan cafe!”
Yun Taerin’s jaw dropped. A fan cafe had formed under the name Crimson Rabbit, and the people it was for had been completely unaware until now.
I set down my can and looked at Bae Somi’s phone. It had forty-five members. For a newly opened cafe, there were quite a few posts on the board.
- The queen’s bass playing was insane today.
└ Did anyone get a fan-cam? Her presence was unreal.
└ Bet she’s got a fiery personality too?
- That drum fill was so damn refreshing.
└ Yeah, the way she plays around with the beat is part of the charm.
- Isn’t that vocalist’s tone totally unfair?
└ The tone too, but it feels like she sings so effortlessly?
└ That vocalist has a bright future.
- So when are the tracks coming out? Are they not?
└ They probably will. Those Plugged guys are just slow at their jobs.
Praise for the members filled the page, but my eyes settled on one post with a different title.
- Let’s figure out who Crimson Rabbit’s guitarist is.
└ Getting that tone without pedals means he’s definitely an old hand.
└ Could he be from some old band that worked the indie circuit in the early 2010s?
└ Maybe he retired and runs an instrument shop or something.
└ Come to think of it, the owner of the instrument shop I go to has exactly that build.
└ Seriously? Which shop?
Fortunately, every guess missed the mark. I let out a breath of relief inside and handed the phone back.
“I’m signing up!”
Yun Taerin excitedly took out her own phone, but Cha Sion immediately poured cold water on the idea.
“Don’t.”
“Why?”
“What are you going to use as your username?”
“Just Yun Tae...”
Yun Taerin’s fingers stopped. If she used her real name as her username, everyone would immediately know she had joined.
“...Oh.”
“I was thinking of joining too...”
“Why join when they got the band name wrong from the start?”
After saying that curtly, Cha Sion subtly pulled Bae Somi’s phone toward herself and began scrolling through the posts. I could see the faint lift at the corner of her mouth, but I did not point it out.
‘Forty-five people.’
Compared to Muri’s fan club in my previous life, packed with tens of thousands of people, it was a pitiful number.
But strangely, it did not feel small.
Instead, it felt as full as this basement rehearsal room.
#
Once rehearsal ended, Yun Taerin and Bae Somi packed up and left first. I stayed behind, planning to get some work done, and opened my laptop.
That was when Cha Sion quietly approached me.
“Uncle.”
“What?”
“Are you free tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow? I am. Why?”
“My dad wants to meet you.”
The finger clicking my mouse stopped. I turned my head to look at her.
“...Me? Why does your dad want to meet me?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
“What is it? Don’t make this weird.”
“Two o’clock. The cafe in front of the school.”
Cha Sion left only those words behind, slung her guitar case over her shoulder, and abruptly turned away. I tilted my head as I watched the back of her head grow distant.
‘Is it because of a guardian consent form? Or does he oppose her being in a band?’
Maybe he wanted the adults to go over the contract terms because his daughter was writing lyrics. Or maybe he just wanted to see the face of the suspicious thirty-six-year-old man playing in a band with his daughter.
Either way, it was not a meeting I could avoid.
#
That same Saturday afternoon, large and small rehearsal rooms lined the basement hallway of the Loop Sound building. Most of the teams at the label Muri belonged to were bands, and the rising newcomer with the sharpest momentum among them was After Rain.
They were in their third year since debut. They first made a name for themselves with an EP full of original songs, and their first full-length album released last year had earned strong reviews, getting them onto the lineups for major festivals. Most of their songs were written by vocalist Moon Hyunwoo. He could sing, compose, and had a handsome face to boot, so there was no reason for the company not to give him its full support.
The problem was that his songs had stopped coming lately.
Up through their first album, songs had come out as easily as water from a tap. But their second album was different. They were still short two tracks, and among the songs they had already picked, there was no obvious title track. The deadline had already been pushed back once, and the office had informed them that another delay would be impossible.
After Rain’s rehearsal room was quiet. They had gathered to work through arrangements, but they did not have a new song to work through. Moon Hyunwoo sat in the corner with his laptop open, rewinding and listening to the same riff for the umpteenth time. He deleted a verse, made it again, then soon erased the whole thing. He could not even tell whether the new version was better than the one he had deleted.
“Hyung, can’t we just take an outside song?”
At the drummer’s tentative question from where he lay on the sofa fiddling with his phone, Moon Hyunwoo’s brow furrowed.
“What kind of band takes outside songs?”
“But the songs aren’t coming.”
“They are. They’ll come.”
“...”
“I’m going to get some air.”
Moon Hyunwoo cut off the conversation and walked out of the rehearsal room.
They had climbed to where they were with original songs. More than anyone, he knew that singing someone else’s song would blur the band’s identity. But the deadline was right in front of them, and no melody he liked would come out. This must be what a slump was.
He was walking down the hall toward the break room when music leaked through the gap in the door of Muri’s rehearsal room across from him. Kang Taeo’s voice soared clearly over an intense rock sound. It was a song he had never heard before.
Moon Hyunwoo stopped walking.
He had heard the rumor. Muri had received five whole songs from an unknown outside composer. When he first heard it, he had scoffed. Even a veteran band with sixteen years behind them had run out of songs and needed to borrow someone else’s hand?
But the sound slipping out through the closed door caught Moon Hyunwoo’s feet.
It was not simply that the song was well made. Kang Taeo’s vocals carried it without showing any sign of strain. The melody wrapped smoothly around his vocal tone, and after each long, soaring phrase, there was exactly enough space to take the next breath.
Standing in front of the door, Moon Hyunwoo realized that he had started breathing along with those breaths. Anyone who wrote songs knew. Something like this could not happen by chance. This was a song structured with the singer’s breathing and range in mind.
‘This isn’t just a good song that Kang Taeo is bringing to life.’
It had been written with that voice in mind from the beginning.
As the song ended, Moon Hyunwoo knocked on the rehearsal room door and entered.
“Sunbae.”
“Oh, Hyunwoo. How’s the new song work going?”
“It’s all right. But was that a new song just now?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you write it?”
“No.”
The answer he had expected. Moon Hyunwoo swallowed dryly and asked.
“...Then whose song is it?”
“One Dragon’s.”
“One Dragon? I’ve never heard that name.”
He knew all the composers who were big names in the industry, but One Dragon was unfamiliar.
“You didn’t see it? The Plugged Finals, the one Taeo-hyung judged. Black Rabbit’s guitarist there is One Dragon.”
At Jo Wonwoo’s words, Moon Hyunwoo took out his phone and searched. One Dragon. Plugged Finals. He tapped the video at the top.
Black Rabbit’s Finals performance began playing on the screen. Behind the three high school students dressed in all black stood a potbellied middle-aged man in a bright red padded jacket, black cap, and mask.
“...They’re a high school band.”
“Not the guitarist.”
Moon Hyunwoo kept his eyes fixed on the phone screen and listened closely to the performance. The same feeling he had sensed outside the rehearsal room moments ago was clear in the song from the video. A precise balance that maximized the vocalist’s strengths without throwing off the band’s balance.
Moon Hyunwoo slowly raised his head and looked at Kang Taeo.
“Sunbae.”
“What?”
“Does this person write songs for other teams too?”
“Why?”
“I’m just... asking.”
Kang Taeo gave a small laugh.
“Wasn’t your band all about original songs?”
“...It is.”
Moon Hyunwoo bit his lip and looked back down at his phone. On the screen, the man in the red padded jacket freely shaped his tone as he adjusted the guitar’s volume knob.
“...One Dragon.”
Moon Hyunwoo quietly saved the video of “RUN” to his playlist.
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