Scratch Tracks & Makeovers

Nightshade begins preproduction

The clapboard house on a quiet Nashville street they’d rented had a basement recording studio in it. The slag wool ceiling had heard too many songs to bother remembering them. Cables snaked across the floor like restless thoughts, looping and tangling in lazy knots that nobody’d bothered to fix. Somehow they always found their way to where they needed to go.

The dimly lit room had little ambiance and just enough light to catch the chrome scratchplate on Matias Monroe’s guitar. Scavenged soundproofing material was patched together. Thrift store rugs tapconned into cracked plaster covered concrete block walls. Gray foam panels curling at the edges. Moving blankets hanging like old flags from forgotten wars.

None of it truly kept the sound in, but it dampened it just enough that the music felt like it was soaking into the bones of the house. The way whisky soaks into oak. Even the pipes in the walls seemed to vibrate when the band played. Quietly keeping time, as if the whole place wanted to be part of Nightshade.

While they did preproduction work and recorded scratch tracks Drew Layton counted them into their songs with his drumsticks. Between songs and takes he sat, tapping his thighs. He was as restless as a caged animal waiting for a hatch to open. His eyes were alert, and ready. He was already hearing things that didn’t exist yet, but soon would.

Tyler Brady leaned over his bass, fingers quietly walking patterns no one else could see. Sketching low end constellations in the air before committing them to coiled steel strings, frets and fretboard. He always played like he was building bridges, carefully and deliberately. Making sure every note could carry weight without collapsing.

Lila Hart stood behind a microphone stand, barefoot. Her toes curled into berber carpet fibres as if the floor itself were keeping her steady. Her eyes were half closed. Lashes trembling as she hummed fragments of a melody that’d already decided it was going to be beautiful. She sang the way some people prayed, not loudly, not for attention. But with a quiet certainty that something bigger was listening. The air around her seemed to soften when she inhaled.

Jace Barnes adjusted his guitar strap and forced himself to look away from her, even though every instinct in his body told him not to. “Let’s run Watch the End with Me again,” he said, turning a knob on his amp slightly clockwise until the tone thickened just a hair. “Matias, I want you to try something on the second verse. A ghost note maybe? Something different.”

Matias nodded, his blond hair falling into his eyes. He brushed it back with the back of his hand and rested his fingers lightly on his guitar’s strings. Although younger than Jace in years, there was a steadiness in him that made you forget it. A gravity that came from too many nights alone with a guitar, and not nearly enough time pretending to be anything else.

When he played, it felt like he’d lived more than one life and carried all of them in his hands. Drew counted them in and then dropped into the groove, a steady heartbeat pulsing through the room. Tyler slid in right behind him, his bass warm and wide. They created a rhythm like smoke curling around fire.

Jace laid down the rhythm guitar, thick enough to support anything that wanted to grow on top of it. Matias came in with a tasty hammer on lick that lasted a few bars and faded out, as Lila began to sing. The song moved through the room the way dusk moves through a field. Quietly, gently, but with a certainty that made you stop breathing. It didn’t rush. It didn’t beg. It simply arrived, filling every open space with something you hadn’t known was missing.

Lila’s voice was soft but strong. The kind of sound that didn’t ask for attention because it already owned it. It carried longing and hope in the same breath. Jace sang harmony at times beside her. His voice was rougher, like gravel smoothed by rain. Where hers floated, his grounded. Where hers shimmered, his burned. They stopped halfway through the second verse. “Again,” Jace said. “But let’s break down that bridge. Something’s hiding in there.”

Drew twirled a stick between his fingers and began counting them in. Tyler rolled his shoulders and reset his grip. Lila took a sip of water, already hearing what the song was trying to become. Matias plucked a single high pitched pinch harmonic that rang like a bell in an empty church. Pure, fragile, impossible to ignore. “That!” Jace exclaimed, pointing to Matias. “Do that again.” Matias did, letting the note bloom and fade.

They worked it over and over. The bridge stopped being a section and became a place. A suspended moment where the song leaned back and let you fall into it. Fingers ached a little. Calluses almost split. Coffee sat cold in forgotten cardboard cups. Sweat darkened the backs of shirts and soaked into the rug beneath their feet.

