Kiss me on the cheek

The best job I got in the worst way

“That’s some lipstick,” he said.

I filled the silence with a long-winded explanation of the Sephora brand lip stain I was wearing and how it never smudged even during long gigs repeatedly smashing my face into a microphone.

“Kiss me on the cheek, then,” he said.

“What?” I laughed nervously.

“If it stays on so well, prove it”.

My stomach sank a little as I leaned over the gear stick to kiss him.

I’d first heard from him via text while on vacation in Asheville, North Carolina with my Mum.

“Hi this is [insert famous singer’s name] and I got your number from [insert bass friend’s name]. I’m looking for someone to play upright on a track - do you bow?”

If he hadn’t mentioned my friend’s name I would have assumed this was some kind of weird prank text from someone trying to catfish me.

I text back, “Hey, thanks for the message. Yes, I do bow and I’d love to be involved. When is the session?”

Over the next few days, we exchanged a few messages back and forward, and eventually, he asked if I was in town to meet up with him to “make sure the vibe was right”. This seemed a little strange given that session players are typically chosen for their skill set, not their personal vibe, but this job would be my first major-label recording session in Nashville and I wanted to do whatever it took to get it.

The next day we met for coffee at an East Nashville coffee shop amongst the burgeoning local artists taking meetings and working quietly on laptops. He asked me about my background, New Zealand, and we talked about Nashville.

I’d never been to a job interview like this for a recording session before, and I was a little surprised it was the artist hiring the session musicians, not the producer. I really wanted the job though, so I was willing to jump through whatever hoops he set up for me.

During the coffee date, the only mention of the session was him saying that he wanted to be sure I was really up to the task and could handle playing classical bowed parts. I could, I assured him, and he went back to chatting.

Over the next week, he started messaging me late at night, with memes or gifs that were either totally random or vaguely suggestive. I was confused about whether he was trying to hire me or date me, and was starting to feel a bit uncomfortable. I went along with it because I was worried that laying down boundaries might lose me the job. I was honestly a little starstruck too.

One night, he text me at around 11 pm saying he was hanging out at a local restaurant bar and asking me to join him. I was already in bed, and I wish I’d just closed my phone and gone to sleep, but I’m somewhat chagrined to say I got up, got dressed, and drove to the bar.

We had coffee again a few days later and afterward I drove him back to the studio, wearing the aforementioned bright lip stain.

Leaning across the gear stick to kiss him on the cheek I was uneasy. I had the hot stomach-twisting feeling that things were slipping out of my control combined with the youthful ignorance of thinking that because I was choosing to kiss him it was all on my terms.

He got out of the car, walked into the studio, and I went back to being confused about what the hell was going on and whether I would ever actually track bass for this album.

A few days later I got the text I’d been wanting the whole time and went in to record upright bass at one of the most beautiful studios in Nashville.

It did end up being my first union check for a major-label session, and I kept the paystub as a memento.

I wish I could look back on the memory with nothing but pride, but instead, the memory is sullied by the game I had to play to get the job.

I was single at the time, so - whether it was dating or not - I wasn’t hurting anyone else. But in retrospect, I can see that I was hurting myself.

I didn’t have good boundaries around how I was willing to be treated as a female musician or recognize the power dynamic at play during this entire exchange.

I was never in danger during any of these interactions and I didn’t do anything I didn’t consent to, but when you are in any kind of employment situation it should be unequivocally clear where the romantic boundaries are, and when they aren’t, it’s usually because someone is taking advantage of a power disparity.

The music industry is a weird mix of formal work environment and relationship-based hang time. So much of negotiating jobs is trusting someone’s word and session and touring musicians often don’t have contracts protecting anything that’s been said. A lot of your hireability is as much based on “the hang” and how you are to be around as it is on your musical ability.

There’s a fear in speaking out against any kind of discrimination, mistreatment, or harassment that you’ll get a reputation for being “difficult” to be around and won’t get hired for sessions or tours anymore.

Musicians living on a financial knife-edge will accept behavior, circumstances, and terms that would seem completely out of line in other fields because they simply don’t want to lose the job.

I’m older and more self-assured now, and if this situation happened again I like to think I would deal with it differently. I want to believe I would protect my personal boundaries whether it risked my getting the job or not. But it’s not always that simple and we also need to be kind to ourselves when we act in a way we’re not totally proud of to get the job we want.

The one thing I do know for sure is that older and wiser me sure as hell wouldn’t have kissed him on the cheek that day.