Daniel Hart

I turned in Stained Glass Eyes v1 on Dec. 19th, 2024, less than a month before the Eaton Fire, from which my family and I would flee for our lives. Looks like I turned in SGE demo v5b - the version we recorded and released - at the end of Feb. 2025, about six weeks after said fleeing. As I've relayed in a couple interviews now, Stained Glass Eyes was an assignment from Rolin ("we need a Claudia song to break Lestat open in Ep 305"), and my v1 demo wasn't what Rolin had in mind for the scene. My from-the-ground-up redo v2 ended up sounding to me like a reject from the Lestat Broadway show. The third almost complete reimagining was the right song for the episode, and some tempo and lyrical tweaks got us the extra versions.

So the song was written over about 3 months - by far the longest amount of time I spent writing any TVL song. I'm sure the fires slowed me down. Conversely, at the beginning of 2025, I was more intimately acquainted with the dangers and losses of everything burning away than I'd ever been. It is a song about one of the deepest forms of loss (loss of a child), and a song about being haunted by the ghosts of your mistakes, and haunted by your suppressed yet unrelenting grief.

Lyrically speaking, the title of the song came to me first, and it was always going to be called Stained Glass Eyes. One of my favorite things about growing up in an Episcopal church was all the stained glass. Even now, I find it remarkably beautiful, full of magic and meaning, which I try to hold with reverence. To describe Claudia's eyes with that same reverence, and find the beauty in her final stare at Lestat, as she was burning away...I felt like I'd peeled back some layers with that title, and it helped me get down to the core of what the song needed to be, and say.