The RED Era - 5
REMUS: Naturally, with James and Regulus being James and Regulus, two more songs were added to RED by morning. We were all kind of surprised by what they wrote though. Regulus being upbeat? James being sad? Rare.
SIRIUS: We took the day off because most of us were not in the state to be writing or playing music. We reconvened the next day and went over what we had. We had eleven songs, but most of them were sad ones. I made the suggestion that we needed to add a couple more upbeat ones. Or at least, upbeating sounding ones.
JAMES: Sirius tasked me with the goddamn impossible. I couldn’t write happy songs because I wasn’t happy, and I couldn’t write love songs, not when I didn’t believe in it anymore. I told him he was out of his damn mind.
PETER: I was so annoyed. He and Lily broke up. We got it. But we needed to make music. God knows that’s what Lily was doing.
REGULUS: I was starting to lose it. I mean, everyone was working on something except for him. He just sat and listened until one day, I snapped and told him if there was a chance of Lily getting back with him, she wouldn’t want to get back with a man who abandoned his band when things got tough.
PETER: Rude? Yes. Necessary? Absolutely. We had to impress Gillyweed.
REGULUS: He got pissy and stormed off. I kept writing, but it sounded like he was destroying something in the room.
REMUS: I was about to go check on him when he emerged with a bubblegum pink notebook that Lily had given him. He grabbed the neck of his guitar and started playing.
JAMES: I wrote Stay Stay Stay for Lily long before there was an album. It was after some stupid argument we had, and she tried to throw a phone at me. When it missed, I realized that I wanted to marry her.
So I was planning it, but I was going to use this song to propose to Lils.
PETER: It was exactly what we needed. So I grabbed a pen and scrawled it down on the tracklist.
JAMES: Later, I was angry that nobody asked me if I was okay with using it or okay with singing it. But I figured that I’d only sing it once since recording would be a one-time thing, and our album needed it. I didn’t want to let them down.
SIRIUS: The last song was a struggle. Nothing they wrote was quite what we were looking for, and we were running out of fucking time.
PETER: I suggested we start with a bit of music and then write. So we tried that. But it was either not the vibe at all or too similar to other songs. I was stressed.
JAMES: We needed two more. Just two.
REMUS: I was reading the paper at breakfast when I saw Barty’s wedding announcement to Marionette Holcomb. My God, her ring was a rock.
REGULUS: It’s the family stone. A simple silver band with a pear shaped sapphire in the center. He had told me long ago that whenever he saw the ring, he thought of me, because we were soulmates and whatever. So when Remus showed us, I thought to myself, “I bet he thinks about me.”
I wrote it on the back of the paper.
JAMES: We only needed one more, and I had no idea what else to write about. I was complaining to my father, and he told me to write what I know.
Of course, I rolled my eyes and told him that was what I was already doing, and we decided that the last song written for the album should be written by the both of us, and we both knew different things.
He said, “And who says that can’t be in the same song?”
PETER: That night, I was out with Caroline, and Remus and Sirius were on a date, leaving James and Regulus alone. I remember telling Caroline I hoped they’d write a song.
REGULUS: We popped open a bottle of this sparkly pink shit Peter had and drank it straight out of the bottle, along with a greasy pizza. We were just watching some shitty movie, when James told me what his father said.
I scoffed and said, “What would we write about?”
He said, “How it feels to be in love and then lose it.”
JAMES: We finished the first bottle, cracked open a merlot, and wrote Red.
REGULUS: We wrote it on the floor, covered in pizza and wine, drunk off our asses.
It was the first time I really saw James.
…
His face was flushed crimson from the alcohol, and he’s got a smile that’s damn near blinding… but we were drunk. He wasn’t even looking at me.
JAMES: I hadn’t even looked at someone else after Lily, but something about Regulus was drawing me in.
I couldn’t look at him. It was too much feeling… too much. So I tried to look somewhere else, and landed on his collarbone, and I almost combusted.
But I was drunk and that’s all I ever left it at.
PETER: They forgot they wrote the song. I only noticed when Remus was cleaning up their mess while they slept. I saw scribbles on the pizza receipt and snatched it before Remus could throw it away.
SIRIUS: I woke them up and asked them about it and they just said, “Oh, right.”
REMUS: I was kind and let them sleep it off. When they were mildly coherent, we sat down together, finished up the order, and started thinking of a name.
JAMES: To me, it was obvious. RED. The color of Gillyweed is red, we had a song named Red, and it just made sense.
REGULUS: Gillyweed is maroon. I told him and he said it was the same thing. But I did like the name RED. Everybody did. So RED it was.
Later that week, I couldn’t get the wine and the pizza and the smile out of my mind. So I started writing a song with the correct fucking color. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
PETER: We started recording as soon as possible, and it was released in early October.
It debuted at #5.
Insane.