Apprentice
by Michelle Dockrey & Tony Fabris

      Vocal: Michelle Dockrey
      Guitars & Bass: Tony Fabris
      Percussion & Strings: Alexander James Adams

She was all the stars in a velvet sea
A gem of perfection she seemed to me
Skin like silk and a rose red smile
All grace when I brought her tea

And her laughter cut through my girlish dream
"Don't you know that we're all silk and cream
And roses and velvet and gems and stars?
You must be more than what you seem."

One night I stole into her garden
And I overheard her sigh...

"You don't have to be wild to want to run
Look at the roses and you'll see
See them climbing ever higher toward the sun
These garden walls are not for me."

I had come so young to the Twilight School
Quiet and shy and a bit of a fool
A hopeless handmaid, so awkward and awed
Until she saw an uncut jewel

She taught me all the Companion's art
Beauty and charm and the skills to set ourselves apart
We were teacher and student, we were friend and friend
And we were sisters of the heart

Sharing afternoon tea in her garden
She would gaze up at the sky...

"You don't have to be wild to want to run
Look at the ring-doves and you'll see
See them stretching their clipped wings out toward the sun
This pretty cage is not for me."

She could see her path laid out in flowers and in stone
Priestess, Lady, Head of House, and nothing left unknown
She whispered to her teacup that it chilled her to the bone
"When others look to you to make their choices
You no longer make your own..."

Now my clients say there's no lady as fine
The skill and the charm and the garden are mine
But I walk outside the gate at night
And see the stars and planets shine

They say she's done battle, they say she fell in love
They say she near died in that endless sky above
And all of her lessons I took to heart
Even that of the rose and the dove

She taught me to look beyond the garden
And she never said goodbye...

You don't have to be wild to want to run
Look at the river and you'll see
See it leap and dance away, laughing in the sun
Perhaps it knows a place for me.

About the Song

Vixy:
The good ship Serenity is full of interesting characters. But they all seem to be running from something, don't they? With most of them, it's fairly obvious; they're looking for a wider world, a world of more freedom than they've had; wild things trapped in narrow cages. But what about Inara? She's no wild thing. Why would she stay on this raggedy ship with this raggedy crew? What's she running from?

About the Songwriting

Vixy:
After "Mal's Song" gained us so many Browncoat fans— the most loyal folks there are— and we started getting specifically Browncoat gigs, I thought I should really write another Firefly/Serenity song. Covering all of Seanan McGuire's songs is all very well, but I could at least have more than one! :) I just sort of thought generally about the show and the movie for a while, and I couldn't remember ever hearing a song about Inara.

Now, just "a song about Inara" isn't enough to be the basis of a song; it's an idea, but every song has to have its emotional moment, its story, its "so what?" So I thought about what we know of her. And Joss drops a lot of hints about her that never really got expanded upon. There's the box she opens with a needle in it when threatened by Reavers, which Joss said in commentary is not a suicide drug. There's the general incongruousness of her personal elegance vs. her surroudings. And there was Nandi, who said that Inara had been a rising star among Companions, all set to be House Priestess and everything, and then said, "ask her sometime why she left." That hooked me. Why did she leave?

I had a vague idea that she was running from something, and there are all these songs out there about Mal and Kaylee and the war and being wild and free and running from the law and running from oppression and running from a small country life and being wild and free and wild and free and wild! It's an awfully Browncoaty theme, that. And if you take "wild and free" as the main Browncoat theme, that made me kind of go "...then what was she doing on that ship?" Inara was no wild thing. But maybe you don't have to be wild to want to run. Oh hey! Sometimes a phrase pops into your head that you just know is your hook.

But I was still struggling with the reason; I needed to invent a story for her. About this time I mentioned to Tony what I was writing and where I was stuck, and he had the perfect idea. Not too long before, we'd watched Bring on the Night. There's a part of an interview where Sting says that what he likes about his life now is that he doesn't know what's going to happen next. When he was a schoolteacher, he said, there came a point where he could see himself and exactly where he'd be in five years, in ten years— deputy headmaster, headmaster, and so on— and it terrified him. Now, as a musician, he didn't know where he'd be in a year or what he'd be doing next, and that world of possibility made him so much happier.

That resonated so perfectly with me. Why someone like Inara would give up such a perfect life with security and potential and power, to go roving the 'verse with a bunch of bandits— it all fit. The rest was easy.

