Between June 2001 and February 2002, I worked on a batch of songs with a woman, let's call her J, at her recording setup in her apartment in Cambridge. Our collaboration began tentatively, with me coming over every few weeks to help out with her material, but eventually the partnership evolved to the point where I was contributing lyrics, arrangements, melodies and other musical ideas. At first, we joked about calling ourselves a band, but as things progressed, and progressed so well, we adopted the name Pocket Symphony, which fit with the orchestral pop songs we were creating.

After we had finished recording 14 tracks, I suggested that we go into a real studio to polish them up. I booked time at Q Division, and we spent several sessions mixing the songs, which I believe came out much better than either of us had anticipated. It was during this time that J, unbeknownst to me, was growing dissatisfied with our working relationship, likely because it was dawning on her that our collaboration meant that the situation wasn't solely about her, and she didn't want to give up total control. At one of the mixdown sessions, she told me that she was bringing in her brother-in-law to play drums and a friend of his to play bass. Although the songs did benefit from a beefier sound, I felt that their styles were wrong for the material and that a lot of the subtleties we had worked so hard to create were lost to their unsympathetic performances.

What I didn't know at the time was that J had designs on making the band her own project, with me as a sort of studio sideman. She put up a Web site, again unbeknownst to me, in which she talked in first person about how she had put together this band called Pocket Symphony and, although I was mentioned, it was disconcerting to discover that I was not considered an equal partner. It was now "J ... with the assistance of Eliot." Perhaps that's the way she saw it, but in truth the songs came out of the two of us; she may have played a good share of the instruments, but the tunes existed because we labored together on them - and I know to this day that none of it would have happened had we not worked in what was initially an atmosphere of open collaboration.

Rather quickly, our relationship dissolved. She refused my calls, so I emailed her (I would've preferred talking face to face, but J was not comfortable with any type of confrontation and she avoided me at every turn). Subsequently, J posted a series of vile attacks against me on her Web site (I've collected all of it here). She also sent me a six-page letter (with no return address on the envelope so I had no idea who it was from) that seethed with hurtful and hateful things. I am still not exactly certain where all this anger was coming from, though based on what she had told me at length about her domineering father, and because it was her wont to transfer what she saw as his behavior onto the nearest male object, it made sense.

On her site she claimed that I "pushed and pushed" to get things done - this from a 30-year-old pampered dilettante who has never worked a single day in her life and has no understanding whatsoever of what people need to do to get by; who has no discipline, who buys whatever she wants whenever she wants and usually winds up losing it or breaking it; who drives her mammoth SUV to the Starbucks around the corner because she is too lazy to walk; whose daddy bought her her own condo and pays her bills and living expenses; who can't manage to get out of bed before 2 p.m. on any given day and who stays up till 3 a.m. every night drinking and playing video games. She also claimed that I was trying to take credit for things I hadn't done, and that I'd forced her to erase some of her older material on her computer to make room for new songs - truth is, I suggested she transfer her stuff to a back-up disc, but she was simply too lazy to do that. As her attacks grew more wayward, extreme and bizarre, she made it sound as if I were attempting to steal her soul: "They think the art you've created together is 'bigger than the both of you' but you've brought much more to the table from the beginning so of course it's going to feel to them that it's much bigger than them because it's not their soul and voice in the recipe, the songs, the painting. But your soul looks a little better to them than theirs and they'd rather just live there for a little while." What sort of person says shit like that?

J went on and on about how she had allowed herself to be sucked into my "emotional tornado" and that she was merely letting me think I was a collaborator because she's so magnanimous. What she neglected to say was that I'd had an extremely rough year, one in which I had been laid off from my job and was barely scraping by, one in which my dad had contracted cancer and then had passed away. Yes, I was going through an incredibly difficult patch and, yes, I was grateful to have the recording sessions to go to, just to have something positive to focus on. But I wasn't, as she put it, using up all the emotional space. She managed to use up quite a bit of it herself, what with her incessant complaints about her friends and family (especially her father), most of whom she said had betrayed her and all of whom she judged harshly, as if she were a better person. She railed against seemingly every person she had ever known, from the boy who wrote "phony" on her locker in high school to her ex-boyfriend and his obsession with pornography. Why did she tell me these things? I didn't know any of them.

Ultimately, I learned yet again that, as in any relationship, there must be ground rules. If I'd known that she wanted me to help produce her songs, then that's the role I would've taken. But she told me many, many times, without my prompting, that she liked the idea that we were this little band called Pocket Symphony, and her screeds that followed our dissolution went against all she had said before. Frankly, I believe she never knew what she wanted out of our relationship, other than not give up control. Which is ironic, because now that she has complete control and all the time in the world, she hasn't done squat. "When I go back into the studio in the fall to polish/record/rerecord I'll let y'all know how it goes," she declared to the world in early 2002. It's now 2007. The world is still waiting. Actually, it's not.