One song I know will be massive in 1995 is "Gangsta's Paradise." I close my eyes and the lyrics are simply there, the way a room is there when you turn on a light—Coolio's voice, the low pull of the Stevie Wonder sample underneath it, every syllable sitting exactly where I left it. I begin transcribing. My hand moves fast, nearly automatic, the pen barely keeping pace with what my memory is already finished doing.
The lyrics take half an hour, spilling out of me like water from an upturned glass. Liam's voice is already in my head as I write—that particular Mancunian sneer softening just barely around the word *today*. I title it "Wonderwall" and set it aside, already certain of what it will do: conquer the UK charts first, then drift west across the Atlantic like weather, arriving in American dorm rooms and coffee shops sometime around 1995, inescapable.
Next come two songs I know belong to TLC. "Creep" arrives first—the low, unhurried bass of it, Left Eye's verse sitting sharp against the softness of T-Boz's delivery. Then "Waterfalls," which I transcribe more slowly, feeling the weight of it, the way it opens like something trying to warn you. Three songs in one morning. I cap my pen and look at what I've made: a small, impossible stack of paper that will chart in twelve countries before I turn eighteen.
I set the pen down and stack the pages. The songs will go out by end of week—to the labels, to the right people, through the right channels. Meanwhile, the Koppaberg batch has already shipped from Sweden, timed well: the World Cup is underway, and Sweden is making a decent run of it. It would be first released in Swedens night club scene and for the world cup coming soon it would be the perfect opportunity for it to be supplied in stores to drink and enjoy while their nation is competing in the world cup 1994.
Alexandre's voice on the line is measured, precise—the voice of a man who does not waste words on uncertainty. The first Koppaberg batch has moved well. Better than projected, he says, and I can hear in the careful flatness of his delivery that this is his version of enthusiasm. I lean back and let the number settle over me. The ciders had gone out into the summer heat of the World Cup and been drunk by strangers who did not know my name, which is exactly how I had wanted it.
There were, she realized, only a few books in this world that truly mattered—works that, in the language of her own interior mythos, could change the axis of adolescence. Rose set her sights on two of them for the year: first, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, and second, Northern Lights from His Dark Materials. She toyed with the titles in her notebook, rolling them along the lines of her handwriting like a jeweler inspecting stones. The Harry Potter idea was outrageous, almost gauche; the notion that she would conjure up the Boy Who Lived, before Rowling could even finish her second pint, felt like both a cosmic joke and a dare. But that was the point. She could see it, if she let herself: midnight launches at bookshops, children in wizard hats, a story so embedded it felt older than folklore itself.
But it was the second book, Northern Lights, that caught at her ribs like a fishhook. She'd read it—would read it, in 1995, as a hardcover smuggled out of a school library—but now, she could sense the magnetic pull of the world Pullman had built. Dust, daemons, the knife-edge of innocence and complicity. There was a character in those pages who would, years later, spiral into cultural infamy: Mrs Coulter, with her golden hair and her unholy self-possession. Rose wanted to play her, more than anything. She wanted to wear that mask, to see whether the cruelty in Mrs Coulter's heart was born or made. She imagined the costuming, the sharpness of her diction, the way she could walk into a room and, without even looking, become the center of it.
Rose made a list, because that was how she made things real: Harry Potter, Northern Lights, Mrs Coulter. She would write them; she would be them; she would launch them into the bloodstream of the year. But it wasn't enough. There was a hunger to her ambition, the kind that gnawed at her when the house was still and no one was watching to see what she would make of herself. She wanted something bigger. She wanted to disrupt the canon, to splice together stories so feverish and so outlandish that they would be impossible to ignore.
She stared at the page. It wasn't just about books. The culture was a rhinoceros, stampeding and oblivious, and if you wanted to change its direction you had to plant explosives beneath its feet. She jotted down a new line: stage musical. Not just any musical—she wanted to hijack Broadway's DNA, to take the sugar-rush of Andrew Lloyd Webber and inject it with actual purpose. Something subversive and battered and sincere. She thought about the stories that had obsessed her as a kid, the ones that made her want to run away into the wings of a theater and never come out. Wicked, she wrote, and underlined it. She would make it a real, living thing, even if it meant rewriting the world to let it exist.
And then, as if it were an afterthought, she added one last project: Game of Thrones. Not the television show, not even the actual Martin book—she wanted to try her hand at epic fantasy, the kind that could swallow a decade of her life and still leave her hungry for more. She would write it in the margins of everything else, letting it fatten and grow. She could see the shape of it already: thrones and betrayals, the hush of winter coming, the knowledge that nothing built by men would last.
There is a play/ musical I want to work on called Wicked this year, 1994, and then I will work on the first Game of Thrones book.