Archive of Our Own

Soul Evans didn’t have the kind of meteoric rise to the top that people love to imagine. Instead he built his career in a slow wave, and I’m here just in time to see it crest. 

He got his start working with his brother, although not many people know that Soul co-wrote many of Wes’s songs, like some kind of child prodigy. Why would they - it’s not like he used the name he performs under now. 

I met Soul previously, when I was interviewing his brother - Soul is the taller of the two, but Wes’s tendency towards spectacle casts the kind of distraction Soul could hide behind. He was quiet, and as much as Wes had tried to drag him into the conversation then, his feet were firmly planted in his brother’s shadow. He was a closed book then, and trying to pry anything out of him over the course of this interview is just as difficult, but more noticeable, considering the fact he can’t foist me off onto his brother in the same ways.

To be entirely transparent - he definitely tried that. Wes is incredibly talented, the kind of visionary artist in league with Lady Gaga, but he’s not going to be following her footsteps into acting anytime soon that’s for sure. That spontaneous facetime didn't fool me (for long). 

Soul picked me up from the airport in a rental car and a pair of sunglasses. The only attempt he makes to disguise his appearance from the handful of people milling around the small regional airport is a bandana worn 2001 style. Soul asks if I want to drive. He’s rusty - he only got the car because he needs to cart me around for the next few days. 

I can’t drive stick, so I take my chances with his driving.

Normally I would ask a few questions in the car - people open up in the car in a way they don’t anywhere else. Something about the hypnotising nature of the scenery flickering past the windows makes the world and its consequences feel less real. When I try, Soul shushes me and says he can’t talk and drive at the same time.

Evidently he can't drive stick either.

Soul lives in an unassuming apartment, toeing off his shoes when he enters, and asking me to do the same or his roommate is going to kill us. I wish I was wearing better socks for a minute. 

The first real question of the interview is prompted by learning this. 

A roommate?

            Yeah.

This is our only meaningful conversation for what feels like the next hour and half. I recorded this interview, the real time that passes is only ten minutes. I meet his cat. It’s black, and the most singularly fickle creature I have ever encountered. It alternates between demanding my attention and biting me. 

Soul goes through all the motions of making tea without explicitly offering me any - he puts the cup down beside me, leaving sugar, and milks both oat and cow within reach.

It’s really good tea.

Soul’s apartment isn’t the kind of polished bachelor pad I’d expected - it looks like the kind of apartment I’d had at his age - a mismatched collection of furniture that looks to be some combination of ‘free to good home’ or IKEA or both. The end table beside the couch (the original shape and colour of which is lost under a layer of hand-knit throws and the heavy press of a weighted blanket) has the look of an unfinished DIY project, an upcycled item that never crossed the line to refinished, a couple of stubborn layers of paint clinging to the crevices. 

He offers me a tour of more than his main living space.

It’s not much of a tour - Soul lives in a two bedroom apartment with an open plan living room. He shows me where the bathroom is, the towel rack is hanging off the wall with a threatening sort of aura, and more importantly is the fact that the towels are stacked on top of a set of basket drawers. Soul stares at it for a minute, as if showing me around has allowed him to see the room with new eyes. 

Is that safe?

            Yeah, I mean. Probably. I’ll call the landlord about it. 

Grammy nominated Soul Evans has a landlord. Last I checked (immediately, but the fact checker assigned to this piece is going to check again) he had a net worth of $20 million dollars. 

I didn’t know you rented.

            I’ve been looking around - but It’s kind of a hassle to try and find somewhere that suits. Places don’t go up for sale around here very often. 

He points out his bedroom, opening the door to allow me to glance in at his best attempts at renter-friendly soundproofing. I don’t think it was entirely successful in execution. 

How much was the deposit on this place?

            You don’t think I’m getting it back?

I look at him, standing in the doorway to a room layered with black foam and thick grey flame retardant felt. I look at him some more, and the denial melts off him, and he sags under the new weight of realisation. 

I don’t think you’re getting it back.

            I don’t think I’m getting it back. 

Soul nods to his roommate’s door, but doesn’t offer me a look in. This seems like a reasonable attempt at privacy.

I do not know exactly what constitutes an unreasonable attempt at privacy, but I feel like the topic of Soul’s roommate might come close. 

To be clear, when I took this assignment, like all respectable journalists, I received a very long list of things I was not allowed to talk about. Ninety percent of things covered on the ‘not allowed to talk about it’ list directly pertained to his roommate. I am not allowed to use their name. I am to edit them out of any incidental interactions. As much as possible I should ignore them. 

I am risking my entire career by referring at all to the fact that he has a roommate. 

It feels important to risk my career like this because it’s very important to understand the context of the rest of the interview. 

Also he talks about her a lot and when I was actually trying to pull together the interview I sent him a supercut of all the times she came up.

Soul doesn’t elaborate on his answers in the natural conversational way of an ideal interview.  “Sorry,” he admits quietly. “I’m a bit worn out after all that.” He tosses his hand over his shoulder, all that being a reference to the fact he just peeled away from his brother's tour and subsequent press, before diving straight into his own album release. He has his own tour looming - his first solo affair in front of crowds. 

Soul’s roommate arrives.

She creeps into the room with all the subtlety of a mother who insists that ‘you won’t even know I’m here’ while she moves the laundry from the washer to the drier in the basement you’ve recently decided to hang out with your friends like the cool kids do on tv. In her defensce - she does have some tote bags that she swings onto the counter that heft with the weight of a week's worth of groceries.

She introduces herself cheerfully, and asks if I’m staying for dinner. I look at Soul. Soul looks at his roommate. His roommate asks if I have any dietary restrictions. I tell her I can’t have dairy. She can’t either. 