I can't remember at what point I decided the story would be told from the point of view of a novice at the Academy. I think that might have been pretty early on. Then I didn't quite have to put words in Inara's mouth, and I had something slightly more interesting than "hi here is my story" (a motif which I'm fine with, obviously, but I try not to do the same thing over and over.) I did a little fudging here and there; though it's definitely called "the Academy" in the show, I couldn't fit the word in anywhere that it would rhyme or scan. I settled on a bit of a cheat; Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel series of novels refer to the courtesans' Houses as the "Court of Night"or "Night Court". Except I needed two syllables, so I fudged from there to "Twilight" and hoped nobody would notice. :)

I steal— er, am influenced by— whatever catches my fancy, and in this case something from my childhood found its way into this song. Ever since I was little, one of my favorite books has been a retelling of the Cinderella story called The Glass Slipper by Eleanor Farjeon. In this version, Cinderella is announced at the ball as the Princess of Nowhere. Toward the end, when the Prince is looking for his lost Princess, the fairy godmother asks him to describe her. He says something like, "her eyes are like stars, her teeth are like pearls, her hair is like silk, her skin is like milk, and her lips are like roses." The fairy godmother replies, "Hoity-toity. All princesses are like stars, pearls, silk, milk, and roses," and tells him to think of something else to describe her.

That always stuck with me. We're all princesses, that said to me; pretty isn't what makes you a princess. And somehow that fit with the image of what a Companion is supposed to be. I could so easily imagine Inara saying something like this in teaching young novices. We're all pretty; that's only the beginning. A good Companion has to be so much more.

I also liked my little idea of the parallel structure of the roses—ring-doves—river, and hoped it wouldn't come across as completely stupid. :) It was also another bit of artistic license; I've never really heard "ring-doves" used anywhere except in Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy (The Crystal Cave et al.), but it was alliterative and it scanned and I've always liked it. (Uncle Google seems to tell me that it's a term for Old World wood pigeons or turtledoves.)

All I knew for sure about the music was that I wanted something Eastern. I'm not good at describing to Tony what I want; I have no guitar vocabulary (other than the occasional "go like this: nuh nuh NUHHHHH nuh nuh" or something) so I usually resort to finding examples of other songs and saying "sorta like that". Prince's "Seven", Jeff & Maya Bohnhoff's "Persian Rose", and Sting's "Desert Rose" were all influences I brought up as I struggled to figure out what I wanted. Tony, as usual, was magic; he can listen to a song in its barest stages and hear things that aren't there, but should be. Apart from my insisting he stay on the same chord at a few places where he really wanted to depart to something different, I didn't have to do much work on that part at all.

One last secret— I improvise every one of those long twisty vocal lines, every time. I never have any idea how that's going to sound until the moment it comes out of my mouth. I do try to let it build over the course of the song, saving the bigger crescendos for later, but that's about it. This, also, was influenced by Maya Bohnhoff's singing in "Persian Rose". It doesn't always work out right, but if I can get that particular scale lodged in my head (sorry y'all; classically trained, I'm not) I usually do okay.

Tony:
Almost every guitar chord in the song is an E-family barre chord, but with the high B and E strings left ringing open. Vixy wanted something Persian-sounding, and I immediately went for those chords. They were taught to me by Alex Lifeson by way of Jeff Bohnhoff, and they probably date back to Led Zeppelin before that. A simple slow upward strum on those chords, and presto, instant sitar. (Yes, I know it doesn't really sound like a sitar.)

I love the way the chord progression on the bridge builds up to a powerful resolution. This is another case where, when writing the bridge with Vixy, I ended up just "going minor", but boy that sure works well, and sets up for a nice resolution back to the major chord progression of the verse. I'm particularly fond of how the lyrical revelation in the last line of the bridge combines with that dramatic resolution in the chord progression. I even did some tricks with the mix of the instruments to emphasize the bass on that section, to give it the proper impact. I just love it when all the elements of lyrics, music and production come together in such a perfect way.

About the Recording

Tony:
This is one of the last songs on Thirteen to have been recorded. It barely got finished at the end, along with Strange Messenger. We knew what we wanted early on, but didn't really have a way to achieve it with our own resources, so it sort of sat there untouched, left until the last minute.

We were talking to Alexander Adams at a Norwescon, the first time he'd actually seen us perform as a duo, and we'd mentioned during our set that we were making an album. Alec offered his services in mixing and mastering, and I remember I said something like, "I think we've got that part covered, but what we really need is a bit of this," making a bowing motion with my hands. He was very gracious and said, "I would be honored." We didn't have anything ready for him then, but later, at an Orycon, we caught up with him again and confirmed that we wanted him on a new song we'd just written, one that needed a vaguely Eastern feel to it. We said we wanted one track of bodhrán and one track of fiddle. We agreed on terms and I said I'd send him tracks in December when he had free time on his schedule.

