Chapter 714: The story of my Song 1

Dayo had been telling himself for months that he would find time to work on his third album, but something always came up. There was a meeting that needed his attention, an artist who needed his decision, or a problem at JD Records that nobody else seemed able to settle without him. Even when he managed to sit down with his notebook, his phone would ring, and before long, he would be back to thinking about the company instead of the music.

Things were different now. JD Records had reached the top of the global rankings, his team had taken responsibility for the company’s daily operations, and he had finally given himself permission to step away for a while. The decision had not been easy because he was accustomed to being involved in almost everything, but he knew he could not keep dividing his attention between the business and the album he had wanted to make for so long.

That morning, he entered the room he had prepared for writing with a notebook under his arm and his laptop in his other hand. Several old voice recordings waited on his phone, some containing melodies he had hummed while travelling and others holding unfinished ideas he had recorded late at night. He placed everything on the desk, opened the notebook to a clean page, and sat down to begin.

For several minutes, he did nothing beyond looking at the blank paper. He had plenty of ideas, but the difficulty was deciding which one deserved to come first. His second album, Unison, had broken records and brought comparisons to Michael Jackson, and the success of that project had created expectations he could not ignore completely. This time, however, he did not want to begin with questions about commercial performance, chart positions, or what people might expect from him.

He wanted to write something that belonged to him.

The first idea came from an ordinary morning at home. He thought about the familiar sounds of his family moving around the house, Luna getting things ready for the day, and Jennifer finding a reason to call him whenever she wanted his attention. Those moments were so common that he rarely stopped to think about them, yet they were among the things he looked forward to most when work kept him away for too long.

Dayo picked up his pen and began writing a few lines about a morning that had no special plans attached to it. He wanted the song to feel as though somebody could listen to it while getting ready for work, remembering their own family, or thinking about the person who made an ordinary day worth returning to.

I woke up to the sound of your voice coming through the hallway,

You were already asking questions before I’d even started my day.

I told you we could take our time, there was nowhere we had to be,

And you came and sat beside me, telling me what you wanted me to see.

We didn’t need a special reason, we didn’t need to go away,

I only wanted one more morning where I could watch you laugh and play.

He read the lines again, quietly following the rhythm with his fingers against the desk. They were simple words, but he could imagine how they might sit over a warm melody. The song was not supposed to reveal anything about the painful experiences he had lived through. It was about a family spending time together, about the kind of morning that most people forgot by the following week.

Still, he wanted the lyrics to carry a feeling that would become clearer later in the album. A listener could hear the song and think about somebody they loved without knowing that Dayo was also thinking about how easily an ordinary day could become something a person wished they could return to.

He opened a music application on his laptop and tried a melody over the lines. The first attempt felt too slow, so he changed the rhythm and sang the verse again, this time allowing the words to flow more naturally. After several attempts, he found a direction he liked, although he knew the song would need more work before it was finished.

The sound of Luna calling him from downstairs interrupted his concentration. Dayo glanced at the time and realised he had been working longer than he thought.

"Lunch is ready," she called again. "Are you coming, or should I keep it for you?"

"I’m coming," he answered, saving his work before closing the laptop. "I just lost track of time."

When he reached the dining room, Jennifer was already seated and explaining something to Luna with the seriousness she usually reserved for matters she considered important. Dayo listened as he took his seat, then asked Jennifer a question that made her start explaining the whole story again from the beginning. Luna watched him settle into the conversation, and the three of them continued eating while Jennifer insisted that her version of events was the correct one.

For a while, Dayo forgot about the notebook upstairs. He joined in when Luna challenged part of Jennifer’s explanation, and he laughed when their daughter tried to defend herself by introducing details she had conveniently left out the first time. Nothing extraordinary happened during lunch, and that was precisely why he enjoyed it.

When they finished eating, Jennifer asked whether he would spend some time with her later. Dayo told her he would, explaining that he needed to finish some work first, but he would come and find her when he was done. She accepted the answer and returned to what she had been doing, while Luna walked with him part of the way back toward the stairs.