Does she always - 

            No. We take turns.

She shoos us back to our conversation. 

What motivated your decision to go solo?

            I never really wanted to to be honest - when I started working on the album it wasn’t like I sat down and said ‘alright bye Wes I have to do my own thing’ I was writing all these songs and passing them off to him like I’d been doing my entire life and he adds his own flair, pads them out and makes them so his own you can barely see my hand in them at all. It works the other way around too - he’ll send me a voice note or something and I’ll take the bones of what he’s left from me and build some muscle, then he’ll do the skin - that sounds gross. And I’d been churning them out, just working through a lot of stuff and Wes had to like, sit me down and stage an intervention. [Roommate] was there. 

Soul’s unnamed roommate knocks her headphones - a set of the Master & Dynamic from Wes’s collaboration a handful of years ago, with duct tape around the middle - back off her ear at the sound of her name. She frowns a little.

“We’re not talking about you.”

Yes we were. 

“You said you wouldn’t,” she says quietly. “You know I don’t like--” - “

The abrupt way she stops makes me think she narrowly avoided insulting me personally.

“He’s not allowed to mention you at all in the article.”

A silence stretches between them for a second, before she turns back to chopping.

Your brother?

            Oh yeah. I was passing him off all these songs I was working on in the middle of the night. They were all pretty rough. He rang up [Roommate]--

She coughs deliberately. 

I can edit it out?

            Sorry.

“It’s - just don’t use my name or anything I guess,” she offers.

Soul stumbles over the gap in the interview, the interruption throwing him off.

“Wes called me- - “ she prompts.

“You should tell it,” Soul says. “I wasn’t even there.”

“It’s your interview?”

Soul looks at her for a second, and she cracks. She takes off the headphones and pauses something on her phone. She doesn’t stop making dinner, and in an awkward effort not to be so deliberately interviewing her, I angle the dictaphone towards her without actually moving it any closer. 

“So Wes called me,” she starts. “It really wasn’t that long a conversation. He was worried because Soul kept sending him stuff in the middle of the night. That’s all.”

“That is not all,” Soul insists, oddly vehemently for someone who insists he wasn’t even there. “You ganged up on me.”

“We did not.”

“You absolutely did.”

“You were writing really good stuff, and Wes wanted you to get the credit you deserved for it,” she says, thinking for a minute. In the silence before she says this final part you can hear her turn it over in her mind like she’s weighing the risk of being honest. “When you were younger, you always used Wes as a kind of shield, because you didn’t think you were good enough at music to make it on your own. You always acted like the only way you had a music career was because Wes gave one, like some kind of nepotism hand out. We just wanted you to know that we thought you didn’t need him.”

So your roommate and your brother ganged up on you to write a solo album?

            Pretty much, yeah. Wes put his foot down and refused to touch any of the songs I was sending him until I wrote an album. He wouldn’t even give me any feedback on the album because he didn’t want to ‘taint it.’

Ouch.

            Yeah I took it pretty hard at the time.

(If you listen very carefully to the recording you can almost make out his roommate muttering something. I was never able to make it out but I have reason to assume it caused some offence because Soul threw a cushion at her.)

What was it like, writing without Wes? You were completely on your own with this one.

            I hadn’t written a real song solo since I was a teenager, and even then, I used to always go to Wes to get his opinion. I really relied on him, so I get why he cut me off, but it was so hard. For the first time in my life I had to dig into myself and really find what kind of music I wanted to make. Before it was always for Wes, or someone else. There was always a distance between me and music. Even if it was personal, it never had to be vulnerable the same way that it did with this album. It was important to be vulnerable and authentic with this record, and I think I was ready to be? I wasn’t completely horrified by the prospect of being known like that. 

It’s a very different way of working than your brothers.

            Wes is all about creating a persona for each album, a whole life to explore. It’s all about telling one story about this new character. There was no character with Empty Room . It’s just me. It’s a little weird though, like that quote about Mount Fuji in Japanese paintings. 

Mount Fuji?

            Yeah, like if you see a Japanese painting, it either has Mount Fuji, or it was left out very deliberately, or you’re on Mount Fuji? Wes is the Mount Fuji of my music, and he’s very deliberately not on the album. I didn’t even use violin on it, because I knew I wouldn’t want anyone else to play them that wasn't him. 

Was this philosophy part of the reason you didn’t have any featured artists on any of the tracks?

            Part of it, yeah. And I guess that's kind of an artist's excuse. I’m a pretty shy guy, and I was terrified of the idea of asking someone to be on the album and them saying no. I didn’t ask anyone because I was really terrified of getting rejected. I’ve met a lot of people at industry events, and I have, like, phone numbers for some of them. Some of them I would’ve liked to have worked with, and some I worked with on Wes’s stuff too. But I think my refusal to talk to anyone about featuring on it worked in my favour. I think putting anyone on it would’ve just undermined the whole idea that I was striking out on my own. 

“We didn’t mean to make you feel like that,” His Roommate says. “That you couldn’t ask for help, or like you needed to prove to everyone that you could do it by yourself. I just wanted you to know you could.”

“I didn't think you made me feel like that,” Soul says, moving to clear the emptied tea mugs. “I wasn’t ready to ask anyone to come be part of my work that wasn’t Wes, and he was off the table. He was always the one who wanted the particular artists on our stuff. But I think that had, like, the added bonus of making it like my ‘I’m not on Disney Channel Anymore’ Album. Like I can do it by myself if I want to.”

“I don’t think anyone would’ve said no,” His Roommate frowns at him. “Not after they heard it. And Black Star sent me so many texts about getting on there. He was really shameless about it. He really wanted to feature on it. I had to mute him.” 

