From A Producer To A Global Superstar

The booth smelled like copper and dust. Frosh put on the headphones and adjusted the microphone stand for the fourth time, though it hadn’t moved. Through the glass, he could see Blake leaning against the mixing desk, talking to Akin with his back turned. The red recording light above the door was off. Frosh was grateful for small mercies.

"Whenever you’re ready," Akin’s voice crackled through the talkback.

Frosh closed his eyes. The beat started in his ears. That warm, humid groove he already knew by heart. He came in on cue.

Two bars in, he heard himself. The voice was wrong. Too careful. Every note landed exactly where it should, but nothing stuck. He was singing like someone who had been told a cop was listening. He finished the verse. The chorus. The bridge where Blake’s voice was supposed to slot in. He got through it. Then he opened his eyes and waited.

Akin’s voice came back flat. "You want to hear it?"

Frosh shook his head. "I know what it sounds like."

"So do I."

Blake turned around. He looked at Frosh through the glass for a long moment. Then he walked to the booth door and opened it. The seal broke with a soft hiss.

"Step out," Blake said.

Frosh stepped out. The studio air felt colder outside the booth. He stood there waiting for notes, for corrections, for the kind of technical breakdown that would tell him exactly how he had failed.

Instead, Blake sat on the arm of the couch and said, "My third session ever. Atlanta. I was nineteen. Feature for a guy who had a number three record on Billboard. I walked in thinking I was ready. I wasn’t. First take, I forgot my own hook. Second take, I sped up my flow to match his energy and ended up sounding like an auctioneer. Third take, the engineer stopped the track and told me I was wasting studio time." Blake paused. "I walked out. Found a parking garage. Sat in a rented Camry and cried for twenty minutes. Not because I was sad. Because I was embarrassed in a way I didn’t know my body could feel."

Frosh looked at him. "You?"

"Me. Crying in a Camry that smelled like pine and somebody else’s cigarettes." Blake stood up. "The point isn’t that I got over it. The point is that I went back in because I had to. But first, I had to stop trying to be the guy with the number three record. He wasn’t in the booth. I was."

Frosh nodded. He understood. He was singing for Blake instead of with him what Blake failed or didn’t mention was the person in question was Dayo he couldn’t imagine frosh reaction if he did.

"Let’s run it again," Blake said. "But this time, don’t think about me listening. Think about the girl you’re singing to. The one who doesn’t know yet that you’re talking to her."

Frosh went back into the booth. He reset the headphones. The red light came on. The beat started.

This time, he didn’t think about the glass. He thought about humid nights. About a girl who hadn’t texted back. About wanting something so badly it made your throat tight. He sang into that feeling instead of around it.

When the bridge hit, he heard Blake’s scratch vocal come in through the talkback, answering him. Frosh didn’t flinch. He stayed in his pocket and let the two voices find each other.

The take ended. Silence. Then Akin’s voice: "That one stays."

Frosh took the headphones off. His hands were steady.

He pushed out of the booth and walked toward the lounge for water. The hallway was narrow and lit by fluorescent tubes that hummed. Halfway down, he stopped. Through the cracked door of Room B, he heard Faye.

Her voice was quieter than usual. Hesitant. Then Sarah came in underneath her, filling the gap after the second verse of *Free Mind*. The blend made Frosh stop walking. He stood in the hallway like an intruder, listening to two voices become one. Faye sang a line. Sarah echoed it, but not exactly. She changed the shape, added a harmony that sounded like agreement.

"You don’t have to hold back on the bridge," Sarah said, her voice carrying through the door. "I can meet you wherever you land."

"I don’t want to overpower you," Faye said.

"You won’t. Trust the space. Dayo left exactly enough room for both of us."

Frosh walked on. He didn’t knock. He just carried the sound with him to the lounge.

Kazeem was there, pacing a tight circle around the coffee table, muttering bars under his breath. Amara sat in a corner chair, scrolling through her phone without seeing it. Tunde was reading the same newspaper from yesterday. Jinad stood by a hot plate, stirring something that smelled like pepper.

"They fit?" Jinad asked Frosh.

"We fit," Frosh said.

"Good. Eat. You got four hours left in the day and Blake still gotta work with Kazeem."

Kazeem stopped pacing. "I don’t need four hours. I need twenty minutes. I know my verse all the way."

"You know it loud," Tunde said, not looking up. "That no be the same as knowing it."

Kazeem started to argue, but Shina walked in carrying bags of takeout. The afternoon dissolved into yam and eggs, plastic forks, and Blake explaining to Jinad why New York studios charged double for the same equipment. Sarah sat on the floor with her back against the couch, eating with her fingers and telling Amara about a festival in Austin where the crowd threw water bottles at the stage.

After lunch, Frosh stayed in the lounge. He wanted to watch.

Blake moved to Room C with Kazeem. Akin followed to engineer. Through the glass partition that separated the lounge from the secondary tracking room, Frosh could see them clearly. Kazeem was amped, bouncing on the balls of his feet, running through his verse at double speed.

Blake shook his head. "Slow it down."

"This is how it was written in my head," Kazeem said.

"Then rewrite it. The beat is heavy already. You’re adding bricks to a wall that doesn’t need them."

