Silk Screens is a behind the scenes look at the making of a track.

In this edition, Austin’s Love Inks reflect on the making-of “Waiting on a Plane,” the closing track on their brand new album.

Kevin Dehan (Guitar & Synth): I wrote this song on a Korg MS-20 synthesizer. I’ve been using that as my main writing instrument for a long time. The most fun thing to do is to build up tracks with it because it’s monophonic, which means you can only play one note at a time. The first recording device I bought I still use, it has 4 tracks. So you get four synth lines going and it makes this weird organ sound. I don’t know piano, but by doing this you get a clean dark sound that’s not like any organ. That’s what you hear in the demo (below). The record was mixed by this guy in Austin, Matt Oliver, and he really wanted to change this particular song. It was the only song he really wanted to flip on its head. And I didn’t really like that at first, but he said, “Give it a day or two to grow on you.” And then I realized it was more dynamic and much sadder. He took it somewhere else, which is cool if you can get that to happen. You’ve got to trust someone and you’ve got to let your ego go when it comes to doing what truly is the better version. Here’s the demo—this is where the inspiration really zapped in and you can still hear the dark mood that was happening:

Sherry LeBlanc (Vocals): When I wrote the lyrics to “Waiting on a Plane,” I was going through a heavy rotation of some of my favorite female artists. I do this every few months. My turntable will only see Roberta Flack, Melanie Safka, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Stevie Nicks, and Bonnie Raitt on repeat for a long time. I like to just wallow in the tones of their voices and sit in bathrooms by myself practicing singing their songs.

I was thinking about how Joni Mitchell was in her late twenties when Blue came out and how I only dream of writing lyrics that prolific. I thought about the space and time that all of these women were in when they wrote my favorite songs. I thought about myself a bit younger and a bit more of a raw nerve. Finally, I thought about how so many of these artists focus on every aspect of a relationship from infatuation to boredom to heartbreak and everything in between.

I wanted the song to paint a very specific picture so the listener could immediately picture themselves in the song. Also to touch on the raw emotions I felt when I was twenty-two and lovesick. I came up with the first line and the rest of the lyrics poured out in about thirty minutes. It’s about the last chapter of a relationship—the time period when you both know it’s over but haven’t completely severed the ties because there’s still an incredible amount of love there. I tried to capture that feeling of holding on, being in love, and feeling sick all at the same time. Hopefully it came across. Here are some of the songs that inspired the lyrical content:

Melanie Safka - “Steppin”:

This is one of my favorite songs of all time, with a great dig regarding a broken relationship, “It wasn’t for nothing, it made a sad rhyme…”

Bonnie Raitt - “If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody”:

Joni Mitchell - “A Case of You”:

Matt Oliver (Producer): I tried to do some cool synthesizer stuff for several hours but was never successfully able to really capture the mood I wanted to. It’s almost like all the atmospheric and the incidental stuff on there is what works for the most for me. To me, I think of a sort of dilapidated bus depot, or a deserted airport, any sort of place of transit when nobody is supposed to be there. There’s some trash on the ground, maybe a member of the janitorial staff is coming in but not really in a hurry to get to work, that kind of thing.