“You never told me that.”

“You told me you didn’t want anyone on the album?”

“He could’ve texted me.”

Why didn’t he text you? Doesn’t he have your number?

            He does have my number. Why didn’t he just text me? He texts me all the time. He’s a very prolific texter. (Soul’s Roommate nods emphatically.) I would’ve put him on the album. You know. If he’d asked me. 

That would’ve been a very different album.

            Yeah maybe that was for the best. Artistic vision or whatever.

There’s a pause.

“Did anyone else ask?” Soul leans away from me, craning his head over his shoulder to ask his Roommate who is evidently only a secret from me, and not the entire music industry.  

“Yeah, sure,” she says, ladling soup into bowls. It smells delicious in here. 

“Who?” I confess, dear readers, that I wanted to bold this to indicate that I also desperately wanted to know who his Roommate fended off. 

“Oh, you know”--she carries the soup over to the coffee table and returns to grab herself a bowl. It’s a thick lentil dhaal, with a stupid amount of naan--“Kidd rang too. A few others. My uh…”

She sits down on the floor on the other side of the coffee table, folding her legs underneath herself. Soul slides off the couch to do the same. Not wanting to feel like some kind of giant, I too join them on the floor. 

Readers, if we might pause during this absolutely pivotal point in the interview. I had no idea who Soul’s Roommate was until this point. We’d been introduced, of course, and I’d agreed not to talk about her, and then not to use her name. But I assumed that was because she had an ordinary life that she didn’t want disturbed by her bizarre association with a musician. But the name Soul gave me, the one on the documents I signed agreeing not to acknowledge she existed, is not a name you would recognise by design.

“My dad asked.” 

That hangs in the air the way nothing else has so far. 

“He did?” Soul leans forwards, watching me carefully. 

“He did.”

I don’t want to ask.

I’m dying to know.

“He did,” she pauses, and glances at me. She makes a choice in that moment, glancing over to fill me in, pointing out the elephant they’re squeezing around in this cosy living room conversation. “My dad, Spirit Albarn.”

Spirit Albarn.

So your Roommate is…

            Angel Albarn, yeah.

Angel flinches at the name, as if recognition stings. 

Angel Albarn. Back from the dead, if the rumours are to be believed. The ease at which we’d been using the other name leads me to believe that not many people call her that these days. 

“I think you should head to the hotel,” Soul says. “We'll pick this up tomorrow.”

I leave in a kind of dizzy stupor.

Angel Albarn. 

I feel like I’ve found the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. 

Her parents were one of the most famous celebrity couples ever. They were everywhere back in the day - they still are, but they aren’t a couple anymore. It feels redundant to tell people who read Rolling Stone articles that Spirit Albarn is a multi-platinum artist, one of the most successful musicians alive. It feels slightly more excusable to remind readers of Rolling Stone of his ex-wife, Kami Albarn a multi-award winning actress, with a good shot at Best Actress in a leading role at this year's Oscars.

They were the It Couple.

Every inch of their lives was documented in the early two thousands.

They couldn’t step outside without being trailed by paparazzi. 

The reported price for the baby photos of the woman who just made me soup was five million dollars. 

Even the photos of Angel Albarn being shepherded to school with her head hidden under a blanket were worth a mint in those times. Looking at the few I can find of her face now, I see the resemblance, the way her parents' features have blended. She’s not unrecognisable in adulthood, now that I know, but I doubt anyone is on the lookout for the daughter of a celebrity couple that broke up years ago who stopped appearing in public when she was about ten. 

There were rumours, as previously mentioned - some people thought she was dead. Some people just thought she didn’t want to live in the limelight in the same way her parents had. Most people think it was probably the attempted kidnapping. 

I don’t want to ask her about it. 

I’m on thin ice with regards to meeting word count on this interview if Soul decides not to talk to me tomorrow. 

But for anyone who wants the gory details, here they are. I listened to a podcast about it. 

Kami and Spirit were doing the last interview they would ever undergo together, talking about the realities and baring all of their failed marriage. It was on Oprah. Angel was on set, and she was supposed to be interviewed too. The kidnapper was a man who worked on the lot who was obsessed with Kami Albarn - he’d been stalking her for months, but police hadn’t traced who he was just yet. They didn't consider it to be a serious threat. He saw his chance, and grabbed her, and ran. The whole thing was caught on camera, and made it to air in one of the most dramatic Oprah episodes of all time.

I also watched the Oprah episode after the podcast. 

Some people think that it was staged to cover up her death, or the fact that she was replaced with a clone. Orchestrated as an excuse to hide her away from the public like they’d always been criticised for not doing. Any hope of reconciliation was lost and the marriage slipped apart like a ribbon come undone.  After that, there’s hardly any photos of Angel Albarn. 

When I arrive at the apartment the next morning I worry that I won’t be let inside. I hit the buzzer, and wait outside - it’s already sweltering out, and it’s still early. They let me in, but for all I know, that could just be so that they have the smug satisfaction of slamming a door in my face. 

Soul doesn’t do that either, opening the door and gesturing me inside. He’s a nice guy, and I have an anxiety disorder. Also I think he was contractually obligated to finish out the interview. 

“We talked about it, you know,” Angel said. “Last night.”

Talked about what?

            Whether or not Angel should let you print her name.

“You can use Angel,” she offers. “But please be careful.”

I edit out full paragraphs about the view from their living room balcony in my mind.

We hammer out a few new conditions of the interview. 

Soul defers the interview to Angel, who is not the subject but I am burning with questions for her, nevertheless. He sits in the room and does the careful work of sewing in all the loose ends on his latest knitting project, unwilling to leave me alone with her. 

Can I ask about Spirit -why did he want to be on the album?

