Brad glanced over and smiled at me, almost as though he could read my thoughts, before turning his eyes back to the road. “What’s next, mommy?” I turned in the seat to look behind me—sweet Chris, my little boy who was slowly creeping close to school age, and Hayley, his baby sister, sat in two cars seats just behind us. We’d been singing Christmas songs on our journey up I-70 toward Beaver Creek, Colorado, where we were going to spend a mini Christmas vacation—just the four of us. “How about ‘Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer’?” Chris smiled and nodded his head. “Yeah!” He started singing, and Brad and I joined in. Hayley was mouthing syllables, smiling and giggling, focusing mostly on her brother. I sang but truthfully was lost in thought. The past year had been a whirlwind. Somehow, Brad knew I’d been feeling restless and needed something more than motherhood to feel fulfilled. He’d talked with his record company and then brought the idea to me—what if I had my own band, started over in the music business? I felt a little unsure. After all, Fully Automatic had been a band before I’d joined them. I didn’t know how sure I felt about starting one on my own. But then he told me that he and Nick would be part of my band too as a side project, and I was sold. So we started off by writing songs and then we auditioned for bassists and found a woman who fit the bill. It was no time at all that we were in the studio recording some of the best songs I’d ever written. We would start touring in less than two months, but we’d just wrapped on our second video and felt like we were almost ready. We simply had to get through the holidays.
