The Early Morning Musician

This year we set a goal to release one song - Every. Single. Month. For a year. We got to September (so close to the end of 2024!) and failed for the first time this month. Tomorrow's October 1st, and this podcast is us processing this failure out loud together for the first time. Trust us when we say we haven't talked about this before now - so this podcast is a really a stream of consciousness.

Join us for a casual chat about what we think this miss means for Geraldene. And stay tuned for September's song to come out THIS month, in October 2024.

Lollllll

You never know when you're going to have a random opportunity come your way - and this story is our most random. It's also a testament to the reality that no matter how an opportunity pans out, sometimes the opportunity alone was all you needed to become someone completely different.

This episode is for the nerds who don't want to pay someone else to produce their tunes. Here's everything that DIDN'T work - and everything that has been worth every penny - in our home studios over the last ten years. Ryan's been on a quest for studio knowledge for like, a very long time, and in this episode he's spilling the tea on all the tech he would advise new starts to invest in.

What a fun trip down memory lane. We decided to share with you the meanest (and funniest, by default) things that have been said to us or have happened to us while pursuing music the last 10 years. If you've ever worried about what people might say to you if you put something out there, this episode will either make you feel a whole lot better or a lot worse. Enjoy! :')

The other day on Tiktok we were talking about how few artists ever post more than 10 songs on Spotify. The VAST majority stop before 10, so we were encouraging our listeners to set a quantity goal: post ten songs and you'll already be ahead of the vast majority. Someone commented on that post and said, "But how does quality vs. quantity come into play here?"

We thought that was such a good question that we decided to dedicate a whole episode to answering it.

We obviously have an opinion on which matters most, but what's yours?

The parable we quoted in this podcast:

[A] ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

Listen to this month's song Ultraconditional

It's Ryan's turn to be in the question seat! Ryan's usually pretty quiet, but in this episode he has to dig deep to answer questions that he and Carisa have never asked each other before. For those of you who don't know Ryan very well, this episode gives you an uncomfortable inside look.

Listen to this month's song "Sunburn Season" here.

We've made a lot of new friends in the last six months and wanted to let you get to know a little more about the girl-voice of Geraldene, Carisa. Even if you know her well, these questions and answers will be brand new, even to her.

We used to think that if success was "meant to be," that it would come fast and easy. Roadblocks and delayed gratification seemed like signs that we should drop what we were doing, every time. We noticed that this wasn't a phenomenon that affected everyone, though, especially as we got older. In fact, in today's music industry, "getting discovered" is no longer the starting point. Music has become like other careers - it's built in small steps over years. In other words, we're in it for the long game, and in this podcast we tell you why you should be, too.

Listen to the music at Geraldene.

Have you ever found yourself having a very refined musical palate? Us too. When we were younger, we thought this was serving our art - because knowing what good art is should help us make good art, right? We found that ultimately the opposite was true. In this episode we are giving the cheat codes to learning how to love your own (imperfect) art while still holding your all-time favorite art side by side.

Listen to our new single Sunburn Season here.

This is a personal episode for those of you who have been following along with us for a long time. We've been Christians since we were kids, and have made expressly Christian music all our lives till now. In this episode we're getting candid about why we're not making Christian music right now, and what led us here after all these years.

Listen to the music at Geraldene.