            I don’t even know how he heard about it to be honest - I didn’t tell him. 

“The album was kind of an open secret while I was working on it,” Soul offers without looking up. “Everyone knew I wasn’t working on stuff with Wes as much. He went off to try to get cast in a Broadway show to cover the gap a little, but it didn’t really work out.”

Wes Evans’ short lived Rum Tum Tugger. He performed for less than a week, broke his leg on stage in an embarrassingly ironic turn of events, and his entire run had to be covered by an understudy. By all accounts he was a great Rum Tum Tugger for the few nights he held the role despite my own personal experience with his acting prowess. 

“What was the question again?”

“Why did Spirit want to be on the album?” Soul asked. “He doesn’t even like me. Don’t put that in the article.”

“Absolutely put that in the article.”

“Don’t.”

I think we can rely on context clues to know who admitted defeat in this battle.

Why did you-

            Fade into urban myth? I hated people knowing everything about me. My Dad - he’s never shied away from the media - shared everything about me with them. I hated it even then. I hated that strangers knew my name, that there would be all these flashing lights every time I went outside. It was scary. 

How did you do it?

            I had to really dig my heels in - I started refusing to go to events, hiding under blankets to avoid the flashing lights. More and more I just wouldn't go out with my parents in public. I never visited Mama on set or Dad in the recording studio. It was like I was a weapon, not just in the way kids can be in that situation. But if I was seen with one or the other there would be all the stories about whose side was little Angel taking. My parents divorce was really public, and really messy. Their marriage fell apart around me. 

            I got to see parts of it first hand, but they were so careful around me. It's crazy to think that they thought they could hide it all from me but every rag in town knew their business. I knew. Of course I knew. But I don’t think I should’ve learned about it like that. It wasn’t fair to know things like that, when I was too young to really understand them. Maybe when I was older, maybe coming from my parents - there’s some things I think you just never want to know about your parents, about their marriage. 

            I couldn’t share how I was feeling about it with anyone, my parents put me in therapy and everything but I was really paranoid that if I said anything it would get back out to the press, be twisted. 

How do you stay off the radar these days - everyone’s got a camera in their pockets. 

            I don’t have any social media. It would be too easy for people to find me that way. And I just don’t think that many people care about what I’m doing or where I am. 

Why don’t you use your, uh, nom-de-plume?

            My dad would insist on following me anyway. He doesn’t really understand why I don’t want to live like him. He respects it as much as he can, but his career, his life - it’s exactly what he always wanted, and when you want something that badly, you don’t really understand why someone else wouldn’t. Mama is better. But it’s better not to tempt faith by having it. If he followed me, I think people would put the pieces together. And it was a lot of effort to be this obscure.

How’d you meet?

            Oh, at my Dad’s birthday. He always--. He always throws like some kind of themed party that everyone is supposed to wear a costume to. He does that just so I can come. It’s sweet actually. He can’t help himself having this huge party, but he makes sure It’s fine for me to show up in like - a skeleton outfit or something so that I can go without anyone recognising me.

“Yeah,” Soul corroborates. “It was the first one me and Wes went to. I didn’t want to go.”

“You hate parties.” 

“I do. So much.”

“Wait here.” Angel disappears into her bedroom.

You hate parties?

            Can’t stand them. I’ve always hated them, ever since I was little. My parents are kind of… well they used to like to throw these parties when I was kid, fundraisers and the like.

It’s easy to forget, in this deliberately ordinary apartment, that Soul Evans doesn’t come from humble beginnings either. His family are old money, the kind of dignified socialites that settle into a sort of D-list celebrity and run charity balls. When I search later on, it’s not hard to find a handful of pictures of Soul at these events in his youth. 

I can’t imagine that was fun for a kid.

            I hated it. Wes loved it - that was where he got bitten by the bug to perform. He’s classically trained on the violin, and in those days I would accompany him on the piano. It was kind of our role to be the centre of attention at these parties, the cute and talented Evans brothers, child prodigies. It came so easy to Wes, charming people, saying the right things. People fall in love with Wes when they meet him. He’s a very charming individual. I’ve always struggled with that. It’s part of the reason this solo thing is so hard. I’m just not as likeable or personable or whatever as Wes. It was worse when I was a kid - people used to say I was “deeply unsettling.”

At that time I reassured him, looking at the photos later, I have to concede a point to whoever he’s quoting.  

That must’ve been hard.

            It was. It still is, to feel like everyone would rather your brother over you. I don’t think that feeling is ever going to go away. It’s just something I have to deal with day by and day. Wes is great, don’t get me wrong, but it’d be nice to be someone’s favourite.

Doesn’t the album doing so well help with that?

            Yes, and no. There’s a certain level of curiosity motivating the sales of the album rather than any individual interest. It’s hard to know who's listening because they like it, and who’s listening because they’re curious about Wes Evans' kid brother who's always hanging around. So I think a lot of it is still me hanging off his coattails rather than any genuinely cultivated success of my own.

Half a million copies can’t all be curiosity.

            That’s the yes. There’s got to be some people out there who just like the album for what it is, without the Wes connection. Who listened to it, and appreciated it for what it is.

It’s been really well reviewed.

            Yeah that doesn’t hurt either. 

I guess you’ll just have to write another one.

            I guess I will.

Angel comes back into the room, holding a photo. She flops down onto the couch, offering it to me. 

It’s got the faintly blurred, dreamy quality of the more charming type of disposable camera shots. It’s a photo of the two of them, hauled into frame by a grinning Wes. All of them are in costume - my best guess is that it was a Versailles themed party. The outfits are outlandish, and Angel’s giant headpiece does a lot of the work of distracting from her face. She holds a masquerade mask in one hand, presumably for dodging photos. They both look very young.

