From A Producer To A Global Superstar

Chapter 465

The name came like a summons.

"Frosh."

Sheun stood in the doorway, holding a clipboard, his voice carrying no urgency, just the calm rhythm of someone who had done this many times before. The room shifted, eyes moving to the man who was being called, some curious, some relieved it was not them, others calculating how long before their own turn arrived.

Frosh felt his body respond before his mind caught up. His legs straightened, his hands tightened around his notebook, and he stood from the plastic chair that had molded to his weight over the past hour. The room looked different from a standing position. Larger. More exposed.

Faye looked up at him. She did not speak. She just nodded, a small gesture that carried more encouragement than any words could have held in that moment.

Frosh nodded back. Then he walked toward Sheun, moving past the rows of chairs, past the faces that watched him with a mixture of empathy and competition, past the fan that turned in the corner without really cooling anything. Each step felt deliberate, like he was walking toward a ledge and choosing to step off it.

Sheun held the door open. "You are good?" he asked quietly.

"Hmm yes I am good," Frosh said, though his voice came out rougher than intended.

Sheun led him down a short hallway that smelled of fresh paint and equipment heat. The walls were thin enough that Frosh could hear the low hum of machinery on the other side, the kind of sound that lived in recording spaces, constant and patient. They reached a door, and Sheun pushed it open.

The studio was smaller than Frosh expected. Not the grand, polished space he had imagined when he first received the call two weeks ago. This was stripped down. Functional. A microphone stand in the center of the room, a single stool beside it, and a small group of people arranged in a semicircle of folding chairs. Frosh counted five. Sheun made six.

Jinad sat closest to the microphone, a laptop open in front of him, his fingers resting on the keys with the relaxed readiness of someone who knew his craft well enough to forget about it. Beside him, Akin held a tablet, his expression neutral, his eyes moving to Frosh with an assessment that felt professional and impersonal. The others Frosh did not recognize. Young men and women who watched him with the same quiet focus, the same waiting.

Akin and Jinad both traveled back to Nigeria under Dayo's order after all they would be the ones running the songs created by Dayo and other artists in the JD Nigeria label so they have to be there.

"Sit if you want," Sheun said, gesturing toward the stool. "Or stand. Whatever you need."

Frosh walked to the stool and sat down. The wood was hard and unfamiliar beneath him. He placed his notebook on his lap and opened it to the page he had marked, the lyrics he had chosen to lead with. His hands were shaking slightly. He pressed them against the paper to still them.

"What's the name?" Jinad asked, his voice low, almost gentle.

"Frosh."

"And what you performing?"

"A song I wrote." Frosh looked down at the lyrics, reading the first lines in his head, feeling them move through him like blood returning to a limb that had gone numb. "No title yet. Just words."

Jinad nodded, his fingers hovering over the recording controls. "Anytime you ready."

Frosh closed his eyes.

The room did not disappear. He was too aware of the people watching, the equipment listening, the weight of the moment pressing against his skin. But he pushed it back, the way he had learned to push back everything that stood between him and the music. The landlord. The eviction. The boxes. His sister's face in the doorway this morning. He pushed it all to the edges and let the center fill with sound.

He started acapella.

No beat. No guitar. Just his voice, raw and unaccompanied, filling the small space with words that had been written in the middle of a night when he was not sure he would survive to the morning. The lyrics spoke about standing at a door that would not open, about knocking until your knuckles bled, about hunger that became indistinguishable from hope.

His voice cracked on the third line.

He heard it. They heard it. The imperfection hung in the air like smoke, and Frosh felt the old instinct flare, the urge to stop, to apologize, to start over and get it right. But something held him back. The memory of what Sheun had said. No tricks. Just you, your voice, and whatever you brought with you.

He did not stop.

He let the crack stand. He sang through it, his voice finding its footing again, growing stronger as the words carried him forward. The roughness became part of the texture, the evidence of a man who was not polished but who was real, who had lived the words he was speaking and was still living them.

He opened his eyes halfway through.

The room had changed. Not physically. The same people sat in the same chairs. But their expressions had shifted. Jinad was no longer looking at his laptop. He was looking at Frosh, his head tilted slightly, his eyes narrowed in the way of someone who was hearing something he had not expected. Akin's tablet had lowered. The others were still, completely still, the kind of stillness that only came when attention had become absolute.