So, December rolls around, and I needed to create the bed tracks for Alec to work from. I remember it was freezing in the studio and I didn't feel like doing all the necessary steps to warm it up to record something seriously. So I thought to myself, well this is only going to be bed tracks, there won't be any final guitar tracks yet, so I don't need the nice mics. All Alec needs is a fixed tempo and a chord outline. I rummaged around for a 1/4" to 1/8" cable adapter, and plugged my Taylor's pickup straight into my laptop's mic-in jack. I sat on the couch in the living room, put earbud headphones into my ears for the click track, and recorded the song while Vix watched TV. Sure the TV might bleed through a bit into the guitar pickup, but who cares, it's just bed tracks.

Now let me just say from the start that this is not the ideal way to record an acoustic guitar. Let's forget for a moment that the mic-in jack on a laptop is probably the one method of recording that will provide the worst possible quality. The biggest issue is that my Taylor is an older model, before they made the expression system, so it has a more standard sort of under-the-saddle piezo pickup. Actually, it uses a blended combination of a piezo pickup and a condenser microphone pickup, but that still doesn't help much. Piezo pickups, you see, have a tendency to sound like someone stepped on a poor, defenseless duck, and my Taylor is no exception. But hey, this is just bed tracks, I'll re-record the final guitar later.

Next, there's the issue of how to play the guitar part. Sure the chords may be simple, but the way it alternates between the sitar-like strums and the bubbly bass notes is tricky to play. I can pull it off live, where no one expects perfection, but it's a pain and I make a lot of mistakes. What I needed here was something that was perfectly tempo-locked for the bed tracks, so I decided to do the bass notes and the strums separately. While I was at it, I realized that the simple song structure lends itself well to looping, so each chord change became its own section, which got re-used, copied and looped as needed. I color-coded each chord change until the editor screen was a rainbow of chords. In very short order, I had the entire song laid out, with the bass notes on one track, and the strums and chorus arpeggios on another, and each bar fell precisely into the tempo groove without any drift or mistakes.

Then I dropped an echo onto the bass notes track, one that was tempo matched to the song. This is the trick I learned from Edge and David Gilmour; you get the echoes to fall on the eighth notes between the actual notes you're playing. I did it rather subtly here, instead of overt like they do it, because I think that's what the song called for. A bit of tweaking, EQ, and processing on the guitar got it sounding rather decent, with only the slightest bit of quacking duck remaining audible in the sound.

Within a day or two, Vix recorded a decent scratch vocal, I wrote a quick note vaguely describing the style I was looking for, zipped it up with the bounced tracks, and put the zip file on our file server. Then I sent Alec an email saying the parts were ready for his additions.

Then I waited.

And waited...

And a couple months later, eventually caught up with Alec and Kore at Soulfood Books in Redmond, and asked what was up. Turns out, they never got the email. AOL's spam filter had eaten it! Here we were, just weeks from our planned mastering date, Alec had never received the bed tracks to work with, and his calendar was no longer free. Panic! Some discussions ensued, and he said he might be able to get to it before he left for Tennessee. I crossed my fingers and hoped.

The date rolled around, and then it turned out that Alec wasn't able to download the bed tracks because he's on a dial-up line. Wave audio files are huge, you see, so huge that it would be easier to mail a disc than to download them over a dial-up line. I'd hadn't even thought to check about that, I was dumb and just assumed everyone was on a broadband connection these days. So now Alec was off to Tennessee, and we still didn't have anything more than scratch tracks for the song.

But like the cavalry showing up at the end of the movie, Alec saved us! He returned from Tennessee, grabbed the bed track discs that I'd Fed-Ex'd while he was gone, and went straight into the studio, recording for an entire day, and editing and processing on the second day, to produce the wonderful results you can hear on the final album. He and Kore happened to be heading up to Everett that day, and since my house is right on the way, they dropped off the discs with the tracks.

And boy did he ever save us! I was so excited and pleased, I was just bouncing off the walls. We asked for a bodhrán and a fiddle. Alec gave us eight tracks, including fairly bells, zills, shaker, an asheko drum, and yes, bodhrán and fiddle. Oh wait, how about three fiddles, for an entire string section! We only asked for something vaguely Eastern-sounding, but in our simple scratch tracks, Alec somehow heard the exact same vision for the song that we'd had all along but didn't think we'd ever be able to achieve. He sculpted what can only be described as the perfect set of tracks for that song. When he called to arrange dropping off the discs, he said, "I got a little excited and did more tracks than you asked for. I hope that's okay..."

Yeah, Alec. It's okay.

Postscript: The poorly-recorded guitar? Yeah, of course it stayed in unchanged. It fit with Alec's tracks too well. With a little processing and mixing, you can't even tell there are ducks being trampled.