“That was the day we met,” Angel said. “You remember that?”

“Of course I remember that,” Soul makes a gesture that I interpret as wanting to look at the photo. I hand it off to him. A certain open fondness creeps over his face as he looks at it. 

Is there anymore to the story - or just that you were both at this party?

            Spirit doesn’t generally have a lot of kids at his parties. Angel was usually the youngest person there.

“It was pretty boring,” Angel admits. “I never had anyone to hang out with but he always really wanted me there. Sometimes Black Star would be there, but not always. He wasn’t this time.”

“Yeah,” Soul said. “I was looking for somewhere quiet, away from all the madness, but the only place I found was already occupied.”

“I’m not anti-party like Soul is,” Angel insists. “But it’s no fun to be at a party like when you’re a kid and everyone treats you like a kid. There’s no one your age to dance with or anything!” 

“Yeah, so she was in a sulk.”

“I was not sulking!”

“You were upset that you didn’t have anyone to dance with.”

“I practised so hard.”

“Really? But you were so bad at it.”

“That’s why I practised so much.”

“It was fun,” Soul admits. “Even though you stepped on my toes like a million times.” 

“We just kept in touch after that,” Angel says. “You know, before that, I always avoided befriending people who were paparazzi risks. I mean I had Black Star, but he wasn’t a problem like that until it was too late to get rid of him.” 

I know there was a moratorium on me writing about Angel, but what about the album? It’s all about her, isn’t it?

There is a long silence instead of an answer.

It stretches.

Angel’s eyes could bore a hole right through Soul’s head.

I try to think of any other question. I look down at my list, handwritten and reworked from yesterday. So many of the questions have been stricken, and I struggle to find one that wouldn’t  get me in trouble

Tell me about - 

            Yeah it's about her. Our life. 

“Soul!” Angel’s voice curls back in on itself, the yell curtailing as she remembers that there’s a guest present. “You said you wouldn’t! Which ones?”

Soul pauses again. 

I want to save him from being berated, but I have to ask

Don’t you know? Have you not listened to it?

            Of course I’ve listened to it! I’m just not… I’m not very good at music. It sounds really good? 

“Angel’s hopeless when it comes to music - she doesn’t get it at all,” Soul says. “That’s why I know I could put some songs about - “

He gestures between them. It’s frustratingly vague. 

“Y’know. On the album,” Soul grimaces. “I knew you’d never recognise that they were about you.”

“Which ones?”

Soul braces himself. 

“Most of them. All of them.” Soul scoots away from his roommate. His roommate? I’m not supposed to speculate. I’m a serious journalist and it’s facts only but they have to be more than roommates right? The man just wrote her an entire ‘vulnerable and authentic’ album. “All of the ones that made it onto the album and some that didn’t.” 

“You mean the ones I told you to pull because it was too obvious they were about me?”

“Yeah those ones.”

I want to hear the songs that were explicitly enough about Angel Albarn that she pulled them from the album. I want to ask how she missed all the other references to someone, some person. Who did she think that was, if it wasn’t her? Meeting her is like filling in a blank in Soul’s life, in his work, understanding the negative space his music makes up around their life.

“He’s going to think we’re together! Everyone’s going to think you have some kind of secret girlfriend, and that it’s you know. Angel Albarn.” Angel is mad. I understand Soul’s instinct to scoot away. I want to scoot away. 

I scoot away like the coward that I am.

“He definitely already thinks that you’re my secret girlfriend,” Soul says, the he in question made undoubtable by his thumb jutting in my direction. “He thought that when I asked him not to tell anyone anything about my roommate.”

I did think that, yeah.

Up until this moment, I still thought that.

“Why would you think that?” Angel turns on me, her eyes are sharp and they cut right to the core. It’s always unsettling as a journalist to have the questions turned on you. That’s not how this is supposed to work. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work.

Honestly?

She nods.

I didn’t recognise you, and I thought Soul probably just wanted to keep the uh… teenage girl demographic. They don’t love when their heart throb is taken.

“Hey,” Soul protests. “I’m not a heart throb!”

“You are too!” Angel insists. “Is this about Wes again?”

“What?”

“Do you think you’re not as…”

Pretty?

Angel waves her hand at me, like she can grab the word out of the air, rather than say it again.

“As pretty as Wes?” she says. 

“You think I’m pretty?” Soul responds, completely ignoring the question.

Angel Albarn glares at me, but she does not take the hissed words of the statement.

“You’re very pretty. Prettier than Wes.”

In the name of journalistic integrity I do not admit which brother I think is prettier. They are both very attractive men, each with dedicated fans who have a preference of one over the other;. and if I had to know this in the name of trying to verify which of the brothers was more popular in the teenage female demographic, you do too. There is a not statistically insignificant portion of their fanbases who think the brothers are in some kind of secret romantic relationship. 

Soul admits to thinking Angel is very pretty too. 

I think about emailing my boss that I have to give up on the Soul Evans article and move back home to Wisconsin and try to elbow my way back into the family farm. Maybe my sister will take pity on my failed journalism career and let me raise goats again. 

I miss raising goats.

It was easier. 

No one had secret not-girlfriend-a-lister progeny roommates on the goat farm.

But no. I’ve worked too hard and too long to get where I am to give up now.

I haul on the reins to try to regain control of the interview. 

You mentioned earlier the songs that kicked off this whole album process - you were sending a lot of stuff to him in the middle of the night?