Frosh sang louder.

Not for volume, but for release. The words poured out of him, shaped by years of failure and the refusal to let that failure define him. He sang about sleeping in rooms that were not home, about eating meals that did not fill, about watching other people rise on ladders that were never offered to him. He sang about his sister, though he did not name her, the small presence that kept him moving when everything else had stopped.

And then the final verse, the one he had written after the landlord's visit, after the boxes, after the acceptance that he was going to lose everything. He sang about the bottom, about looking up from a place so deep that the sky seemed like a memory rather than a reality. He sang about finding the strength to stand anyway, to pick up whatever was left, to keep moving because stopping was a kind of death he was not yet willing to accept.

His voice faded on the last word.

The room held its breath.

Then Jinad exhaled, a long, slow sound that seemed to release everyone else. Frosh saw him glance at Akin, a look passing between them that he could not read but that felt significant. The others shifted in their chairs, the stillness breaking into small movements, adjustments, the return of ordinary motion.

Sheun stepped forward from where he had been leaning against the wall. "You write that yourself?"

"Every word," Frosh said, his voice hoarse.

"When?"

"Last week. After my landlord tell me say I get three days to leave."

The statement hung in the air, bald and unadorned. Frosh had not intended to say it. The honesty had simply fallen out of him, a consequence of singing with everything exposed.

Sheun did not react with pity. He nodded slowly, as if Frosh had just confirmed something he already suspected. "You get more?"

Frosh looked down at his notebook, at the pages filled with lyrics that no one had ever heard. "Plenty."

"Good." Sheun stepped back, making room for Frosh to leave the stool. "Wait outside. We go call you if we need anything else."

Frosh stood up. His legs felt unsteady, like he had been sitting for much longer than the few minutes the song had taken. He closed his notebook and walked toward the door, past the semicircle of watchers, past Jinad who gave him a small nod that felt almost like respect.

When he stepped back into the hallway, the door closing behind him, he leaned against the wall and let his head fall back. His heart was still racing. His throat was dry. But somewhere beneath the exhaustion, something had shifted. The song was out. It had landed. Whether they wanted it or not, he had given them everything he had, and that was a victory no one could take from him.

He walked back to the waiting room.

The eyes that found him were different now. The other artists looked at him with new calculation, trying to read what had happened behind the closed door. Faye was one of them. She watched him return to his seat, her expression searching.

"How was it?" she asked quietly.

Frosh sat down heavily, the plastic chair creaking under him. "I sang."

"And?"

"They tell me make I wait."

Faye nodded slowly, understanding that the lack of immediate dismissal was itself a sign. "What you sing about?"

"Everything." Frosh looked at her, and there was a weariness in his eyes that also carried light. "I sing about everything."

Before Faye could respond, Sheun appeared in the doorway again.

"Faye."

The name cut through the room.

Faye's body responded with the same automatic readiness that Frosh had felt. She stood, her bag sliding from her lap to the floor, her hands finding the strap with practiced ease. She looked at Frosh one more time, and in her eyes, he saw the same thing he had carried into the studio. The determination. The fear. The refusal to let either of them win.

"Good luck," he said.

She did not answer. She just walked toward the door, following Sheun down the same hallway Frosh had traveled, disappearing behind the same door that had swallowed him and spit him out changed.

Frosh watched her go, then looked down at his hands. They were still shaking, but less now. The tremor of aftermath rather than anticipation.

---

The studio looked the same from the inside.

Faye noted this as she stepped through the door, the same stripped-down functionality, the same microphone waiting in the center like an altar. But the energy was different. The people in the semicircle sat with the residue of what they had just heard still moving through them. She could feel it in the air, the faint vibration of a performance that had not yet fully dissipated.

She walked to the stool and sat down. She placed her bag on the floor beside her, but she did not open it. She did not need the notebook for this song. She had written it during the night she left her father's house, and she had performed it so many times since then that the words were carved into her memory, permanent as scars.

"Faye," Jinad said, his voice carrying a slight roughness that had not been there before. "You ready?"

"Yes."

"What's the song?"

"About leaving home." She paused, then added, "About choosing yourself over the comfort they offer."