Kazeem ran it again. Same speed. Same aggression. He got through eight bars, then looked at Blake through the glass with an expression that said, *See?*

Blake pressed the talkback. "Stop."

The room went quiet. Kazeem pulled his headphones down.

"You think this song needs you to be impressive?" Blake asked.

"I think it needs energy."

"It needs regret. The song is called *Last Last*. It’s about Saturday night turning into Sunday morning and not liking what you see. You’re rapping like you won something. You didn’t win. You survived. There’s a difference."

Kazeem’s jaw tightened. "I don’t do vulnerable."

"Then this take is useless." Blake turned to Akin. "Play the demo. The original. Let him hear what Dayo wrote."

Akin played Kazeem’s solo rough. The third verse, empty, waiting. Dayo’s guide vocal was on it, talk-singing, stripped down. No flex. Just a man telling the truth about failure.

Kazeem listened with his arms crossed. When it ended, he didn’t move.

"Again," Blake said.

Kazeem went back into the booth. He put the headphones on. The red light came on.

This time, he didn’t bounce. He held the microphone with both hands. The beat started. He came in slower. His voice cracked on the third bar. He kept going. By the eighth bar, his shoulders had dropped. He wasn’t performing. He was confessing.

Frosh watched from the lounge. He couldn’t hear the audio, but he could see Kazeem’s face through the glass. It looked different. Younger. Hurt. Real.

Blake listened with his eyes closed.

When the take ended, Kazeem stayed in the booth for a long moment. Then he took the headphones off and wiped his face with his shirt sleeve. He didn’t come out. He just sat on the stool and breathed.

Frosh looked away. It felt like he had seen something private.

At six, Akin called everyone into the main room. The lights dimmed. Akin dialed a number on the console and put it through the speakers. Not video. Just audio.

The line connected. No greeting.

"Dayo," Akin said. "We got playback."

"Play," Dayo said. His voice came through the speakers smaller than Frosh remembered, but heavier.

Akin played the rough comp of *Essence*. Frosh’s verse. The bridge with Blake. The chorus. Nobody moved. Frosh felt his heartbeat in his wrists.

The playback ended. Silence on the LA end. Frosh counted seconds. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.

"Again tomorrow," Dayo said.

Click. The line went dead.

Frosh exhaled. He hadn’t known he was holding his breath. He looked at Blake, who was smiling.

"That’s a yes," Blake said.

"That’s all he said."

"With Dayo, that’s all he needs to say."

They went to dinner at a spot in Ikoyi that Shina knew. Plastic tables under a roof that leaked in three places. The woman running the kitchen brought out jollof in portions that could feed a family. Blake took his first bite and his eyes watered from the pepper. Sarah laughed so hard she choked on her water. Kazeem challenged her to an argument about whether Afrobeats or Amapiano was running the clubs harder right now. Sarah argued back with the confidence of someone who had been to both scenes and wasn’t impressed by either.

Tunde taught Blake how to eat with his right hand, forming the rice into a ball against his palm. Blake got it wrong twice, rice falling back into the plate. On the third try, he got it to his mouth. Tunde nodded like a teacher whose student had finally passed a test.

Amara loosened up after her second bottle of Coke. She told Sarah about the first time she heard one of Sarah’s songs on a friend’s phone in a salon. She said she had pretended it was just okay, then went home and listened to it seventeen times.

Frosh sat between Faye and Kazeem. He didn’t say much. He just watched the table. Americans and Nigerians passing pepper and arguments across plastic. Strangers who had met this morning and were already finishing each other’s sentences about music.

Blake asked Frosh about his sister. Frosh told him she was eleven, smart, obsessed with cartoons. Blake asked if she knew. Frosh said no. Not yet. He would tell her when the EP dropped.

"When it drops," Blake said, "you call her first no matter how little she is she is your main family"

Frosh nodded.

They paid and walked back to the cars. The Lagos night was warm and loud with generators and distant traffic. Frosh got into the cab with Kazeem and Amara. Faye and Tunde took another. Blake and Sarah disappeared into a car that Shina had arranged.

The apartment was quiet when Frosh got in. He showered and sat on his bed in a towel. He pulled out his phone and opened the encrypted folder Akin had shared. The rough playback of *Essence* waited there. He put in his earbuds.

His own voice filled his head. Not the bad take. The good one. The one where he had stopped performing and started singing. Beside it, Blake’s voice curled around his like smoke.

Frosh listened three times. He didn’t wince. He didn’t skip. He just let it play.

On the third listen, he realized what he was feeling. Not pride. Pride would have been loud and temporary. This was quieter. It was the feeling of hearing yourself in a room you didn’t think you deserved to enter, and discovering that the floor held your weight.

He took the earbuds out and lay back on the bed. The ceiling was stained from old leaks. The fan clicked in a rhythm that didn’t match any song he knew.

Tomorrow they would do it again. And the day after. And the day after.

But tonight, Frosh was just a twenty-something in a hot apartment, listening to his own voice beside someone he had idolized, and understanding that the song hadn’t been a gift.

It had been an invitation.

He closed his eyes and slept without dreaming.