            I’ve always been a bit of a night owl, and ever since the attack - I’d been struggling with insomnia, finding it really hard to sleep at night that sort of thing. So when I couldn’t sleep I would just get up and write music. I was writing way more than I’d written in years, churning out material. Usually when I write for Wes or other people, they tell me what they want, or… It's like trying to solve a puzzle, anticipating what people want. With Wes, because he’s designed this persona for the album, it’s writing a part of that character’s story - even when I was pulling on my own stuff to write, it wasn’t really to deal with that stuff? It was just a tool in my chest, things I could pull out of my life to work from? But I was… for the first time in my life I wanted to respond to everything I was struggling with with music and face it head on, instead of using music to hide from it? Music has always been an escape for me, but I didn’t want to be the kind of person who hid from my problems forever. 

            That, and I had to go to therapy for the whole thing and my therapist was like, I’m going to teach you how to deal with your trauma in a healthy and productive way, instead what you are currently doing, which is hiding it in a box under your bed and hoping it never causes you any problems. It was a fucking nightmare but she was right. 

I hadn’t wanted to ask about the incident Soul referred to, but once he brought it up…

The attack you mention - that was the incident where you were stabbed by a fan?

            Well, it’s only happened the once, so yeah, that’s the attack. I used to suffer from insomnia a lot when I was younger, but I had it mostly under control until that happened. So I couldn’t sleep at night - I was really struggling to write music that was divorced from what I was feeling? So I was writing about my life, and the attack - 

I didn’t think any of the songs on the album were about that incident.

            No, not in the strictest sense of the word - they were all the first things I wrote, so I guess when it came to putting it all together they just didn’t make the cut.

“They were the songs I vetoed,” Angel interjects. “Some of them anyway… I shouldn’t have asked you to take them out. They were… they were really powerful.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Soul shrugs. The work of tidying away the ends is done, and his hands flutter, flickering empty around him for something to do. “It was important to write them, but after you said it… I didn’t want to be reminded of it, if it was playing like, in the supermarket or whatever.”

“It was horrible,” Angel folds in on herself. “I’m glad you’re okay now.”

This was before you stepped out of the shadows, so most people don’t actually know much about what happened. If it’s not too painful - 

            Probably less painful to answer than it was to get stabbed. That was a joke. Trauma is ongoing. I was playing a small solo gig - classical stuff in a church. I don’t do it that often, but it’s nice to go back to my roots and do some really technical playing. It’s not something there’s much call for in the modern songwriting scene. It was after the gig, and the place had pretty much cleared out, and there was a single fan hanging around who wanted to - 

“You can tell the truth,” Angel says. She refuses to look at either of us. “If you want. You don’t have to keep lying all the time.”

The truth?

            It wasn’t my fan. I didn’t have fans then, not really. They were… They were trying to stab Angel. I wasn’t even a blip on their radar. They weren’t interested in me, except in that I know Angel. I, uh- 

“He got in the way,” Angel’s hands fist into the layers of blanket on the couch. “Stood between me and the knife. He saved my life.”

Soul is quiet, but he doesn’t deny what she said. 

I leave it there for the day.

It’s the last day I have to wrangle something of journalistic value out of Soul Evans - something that his fans and fans of the magazine want to read. I have the bare bones of something I could pull together, the kind of cut and paste rote questions that a lesser journalist would be immediately satisfied with. By a lesser journalist, I of course mean me before I got here and everything about this interview careened wildly off my neat list of handwritten questions.

It’s my last chance. 

I’ve rewritten my questions at least five times since I got here, sometimes physically, sometimes mentally. 

I knock on their door.

Angel answers.

She ushers me in, shushing me gently as she moves to boil the kettle. She lifts their cat out of the way with her foot, with the kind of practised ease of a typical cat-owner. She flaps her hand, waving me over to the sofa. 

Soul’s not here.

I settle onto the couch, looking around awkwardly for details of his life I can wring out of the decor. Angel presses a mug into my hand - I look around for milk, but she’s already fixed it the way I like. It’s such a kind gesture I feel the immediate urge to cry. 

I don’t, for reasons cited as professionalism. 

“Here,” Angel passes me her Master and Dynamic headphones, thumbing through a brick of an iPod from a time when a phone alone was not enough to provide music. 

I take them, but I don’t put them on.

“He’s asleep,” Angel says. 

Should we wake him up?

            I’ll wake him up in a while if he doesn’t show signs of life soon. We were - we were up pretty late last night, talking. But I think you’ll want to hear these. And Soul won’t play them for you. 

I’m not sure it’s appropriate to listen - not if he wouldn’t want me - 

            Oh, it’s not like that -I mean. It’s my fault. I don’t want people to hear them. Soul doesn't really believe in writing music to lock it away forever. For now, maybe, but not forever. 

Then why?

            He knew they upset me. It feels so selfish? You know? To have been… Soul was the one who was hurt. We don’t really talk about it, not to each other. It’s the circle of trauma? You’re supposed to talk about your feelings about these things away from the circle, not towards? So we both have our therapists and - we don’t really talk to each other about it. But it was really bad, for both of us. For a long time. Way worse for Soul - 

Are you sure about that?

            Of course - he was the one who got stabbed - and it -

It wasn’t your fault. 

            Wasn’t it?

You need a better therapist. 

She doesn’t answer, pushing me instead to take the headphones and stretch them over my ears. I have to adjust them a little, but not much. 

“Ready?” 

I nod.

She presses play.

The songs are raw - not the highly polished final work of an album, but the hoarse, quiet melodies of a man trying not to wake the girl sleeping in the next room. The piano is soft, but it’s a little more technically complex than what he released. The piano swells to fill in the gaps where words fail him, humming when the story falls away. Soft swears when his fingers fumble over the keys in his sleep deprived state. Whatever Soul said about raw, vulnerable, authentic - it all pales in comparison. This is raw. This is vulnerable. This is authentic. 