Tyler’s bass grew thicker, weaving between Jace’s rhythm and Matias’s lead playing like a river carving new paths through stone. Drew nudged the tempo just enough to keep it breathing instead of marching. Lila tried different phrasing, letting the lyrics bruise and heal themselves. Finding where the pain lived and where the hope tried to sneak back in.

At some point Jace stopped talking and just listened. Then he walked to the soundboard. “Let’s record it.” He said. The red light came on, small and steady, like a single unblinking eye. He counted them in as he walked back to his amp. “Eight…seven… six… five…” Drew’s sticks clicked four times, and the song took off.

This time it felt heavier, tighter, like it knew it was being remembered. Every note mattered now and would live on somewhere beyond this basement. They hit the first chorus clean. The second verse flowed like water. And then, halfway through it, Matias did exactly what Jace had asked for.

A pinch harmonic with some vibrato screamed out of his amp like a hawk diving from the sky. It was sharp, bright, and dangerous. But it worked. It didn’t overpower the song. It electrified it, gave it a spine and some grit. Jace’s eyes snapped towards him, full of glee. He grinned and they kept going.

Lila felt it too and leaned into it, letting her voice darken just a shade, letting the longing in the lyrics turn into something sharper, something that cut instead of caressed. Drew pushed the bass pedal harder, snapped the snare more crisply on the twos and fours. Tyler dug into the bottom end a little deeper until the room itself seemed to vibrate. When the last chord rang out, the silence felt too loud.

“Holy crap,” Drew whispered a few seconds after they’d finished and a few moments of sustained silence had passed. As if anything louder might break what they’d just made. Jace played back the track and there it was, captured. The harmonic, alive and electric, like a secret being told out loud. “That’s staying,” Jace said. “That’s the crowning point of the song.”

Matias shrugged, smiling despite himself. He knew it’d work. A pair of heavy footsteps suddenly came down the stairs. Daniel Charles entered the basement like a man who owned every shadow in the room. His suit didn’t belong in a place that smelled like sweat and coffee, but somehow he made it work. Beside him was a glamorous red-haired woman wrapped in silk and confidence, her eyes sharp and curious.

“This is my wife, Dianne,” Daniel said. Cordial introductions were quickly made around the room and Dianne’s gaze went straight to Lila, and lingered there. “Well,” she said softly, “aren’t you something.” Then Dianne looked at Jace and motioned towards Lila. “I’m borrowing her,” she said, and then added, “just for the afternoon.” Before Lila could even think of protesting, she’d slipped her feet into her slides, and was quickly and gently guided up the stairs by Dianne. And into a different world.

A world of mirrors, makeup, and perfume. Of hands that knew how to shape a woman into something that made people stop and look twice. First they had lunch at a little bistro where Dianne talked about pageants she’d been in, and stages she’d been on. About the way a woman could own a room if she knew how. Then they went to a salon. Lila’s hair was washed and cut and styled until it framed her face like a promise. Her eyebrows were sculpted. Then some makeup was put onto her face and a few pointers on applying it were given. Then a manicure, her first ever. Where her hands were transformed from working hands into stage ready hands.

Next came a dress shop. Racks and racks of silk, satin and chiffon. Mirrors everywhere. Two dresses chosen that made Lila nearly breathless when she saw herself wearing them. “Stage dresses,” Dianne said. “Battle armour.” The woman at the shop handed Dianne a receipt and said the alterations on the dresses would be finished in two days. Then they did a bit more shopping.

Lila returned to the house hours later, new makeup case and a bag with shoes in it in her hands. The band was still downstairs, lost in chaos, cables and chords. Jace was the first to look up at her and he stopped dead in his tracks. His jaw hung open. Lila stood there transformed but still unmistakably herself. Like someone who had stepped into her own future and brought a little of it back with her.

“You look absolutely gorgeous,” Jace said. The others nodded, unable to disagree. Lila blushed, then uttered her humble and all too familiar, “thank you kindly.” Jace felt something crack open inside him, awe and wanting tangled together. It felt as dangerous and beautiful as that harmonic Matias had played earlier that afternoon. “I want you to hear something,” Jace said softly. And in that moment, everything felt like it was just beginning.