“The rest of the guys have the same app on their laptops, so we do this a lot—track the stuff we have in our heads and send it back and forth. We could build an entire song via email, which is where we would save on studio time. They’ll all know what they’re going to play live, and my track will already be complete before we head in. I may need to tweak something here or there if in the moment they decide to make a change to something, but for the most part, we go in with everything mapped out and ready to go.”
Learning about the process of making music in a digital world is eye-opening. I always assumed that every song was made by playing live in a studio, instruments in hand, capturing that raw energy and emotion in real-time, but I’m quickly realizing how much of the magic happens behind the scenes. The freedom to manipulate sounds in ways I never imagined—stretching, distorting, layering, and even crafting entire tracks seemingly out of thin air. It’s fascinating and hasshifted my understanding of music creation from a purely organic process to a fluid, boundless art form where the possibilities are endless.
“Can I hear it?” I ask.
Eric glances back at the laptop, then to me, and I know he’s deciding something. It feels like he’s measuring me, wondering if he can pull me in even further. It feels personal now. Like it’s become more than just showing me his process. He’s showing me a piece of his soul.
He finally nods and pulls the laptop toward him. “Alright.” His voice softens, almost as if he’s excited about letting me in on the secret he’s hiding. He slides his headphones from his neck and over my ears before clicking something on the screen, and suddenly, the quiet hum of the RV is pierced by a low, rumbling beat. It’s chaotic at first, syncopated and loose, before it settles into a steady beat.
I lean forward, my heart beating in time in my chest as the patterns fill the space between us.
“With this one, I had this feeling,” Eric explains as I close my eyes, letting the sound wash over me. “It’s not fast, not slow, just…that perfect in-between space.”
I hear it. That space he’s talking about. A beat that isn’t demanding, but still pulls you in. It reminds me of the way you feel when you’re in a moment with someone, where nothing needs to be said, and everything just falls into place.
“I hear it,” I whisper, surprised at how much it’s affecting me. “It’s almost like…a heartbeat.”
“Exactly,” he says, his voice low and deep. “A heartbeat. Something steady, something that drives you without you even realizing it.”
I open my eyes and look at him, my breath catching when I find him watching me—reallywatching me. His sapphireeyes pull me into their depths, and I’m completely at his mercy. Falling as hard and as fast as I did the night we met. The Eric in front of me now isn’t Velvet Shadows Eric, the one who’s larger than life and untouchable.
The King.
Right now, he’s just Eric. The man I met in New York. The one who made mefeel.
“Do you have anything else I’m allowed to hear?” I ask, desperate to stay in this moment, but needing to pull the focus back to the music.
“Sure,” he says, clicking around on the screen. “I have all the demos from the last five albums. Do you want to hear something fromSuspicions? I can show you how they started versus what ended up on the album.”
“Absolutely,” I say, a smile growing wide across my lips.
I spend the rest of the evening listening to the original drum grooves from their latest album. Some of them are exactly as they are on the tracks, and others are very different. I ask question after question after question—desperate to know how and why things changed from what he had in his head to what was tracked for the album.
If he’s annoyed with my incessant question asking, he doesn’t show it. He answers every question I have in greater detail than I expect him to and can’t help but feel warmth spreading through my chest knowing he respects and trusts me enough to reveal all of his secrets.
TWENTY-ONE
Eric
? When You're Ready - Shawn Mendez ?
Iknow she has shit she needs to get done and she can’t be here every night, but damn do I hate the nights Ty doesn’t come to sound check. It means that I have three, long, miserable hours at the arena without her. Which, as this tour goes on and we spend more and more time together, is getting harder to deal with.
Checking my watch (again) I’m let down (again) when I realize I still have at least one hour and forty-two minutes until she gets here.
I groan and slide my phone out of my pocket, opening my social media apps to scroll through and see if anyone’s posting about the show tonight. That should distract me for at least an hour.
As I scroll through post after post—everything from girls getting ready together in hotels, people out at bars pre-gaming, and people already in the parking lot tailgating—I interact as much as I can, throwing comments andlikes their way and laughing when I get the inevitable “@ericambrose knows I exist?! RIP ME” in response.
The guys find their way back to the greenroom, popping my bubble of solitude, but at least now I won’t have to sit here in silence and think about Tyler.
“Where’s Ty?” Kevin asks, looking around the room and I groan.Well, that lasted all of five seconds.
“Stayed behind to get some writing done,” I say, sitting upright on the couch as Josh settles in beside me. “Where were you guys?”
“Are you kidding? We’re in Philly. You know where we went,” Josh says, and I laugh. Cheesesteaks. These guys areobsessedwith cheesesteaks. I had one the first time we came here, but they’re not my thing. I prefer the food on the other side of this state. I can’t wait to get to Pittsburgh at the end of the tour so I can eat my weight in sandwiches from Primanti Bros. and mac and cheese bites from Sheetz.
We spend the next hour like we usually do—being idiots in the greenroom. Talking and laughing and making jokes while Josh removes his shirt and starts applying his body paint.