It’s a completely different album.

This isn’t the rough draft of Empty Room, this is something else entirely.

It’s painful, not to be able to share this, to have heard something that dug right into the essence of a person, everything they were dealing with, to know that you only have the sanitised manufactured album, cut off at the knees by his willingness to hide this story away, knowing the hurt it could cause one person, one person he considers deeply important to him. It is a different story, unfolding in this small living space, painting a picture that is so completely different to that of Empty Room .

Listening to this, I feel like giving him a Grammy for Empty Room is a waste - this secret, first nighttime album, preserved only in voice notes and copied oh so carefully to an iPod that you can hear the inner mechanics working in, is an album of the year, secreted away. 

Angel fidgets as I listen, watching the minutes, the timer tick down as each song plays. 

She’s waiting for me to hear the whole thing. 

But I understand why she asked now.

To listen to Soul paint a picture of this story, this wound, this rift that was rent between them by the accident, when he shares his worries, his anxiety - it feels wrong even to describe here. But to release this album, this lost masterwork, wouldn’t be sharing his pain alone. Not all horrors belong to us alone, and some are shared.

The trouble with these two, is that they both think the other is the epicentre of the hurt. 

I don’t know what kind of article I’ll have by the deadline, but I do know this.

I think you should wake him up. You need to talk. 

Angel unfolds herself from the couch beside me and moves to knock softly on the door before opening it and slipping inside. 

I can hear the quiet murmur of conversation through the walls.

Soul’s room is soundproofed pretty well, to try to stop music from leaking into the rest of the apartment and their neighbours. I don’t have firsthand experience of how well it works against mournful piano, but if Angel’s awareness of Soul’s nighttime songwriting sessions is any evidence, I would say success on that front is somewhat limited. It has certainly done damage to his security deposit. 

They aren’t in Soul’s room.

The room Angel disappeared into in order to rouse Soul was her own. 

The conversation leaks out into the rest of the apartment.

Their shared cat pours itself into the warm hollow beside my thigh, and I pass the time smoothing my hand over her thick back fur. She twists into me, purring. 

That’s all there is for a long time. 

A quiet conversation.

The purring of a cat.

Me, alone, in a stranger’s house. 

Then, slowly, it changes.

The door creeps open.

“Could you hear us out here?” Angel asks, nervously stepping out into the room. Her voice is thick. She doesn’t speak loudly, but after so much stillness, it fills the empty room. 

I think it would be polite to pretend I couldn’t. I think I would go down in music journalism history if I published any of it.

Yeah, I could.

            We should’ve talked in Soul’s room, huh?

It’s uh. I’ll strike it from the record.

And I do. 

Angel moves over to the kitchen, filling the kettle and setting it to boil. She’s making tea. She puts some bread in the toaster, and squints at the dial for a second before adjusting it. 

She’s making tea and toast. 

I stand up, and the cat leaps down from the couch. 

I lean on the opposite side of the counter to her.

“I always knew,” she says, and it’s hard to hear her over the sound of the boiling water. “That it couldn’t be like this forever. It was easier before, when Soul was hiding behind Wes.”

Interviewing people is more of an art than a science, and sometimes leaving a hanging silence is exactly what people need to fill. 

“I like what we have here - “ 

She gestures around to the apartment, to the quiet life they’ve carved out for themselves despite everything. 

“And I don’t want it to change.”

Change isn’t always bad - moving forward? Growing? It’s a part of life.

            I know. It took a long time for us to have this much though, and I think after everything, it felt like we were barely holding onto what we had. Like we couldn’t have more without letting go of what we have. 

Sometimes you have to let go of something to reach for something else.

            Maybe you should be a therapist.

I am starting to feel like one.

The kettle whistles, and Angel makes a pot of tea. She lets it steep while the toaster pops, and she spreads lemon curd over the slices. She looks up at me. I nod and she spreads the lemon curd over a third while I awkwardly read the label. The lemon curd is homemade, and according to a handwritten label, made with vegan butter. She pours three mugs of tea, and fixes them just right. She nods at me to carry one, and I take it.

I hold the toast in my free hand. 

Angel holds the two slices she has in her mouth, stacked and careful not to bit through.  

I follow Angel into her room. 

Angel’s room is painted a pale shade of yellow, and the walls are decorated with framed photos that appear to be held up by the ever renter friendly command strips. It’s a mirror image of Soul’s in terms of layout - the size is the same, the placement of the bed and the wardrobe. Where Soul had a long keyboard, wall mounted guitars, and loose recording equipment strewn around, the empty floor and neatly organised desk in Angel’s room makes me realise that Soul’s room might be bigger than I originally thought. The only thing approaching clutter in her room is the overstuffed bookcase, the shelves bowing in the middle under the weight. 

Angel’s bedspread is a floral print, which contrasts strongly with Soul, who’s more punk aesthetic stands out in the peaceful pastel room. He’s wearing the same clothes as he was yesterday, slightly worse for wear for having been slept in, and the spikes he meticulously styles his hair into are caved in on one side, indicating that he slept on his left side. His whole posture is crumpled, the creases in his t-shirt making him look like an unballed twist of paper. 

She hands him a mug, and with a hand finally free, takes the toast out of her mouth and offers him a choice of the two.

He takes one, biting down hard on the same corner she carried it by. 

Angel puts the other piece of toast back in her mouth.

Angel walks over the top of the bedspread, bracing her hand on the ceiling to plop down on the side of the bed against the wall. She stuffs a pillow behind her back and throws her legs over Soul’s. 

“Sit,” she says, waving at the end of the bed. 

Their cat jumps onto the bed before I can move, and hisses at me. 

