The story is inspired by my time working for nearly 3 years as a night receptionist for a popular recording studio in Los Angeles and is an homage to the people who work behind the scenes in music - the engineers, studio runners, assistants - close to the stars but not one themselves.
During my time at the studio, I had the opportunity to see behind the curtain of this industry that I love. Many of today’s top charting songs were recorded during my time there and, in Zach (co-writer) and my late-night talks after long graveyard shifts, we started to see a narrative in these unexplored stories from the inside.
This is a fascinating world, one that has so much to do with who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside — emphasized further by the literal gate through which I monitored who came in and out of the studio lot. Even within the walls there is a clear social hierarchy at play — from the artists at the top, all the way down to the studio interns working long hours just to be on the periphery of this exclusive world.
Pop Screen is inspired by a run-in with a producer one of my coworkers had when she herself was working as a receptionist there and my own experience and observation of how often luck...and not hard work...determines who becomes a star and who remains in the shadows.