Jinad nodded. Akin adjusted his tablet. The others settled into their chairs with the slight movements of people preparing to receive.

Faye did not close her eyes.

She looked directly at the microphone, at the small circle of foam and metal that would carry her voice into the ears of strangers who had the power to change her life or to confirm its end. She thought about her father's text, still unread on her phone. She thought about the deadline she had set, the one that was supposed to expire today, the surrender she had been preparing to make.

Then she pushed all of it down and let the song rise.

Her voice was different from Frosh's. Where he had been rough and urgent, she was controlled and devastating. Each note landed with precision, shaped by years of performing in rooms where she had to make people listen despite their indifference. She did not crack. She did not falter. She delivered the words like a verdict, each line carrying the weight of a choice that had cost her everything and given her nothing in return.

She sang about the house she grew up in, the walls that held too much expectation, the voice of a father who loved her but could not understand why she would choose struggle over the path he had prepared. She sang about the argument that ended everything, the moment she packed her bags and walked out into a night that did not care whether she survived it. She sang about the years that followed, the slow erosion of pride, the gradual realization that independence without progress was just another kind of prison.

And then she reached the bridge.

The place in the song where the emotion peaked, where the control she had maintained throughout finally demanded release. Her voice rose, not in volume but in intensity, the words pouring out of her with a force that made Jinad sit up straighter in his chair. She sang about standing in the doorway of a bar at two in the morning, looking at a city that did not know her name, and deciding that she would make it know her. She sang about the refusal to go home, to admit defeat, to accept that her father's way had been the right way all along.

The last note held.

Faye let it carry, her voice vibrating in the small space, filling every corner with the resonance of someone who had given everything she had and was still standing. The note faded slowly, deliberately, leaving a silence that was not empty but full.

The room did not move.

For several seconds, no one breathed. The stillness was absolute, the kind that only came when a performance had stripped away the ordinary and revealed something raw beneath it. Jinad's fingers hovered over his laptop, frozen. Akin's tablet had gone dark, forgotten in his lap. The others sat with expressions that Faye could not read but that she recognized. The look of people who had been expecting one thing and received something else entirely.

Sheun stepped forward from the wall. His face was unreadable, but his eyes were sharp and alive.

"You perform that song before?" he asked.

"Many times," Faye said, her voice steady though her chest was heaving. "In bars. Small venues. Places where nobody knew my name."

"And they listened?"

"Sometimes." She paused. "Most times they talked over me. But I sang anyway."

Sheun exchanged a glance with Jinad. The look was brief, but Faye caught it. The nod that passed between them was smaller than a word but larger than a sentence.

"Wait outside," Sheun said. "We go talk."

Faye stood up. Her legs felt stronger than Frosh's had looked when he returned. The song had not drained her. It had fortified her, the release of it becoming a source of power rather than depletion. She walked toward the door, past the semicircle, past the watchers who tracked her with eyes that had changed from assessment to something closer to recognition.

She stepped into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

Frosh was standing against the opposite wall, waiting. He looked up when she emerged, and she saw the question in his face before he spoke it.

"How was it?"

Faye walked to him and leaned against the wall beside him, their shoulders not quite touching but close enough to share the same pocket of space. "I sang."

"And?"

"They told me to wait."

Frosh nodded slowly, a small smile touching his mouth. "So we both dey wait."

"We both wait," Faye agreed.

They stood there in the hallway, two people who had arrived carrying different weights and were now standing in the same uncertainty. The studio door remained closed, the voices inside muted by the thickness of the wood. They could not hear what was being said. They could only wait for the verdict that would emerge from behind it.

Faye looked at Frosh, at the roughness of his clothes, the evidence of a life that had been harder than hers in some ways and easier in others. She thought about what he had said earlier, about the eviction, about his sister. She thought about her own deadline, her father's calls, the apartment she could barely afford.

"We made it this far," she said quietly.

Frosh looked at her. "This far no be the end."

"No," Faye agreed. "It's not the end."

The door opened.

Sheun stepped out, clipboard in hand, his expression carrying nothing that either of them could read. He looked at Frosh, then at Faye, then back at the studio where Jinad and Akin were already packing equipment, their movements quick and purposeful.