Angel shrugs, helpless against the fickle nature of her own pet. I wheel the chair from her desk over, as the cat kneads the coverlet around Soul’s feet. He wiggles them, kicking his feet for the cat to pounce on. 

The silence swells around us for a minute, broken only by the quiet sounds of eating toast and tea. The lemon curd is good, and I make a note to ask for the recipe. They both look at me like they are expecting me to be the one to get things started.

So I do.

Angel played me the original version of the album.

            It’s not really the same album at all. What did you think of it?

It’s better than Empty Room.

            You think so?

You have got to learn to stand over your work, man. 

            Yeah… don’t get me wrong. I worked really hard on Empty Room. I still stand by it as a piece of work. It’s a solid album. It’s just not really my first solo album. 

Why’d you write a whole new album?

            I wasn't lying the other day, when I said I was ready to be open and authentic and all that. I really was trying to like, uh… bare my soul, if you’ll excuse the uh, the pun. But so much of my life, like you’ve been here, you’ve seen it, you tried to interview me with all those conditions - so much of my life is all tangled up with Angel’s and it’s hard to separate the two. The more I was writing the more it was like ‘oh, this isn’t just my stuff to share’ and that was like. Everything. And I knew Angel didn’t want, she knew she didn’t want to live in the limelight like that again.

Is that part of the reason why you were so reclusive before now? You’ve known each other for a long time.

            Part of it, yeah. I don’t love crowds either way, and I didn’t hate having this kind of privacy in my life. But I could always kind of use Angel as an excuse to maintain that privacy, or to avoid writing my own stuff and being open and vulnerable the way you have to be to make really good art I think. Or at least the way I have to be to make really good art. Everyone’s got their own process I guess.  Like I was always able to hide behind Wes’s talent and like, start quality and ambition, and his reliance on me to avoid people paying attention to me,and then as Angel became a bigger and bigger part of my life, I was justifying turning down opportunities to do stuff solo in the name of preserving her privacy rather than mine. 

So this was the first time someone pushed you to go solo?

            Not even close - Wes was pushing for me to do my own thing ever since we were kids. My parents kind of hated ‘my own thing’ but Wes always supported me. Our managers, agents, recording company - they always wanted me to try solo stuff, or to write more for other artists. I did try that a couple of times - 

And you were fairly successful at it, if I’m correct.

            Yeah, they did okay.* But I don’t love working with people that aren’t my brother as it turns out. All of those people were lovely, but it’s hard to get into sync with them the same way I am with Wes, and it feels like I’m fighting for the song to work, clawing it out my brain instead of letting it flow. Not that it’s always easy with Wes, but he’s my brother so we have years of experience just sort of coming back together after an argument with a very halfhearted apology and moving past whatever it was that set it off. You can’t do that with everyone. 

*Most these ‘okay’ songs spent at least six weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, for the record.

So the solo album was a long time coming?

            Yeah, I was fighting it a long time - Angel would mention it now and again, but I always thought she sounded relieved when I told her I wasn’t going to do it. Not yet. It was always - not yet, not yet, it’s too soon, after this project, after - I was constantly shoving it down the long finger. My manager was starting to lose hope, but then - 

The Attack?

            It changed a lot - there didn’t seem to be as much time ahead of me, like I couldn’t keep waiting, and I was like, it was like everything I’d been pressing down my whole life came bubbling up to the surface and I had to just get it all out from under my skin. It was like it was burning there, like if I didn’t write it down or deal with it I would just have spilled it all out onto some poor unsuspecting cashier or something. My therapist told me that is probably exactly what would’ve happened. 

So you started writing.

            Yeah. Everything I couldn’t keep in anymore. 

Empty Room is almost unrecognisable. Is there anything from the original verison left in there?

            There’s maybe one song from that that made it the whole way through. Everything else is new - it’s not like it wasn’t personal stuff, but it was much shallower. Skin deep, like scraping the surface of everything it took to make me into the person I am today, without getting into the meat, the bones of who I am. It was very surgical. Everyone knew I was writing an album, so after I wrote the first one, panicked and realised I could share that much of myself without sharing Angel too, I had to turn around and write another one. It was like knocking off my own work, but it was also hard to listen back. It was like writing around the album, skirting close to the edges and squeezing in the gaps. Finding the tinuy parts of me that I didn’t think were too obviously about all my shit and my life and Angel.

It’s impossible not to put the pieces together though, knowing Angel now.

            I don’t know what to tell you there. I thought I cut her out.

That’s the thing. You did, but you but it so close, you can fit Angel into the outline in your music once you know what to look for.

            Yeah that wasn’t a problem before this interview, except that maybe Balck Star wouldn’t shut up about it. And Wes. He listened to the original Empty Room, i guess thought, which is worse. 

You didn’t change the name?

            Not exactly? It didn’t really have a name until I realised I had to do the whole thing over again from scratch. So I guess the first version doesn't have a name at all really.

Would you ever consider releasing it?

            It’s not just my - 

Soul, you’re a smart guy. Angel’s consented for me to talk about her parents, about the attack, about your life together-

            It’s less polished. I’d have to re-record, get it produced -  

Sure, you could do that, but there’s something special in what you have already on that iPod.

            You think so?

Not if you didn’t want to.

            I don’t. Not really. I don’t feel like crying in front of people, present company excluded.

You should just release it.

            I don’t want to do that to Angel.

“It’s okay"--Angel shrugs, looking down at where her hand has crept across the bedspread to lace with Soul’s--“I think other people should know you like that. It doesn’t have to be just me.”

Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

            Maka. My name is Maka. You can put that in your article.

CORRECTION: After publication, Soul Evans reached out to us. He in fact has two cats, they just look very alike.