GAYLE Made @ SXS 2026
A home forObserving
Chaos
GAYLE returned to Studio A for a month of making her debut album. An upright piano brought in for the sessions became a gift from her manager when the record was finished.
A place to return to.
GAYLE first came to South x Sea through her manager, Kristina Russo, an old friend of mine. I worked on a few sessions with her during a week of writing in the space. About a year later, Kristina reached back out. GAYLE had felt comfortable here and wanted to return to make her record.
In early 2026, Studio A became home for Observing Chaos. They booked the room for about a month, with GAYLE, her bandmates, engineer Jaxon Hargrove, and different producers coming together around the songs. My part was providing the space and helping them get what they needed to work.
That started with a piano.
An upright, by morning.
They had hoped to use an upright I’d bought while making a record with Dan Layus. Kristina remembered it from her time on Dan’s management team. But the piano was now in another room that was booked, and it wouldn’t be available. They wanted an upright to be a big part of the sound, so I needed to find another one quickly.
On Sunday evening, January 4, I emailed Rick Fretter at Nashville Piano Room. The session was starting the next morning. I was looking for something that would record well, with some character. As I put it in the email, “vibey and quirky is cool for this one.”
Rick had a Starck upright available. He arranged delivery and tuning the next day, getting it into the studio and ready for the sessions. I sent him a thank-you that night. He’d pulled off a turnaround I hadn’t been sure was possible.
I’d bought the piano thinking it would stay at South x Sea for other artists to use. By the end of the project, it meant something different to GAYLE. Kristina told me how much she loved it: the piano she’d made her first full-length record on. She bought it for GAYLE as a gift.
“The world was kind of our oyster for a month.”
People & place
- Artist
- GAYLE
- Management
- Kristina Russo
- Engineering & mixing
- Jaxon Hargrove
- Studio
- South x Sea · Studio A
- Upright piano
- Starck, sourced through Rick Fretter / Nashville Piano Room
Selected project credits. Full album credits are available on Qobuz.
Read the Tennessean’s album feature