There’s a particular kind of electricity that happens when two people who once made a glorious mess together decide to try it again. In 2015, Veruca Salt struck the match. Nina Gordon and Louise Post—once estranged, once convinced their shared universe was long gone—found themselves back in a basement, guitars in hand, staring across the years like, …so, we doing this?
“We hadn’t seen each other in quite a long time,” Nina told me. “We met and we talked and we cried and we laughed.” Only after the emotional archaeology did they go downstairs, dust off the amps, and try singing together again. Louise says they “couldn’t believe how powerful it was,” like muscle memory had been hiding a full PA system behind it the whole time.
Their initial plan was modest—maybe a reunion show, play some classics, satisfy the fan base that never stopped holding the candle. A nostalgia lap. Easy. Harmless. Controlled.
But nostalgia doesn’t write new songs. Rebirths do.
“We started bringing in new songs,” Nina said, “and all of a sudden it became clear that this wasn’t just a reunion. It was like a rebirth.” Cue Ghost Notes, the album that plays like the band telling its own biography while shredding through the footnotes.
This time, everything felt different. The two talked about songwriting not like a task but like a valve that had finally been wrenched open again—one they’d tried, unsuccessfully, to keep shut. Louise admitted she’d been stacking up ideas in the dark for years. “There were so many songs I wrote at two in the morning that would just get forgotten… I call those songs ‘dead soldiers.’” Little orphan riffs, condemned to the graveyard of phone memos and handheld recorders.
She didn’t need to explain what changed. “Alternica” did that for her.
It’s the album closer, but it was the real beginning. The moment the fog lifted. The song that made Nina look at Louise and realize, Oh, we’re not done. Not even close. “When she brought in ‘Alternica,’ that was when I knew… we gotta get in the studio.”
This is the part of the story where the dramatic Hollywood swell would crescendo, but Veruca Salt’s brand of reconciliation is messier, funnier, and a little bit bruised. They didn’t unite under some grand banner of destiny—they just played, and suddenly the past didn’t feel all that heavy.
The songs on Ghost Notes aren’t simply personal diaries anymore—they’re about them. Their friendship, their fracture, their revival. Where earlier albums leaned on parallel confessionals, this record is two voices writing about the same storm from opposite ends of the same lightning bolt.
“So much of the material on this album is about us,” Nina said. Louise nodded beside her, no qualifiers needed. Their dynamic wasn’t cautious or fragile—it was comfortable in that way longtime friends get when they’ve already survived the worst of each other.
”It was such a relief,” Louise said. “I could just let the expression flow again.” After years of forcing the creativity valve shut, she suddenly had an outlet—and an audience of one—who could actually keep up with her.
The record feels like that: two people holding up mirrors, then finally putting them down and looking at each other instead.
When they talk about Ghost Notes, the affection is unmistakable, even in its jaggedness. Their reunion wasn’t engineered; it wasn’t an anniversary tour cash-in; no label was tugging at the leash. “It was coming from such a pure place,” Nina said. “No one was asking us to do it… there would be no reason to do it if it weren’t good.”
And it was good. It was better than it had any right to be after so much time apart. The album landed like a quiet shockwave—one of those “oh damn, they’re back-back” moments you don’t get many of anymore.
Rebirths don’t usually come with expiration dates, and Ghost Notes sounded like the beginning of something—like two songwriters who’d done the hard work of forgiveness and then realized the real payoff was getting to write together again.
Hopefully there are a few more “dead soldiers” still waiting to be rescued.
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below.