"You’re really taking this album seriously," she observed.

"I have to," Dayo replied. "I’ve been carrying these ideas around for too long, and every time I try to work on them, something else takes over."

"Then keep going," Luna told him. "You finally have the time you kept asking for."

He appreciated that she understood why he needed the break. After their conversation, he returned to the writing room and opened a new page, intending to work on another melody before the afternoon passed.

The next idea did not come as easily as the first. He had started with a tune that sounded gentle enough, but the words he wrote beneath it felt empty. He crossed out a line, tried another, and eventually put the pen down to listen to the melody without singing. Something about the sound reminded him of waiting for news, although he had not deliberately chosen that subject.

Dayo picked up the pen again and wrote about a person waiting to hear a familiar voice. He tried to keep the words general, avoiding anything that would turn the song into a direct account of his private life. The more he worked, however, the more the melody brought him back to the days when Jennifer had been taken from him.

I kept the phone beside me, waiting for a word from you,

Every time the screen lit up, I hoped the message would be true.

The hours passed around me, but I couldn’t settle where I stood,

I was trying to believe you’d make it home, although I barely could.

There were questions I kept asking, there were answers I never found,

And I would have given anything to hear your little footsteps sound.

He stopped after singing the final line. The words had taken him closer to the memory than he had intended, and for a moment he could no longer concentrate on the melody. He remembered the uncertainty that followed Jennifer’s kidnapping, the terrible knowledge that she was missing, and the questions that had occupied his mind while he tried to understand what had happened.

The memory was not a complete replay of those events. It came to him through small details, the kind that stayed with a person long after the immediate danger had passed. He remembered the need to find out where Jennifer was, the urgency of every new piece of information, and the fact that he could not simply demand an answer and expect the situation to resolve itself.

Dayo had faced difficult problems before. In business, even a complicated situation usually gave him something concrete to work with. There were people to contact, decisions to make, and actions that could move a problem toward a solution. Jennifer’s kidnapping had taken him into a situation where he could not be certain that any decision would produce the outcome he needed.

He returned to the notebook and changed the final line. He did not want the song to describe the kidnapping directly, because that was not what he was trying to create. He wanted listeners to recognise the feeling of waiting for somebody they loved, of being unable to settle until they knew that person was safe. Anyone who had experienced that kind of fear could understand the song without knowing what had happened to him.

After several more attempts, he saved the draft under a temporary title and moved on. The song still needed work, but he had found the feeling he wanted to capture.

His next attempt dealt with the helplessness that came with not knowing what would happen. He began by writing about a person who had spent years believing they could handle whatever life placed in front of them, only to discover that determination did not guarantee control. The subject was close enough to his own experience to make the words difficult, but he tried to approach it through a melody that would carry the emotion without spelling out every detail.

I thought that if I kept on moving, I could find a way through,

That if I searched for long enough, I’d find my way to you.

But the road kept turning somewhere I had never been before,

And every answer led to questions I was frightened to ask for more.

I had so much left to tell you, so much I wanted you to know,

Yet I couldn’t make the distance disappear or make the answers show.

He sang the lines softly, listening to the way the final words settled into the melody. They sounded closer to what he wanted, although he still felt there was something missing. He could write about uncertainty, but he did not want to make the song sound like a report of what had happened. The listener needed room to bring their own experiences to it.

For a while, he experimented with the arrangement, removing some of the notes and leaving more space between the vocal lines. The result felt more personal. He could imagine someone listening to the song and recognising the experience of waiting for news, even if they had never lived through anything resembling Jennifer’s kidnapping.

As the afternoon continued, Dayo began working on a song about the possibility of losing someone. At first, he assumed he would write about Jennifer, because the fear of losing his daughter had been the most immediate and frightening part of the experience. Yet the words kept moving in a different direction, taking him back to the period when Luna had left him.

