Then again, according to Hollywood Central, since Halle and I didn’t follow each other on social media, we were headed toward rough waters. If you believed them, we were doomed as the next Hollywood couple before we even began. Their money was on the mystery girl, Teresa. I think the Hollywood Central reporter had a thing for her.
What had put the scowl on my face were the comments. It seemed half of them thought that Halle was merely being seen with me as a publicity stunt intended to boost ticket sales for our upcoming movie. The other half were busy fat-shaming Teresa. One Internet troll posted that ‘she needs to lay off the burgers and eat a salad.’ From there, they got worse. I swear, give someone a keyboard and anonymity, and they suddenly turn into mean girls or boys.
“Just reading the comments on some of the gossip sites,” I admitted.
“I thought you knew better than that.”
I shrugged. It was human nature to look to see what others were saying about you. Typically, I just glanced at it and brushed it off. I’d gotten sucked in when they started to say bad things about my friends. While Halle was in the public eye and knew what to expect, Teresa hadn’t signed up for this.
It also made me wonder what people thought a sexy woman should look like. I mean, who wants to be with a bag of bones? Teresa was someone no guy would turn down. Hell, Trip was half gay, and he had figured it out.
“Let’s get to work,” Jett suggested.
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As I finished rocking out to
“Oh, my God! It’s the terrorist!” I said as I recognized the girl who had sat by me on the flight out to LA.
“Shut up,” she said, pouting. “You know you wanted me. I saw you never took your eyes off me.”
“Sorry, Linda Blair, I had a brunette last week. I’m only picking up blonds this week. Check with me next month,” I said as I tried to act like a typical Hollywood douche.
She suddenly looked rather queasy. I ran over to the corner where there was a garbage can. When I turned around, both Jett and Terrorist Girl were laughing at me.
“You had to be there,” I said to Jett in self-defense.
“David, this is Priyanka Amarnath,” Jett said as an introduction.
What!?! This was the girl I was supposed to sing with? The voice I heard on the recording sounded like a hard-drinking, six-pack-a-day smoker who could shred a song. This diminutive pixie should have a little girl’s voice.
“My friends call me Pree,” she said as she shook my hand. “I hear you picked
“They asked me what I knew,” I clarified.
“That’s cool. Sing it for me,” Pree ordered.
The sound guy cued up the music, and I began to sing it. When I’d gotten a few bars in, Pree waved for me to stop.
“Hang on. We’re going to put them to sleep with that version. I’ve got an idea,” Pree said as she grabbed Jett’s arm and pulled her out the door so they could plan.
A few minutes later, Pree talked to me through the speakers.
“Listen to the Elvis version. With your deep voice, I think you can pull this off,” she said.
They played the first half of the song. I got my inner Elvis on and then sang it for them. They stopped me and came back into the studio. Jett was holding an electric guitar, and Pree had two drumsticks.
“Here’s what I’m thinking. We start it out with David singing it all sweet and innocent like the Elvis version through the first chorus, but I stop him. Then we rock it out,” Pree explained to me.
We tried it again. When I got done singing the first part, Pree brought the drumsticks together to get the beat.
Jett ad-libbed with her guitar to give it a rock vibe, and Pree jumped in and sang an up-tempo rock version of the song.
When she was done, I could tell it wasn’t working.
“There needs to be a transition,” I said. “It’s too jarring to go from Elvis to
“Do you have anything you think would work?” Jett asked the studio guy.
He held up a finger to indicate he needed to dig through some audio clips to find what he wanted.
“I can envision you waving your arms and saying, ‘This is boring. Let’s rock this,’ or something like that,” I suggested.
The studio guy came up with a couple of choices. We settled on the sound of a record scratching. We spent the rest of the morning working on the new version. I had fun watching the two singers bounce ideas off each other. The only question was, would Rita want us rocking out on her Christmas show?
What I took away from the session was that Pree was a badass rocker girl.
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