Behind the Music: How a Real Studio Session Became Part of the Story
When people find out I recorded an original soundtrack for my romance series, the first question is usually, “Wait — you did what?”
Fair. It’s not exactly standard author behaviour. But the Stolen Romance series is a rockstar romance, and from the very beginning, the music wasn’t just backdrop — it was character. The songs my characters wrote, performed, and fought over needed to exist. Not as a Spotify playlist of songs that “inspired the vibe” (though I have one of those too), but as actual music. Their music.
So I went to Metropolis Studios in London and recorded it.
Why It Had to Be Real
Here’s the thing about writing a musician character: readers who love music will know if you’re faking it. They’ll feel the difference between an author who’s researched what a studio looks like and one who’s stood in a live room and felt the bass in their chest.
I wanted that authenticity to bleed into the prose. I wanted to write a recording session and know exactly how it smells (coffee, old wood, and something electric), how the light looks through the control room glass at midnight, how it feels when a take goes wrong and the silence in the room is louder than the music was.
Metropolis has recorded some of the biggest names in music history. Standing in that space, I understood something about my characters that I couldn’t have understood from my desk: the intoxication of it. The way a studio at 2 a.m. feels like the only real place in the world. And how falling in love in that environment — where everything is heightened, where you’re creating something together, where the vulnerability of making art mirrors the vulnerability of letting someone in — makes a particular kind of sense.
Music as Emotional Architecture
In the Stolen Romance series, music isn’t just what the characters do. It’s how they communicate when words fail. There are scenes where a melody says what dialogue can’t, where the act of performing together is more intimate than any love scene.
Having real tracks to anchor those moments changed how I wrote them. I could listen to the actual song while drafting a scene and feel whether the emotion on the page matched the emotion in the music. It became a kind of creative feedback loop — the writing shaped the music, and the music reshaped the writing.
What Readers Get From It
I’ll be honest: you absolutely do not need to listen to the soundtrack to enjoy the books. The stories stand entirely on their own. But for readers who want to go deeper — who want to hear the song that’s playing in that scene, who want to feel what the characters feel in that moment — the music is there.
It’s been one of the most rewarding parts of this whole journey, watching readers discover the soundtrack and message me saying, “I was listening to [track] during that chapter and I actually cried.” That’s the dream. That’s the whole point.
The Takeaway for Fellow Writers
You don’t need to book a recording studio to make your fictional world feel real (though I highly recommend it if you ever get the chance). What you do need is to find your version of that — the thing that takes your story from researched to felt. Maybe it’s visiting the city where your book is set. Maybe it’s learning the skill your character has. Maybe it’s sitting in the kind of silence your character sits in and paying attention to what it does to you.
Authenticity isn’t about getting every detail right. It’s about having felt the thing you’re asking your reader to feel.
A. B. Jackson is an LGBTQ+ rockstar romance author. Listen to the original Stolen Romance soundtrack on Spotify and start the series with the free prequel novella, Stolen Nights, at abjackson.com.