He had not forgotten that separation. It had happened during a time when his life was already in turmoil, and he had not been able to give the relationship the attention it needed. Luna had warned him about Michael and Silas before Jennifer was kidnapped. She believed he needed to deal with them and put an end to the situation, but Dayo had continued to delay, convinced that he could handle things in his own time.

When Jennifer was taken, Luna discovered that Michael and Silas were responsible. Her anger was not only about what they had done to their daughter. She was also angry because she believed the situation could have been prevented, or at least dealt with earlier, if Dayo had listened to her warnings. The kidnapping had left her frightened and grieving, and she needed space from the man she believed had allowed things to reach that point.

She left him.

It had not been a simple argument that ended when they were ready to speak again. Luna had needed time away from him, and Dayo had been left to face the possibility that the woman he loved might no longer want to share her life with him. While he was trying to bring Jennifer home, he was also dealing with the consequences of a decision he had repeatedly postponed.

The memory changed the direction of the song. He had started writing about absence, but now he was thinking about the way a person could lose someone without a final goodbye, through decisions and mistakes that accumulated until the relationship could no longer continue as it had before.

He wrote a new verse, taking care not to include the names of Michael or Silas. He did not want the song to expose the details of what had happened between them, nor did he want to turn Luna’s decision into something that could be explained in a few simple lines. The song needed to carry the feeling of losing somebody who was still alive, somebody whose absence left a space in his life that he could not immediately fill.

You told me there was still a road that I could choose to take,

You asked me not to wait too long before there was too much at stake.

I thought that I had time enough to finish what I had begun,

Until the days we used to share were gone before I knew they’d come.

Now there’s a place beside me where your voice used to remain,

And I keep hearing all the words I should have understood back then.

Dayo read the verse several times before singing it. The melody was slower than the others, and he allowed the words to stretch across the notes rather than rushing toward the end of each line. He wanted the song to sound like somebody admitting a mistake long after the person they needed to apologise to had walked away.

He did not write that Luna had stopped loving him. That was not what he remembered, and it was not what he wanted the song to suggest. She had left because the situation had become too much for her, because she needed space after Jennifer’s kidnapping, and because she believed Dayo had failed to act when he should have. The pain came from knowing that love had not been enough to prevent the separation.

For the first time that afternoon, he leaned back from the desk and let the melody play without trying to change it. The song was still unfinished, but he knew what it was about now. He saved the work and sat quietly for a while, thinking about how much of his life had been shaped by decisions he had believed could wait.

A call from downstairs brought him back to the present. Luna was asking whether he would be joining them for dinner, and Dayo realised he had once again allowed the hours to pass without noticing. He closed the notebook, left the laptop on the desk, and went down to spend the evening with his family.

Jennifer was eager to tell him about something she had been doing, and Dayo gave her his attention as she explained it. Luna joined the conversation, and before long they were all laughing about a small misunderstanding that Jennifer insisted was not her fault. Dayo enjoyed the moment without trying to turn it into a song in his head, although he knew he would remember the feeling later.

After dinner, he stayed with them for a while before returning upstairs. The notebook was waiting where he had left it, and the unfinished songs were still open on his laptop. He looked over the pages, seeing the ordinary morning he had tried to capture first, followed by the lines about waiting, helplessness, and the loss of Luna.

The album was beginning to reveal its direction, but he knew he had not reached the most difficult part yet. He still had to write about bringing Jennifer home, about the choices he had made during the rescue, and about the days that followed when the danger had passed but the memories remained. Those songs would require him to look more closely at what had happened, even if he never described every detail in the lyrics.

Dayo opened a new page and wrote a few words at the top, then stopped before turning them into a verse. He did not want to rush the next song simply because he had finally found the time to work. If this album was going to mean anything to him, he had to let the memories take the time they needed.

For now, he saved his work and closed the notebook. He would return to it in the morning, when he was ready to continue writing about the parts of his life he had spent so long trying to put behind him.