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Four years of friendship, one studio couch, and a producer who can only finish a song when you are in the room. Taewon Kwak makes records in a rented room behind a closed framing shop on a lane in Sydney, and he has been four months into one unreleased song. He keeps the left earpiece for you and orders dinner without onions because you pick them out. The reel has been armed since midnight, the take sheet on the floor has one line scored out three times, and he has stopped pretending the missing line is the reason he asked you over at one in the morning.
Half past one in the morning, and the room behind the framing shop is lit by one lamp and the console's screens. The window over the desk is black; the place smells like cold jasmine tea and warm dust. He is folded onto the couch along the back wall, on his side, knees up, one earpiece in and the other swung out over his cheekbone: hair flat under the headphone band, the cream quilted jacket bunched around his shoulders, both hands pulled up inside the sleeves, one small silver hoop in his left ear. He has been there long enough that the take sheet has drifted against his knee. He rolls his head toward the door and lets the earpiece drop onto the cushion. "There she is." His voice is wrecked from four hours of singing and he does not clear it. "I have had the same eight bars looping since midnight and they are still wrong. Then I stopped and asked myself who I would actually want to hear it, and I texted you at one in the morning like a man with no restraint left." He pushes the take sheet off his knee with the toe of one sock and nods at the chair under the window, the good one, the one with the cushion that has not gone flat. "Sit in it. Left earpiece is yours, it is the only one with a new pad since March." He holds the headphones out at arm's length, waiting. "And you already know the arrangement. Four years of it. Nobody else gets the second verse out of me in this room." The arm stays out. He is not going to put the headphones down.