in the studio

Gwen stopped by the studio recently while I was working on American Twilight, and it ended up being one of those evenings that reminded me why I love making records in the first place. Most of the time, recording is a pretty solitary process—hours of listening, adjusting, second-guessing, rewriting, and then listening all over again. So it was nice to have a friend come into that little world for a while and hear some of the songs before they were completely finished.

I played her a handful of preview tracks and watched her reactions from the mixing desk. There is something completely different about hearing a song with another person in the room. You suddenly notice the moments where they lean in, where they smile, where a lyric catches them, or where they just sit quietly and listen. Gwen has always had a wonderfully genuine way of reacting to things, so there was no pretending. If something moved her, I knew it.

We spent a while going back and forth through different mixes, talking about the stories behind the songs and some of the strange little details buried in the record. A few of these tracks have lived with me for a long time, while others came together during a very specific and difficult chapter of my life. Having someone hear them in the studio—before the artwork, before the release, before anyone else gets to attach their own memories to them—felt surprisingly personal.

Mostly, though, it was just a great night with a good friend: music playing through the big studio monitors, lights glowing across the console, a few laughs between songs, and that feeling that this record is finally becoming something real. American Twilight has been such an intensely personal journey for me, and getting to share a little piece of it with Gwen before it goes out into the world was pretty special.