The Early Morning Musician

Stuck in a creative rut? We've all been there, but not all of us know how to get out. Here at EMM we're all about making your creativity work for you instead of waiting for inspiration to strike. But when you're blocked, you don't want fluffy platitudes - you want practical steps to sparking your art again. These are our 10 best tried-and-true steps you can take to turn your creativity back on today. To purchase "The War Of Art" mentioned in this podcast, click here. To purchase "Bird By Bird," click here.

In this episode of The Early Morning Musician, we dive into one of the hardest but most essential skills for independent artists: learning how to say "no." As creators balancing day jobs, personal responsibilities, and artistic pursuits, it's easy to let distractions and requests from others chip away at the precious time you've carved out for your craft. We'll explore why saying no is not selfish - it's necessary. You'll learn how to recognize the subtle ways time is stolen, strategies for setting boundaries with friends, family, and colleagues, and tips for overcoming guilt when prioritizing your creative work. This episode will empower you to reclaim your time so you can stay consistent, inspired, and focused on what you love: your art. Tune in to discover how the simple act of saying no can unlock more time, energy, and mental space for your creative journey.

Here at the Early Morning Musician, we believe in the AM hours so much that we named our podcast for them. But you may not be convinced that making 5AM your prime creative time is when the juices will be flowing. Maybe you like to work best when the inspiration strikes, or maybe you find yourself inspired during night owl hours. In this episode, we're telling you why working in the morning will double your effectiveness, output, and creativity in 2025.

This year was our first full year as indie artists releasing a song every month. From January until now we released 10 songs and learned a TONNN along the way. Here are the top 5 things we wished we had known sooner but learned this year. Hopefully they'll save you some time!

We reached our goal this year, guys. On this episode we're talking about why millions of other artists quit too soon; before they've found their sound, their look, their audience, and how to create income from their hard work.

If you aren't familiar with the internet trend of "Hear Me Out," where people show photos of UNLIKELY characters from movies and tv that they'd consider romantically seeing (or lately, hear-me-out-cakes, where friends are putting photos of their characters on a stick and sticking them into a cake together), then let us be your introduction to the musical version of hear-me-out-artists we hate to love. We didn't talk about which artists we were going to surprise each other with, so Carisa went a slightly different direction than Ryan, but each one stayed historically accurate. Here are the most unlikely tunes they like and never talk about.

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:  From David Bayles and Ted Orland's book, Art & Fear:  [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.

We had so much to say about cringy content that we had to make a part 2. In this episode, we're going over Jojo Siwa, overcoming negative feedback (different from constructive feedback), the importance of finding positive community, audience building through cringe, the gap musicians feel between their musical talent and social media talent, and literally so much more. We hope you find this episode as cathartic to listen to as it felt to make. Tell us what you think in the comments! And listen to the music at Geraldene.

This is one of our favorite podcast episodes yet, and we had so much to say that we split it into two parts! This week is Part 1 of "Climbing Cringe Mountain," which is what we affectionately like to call showing up on social media - when it feels salesy, when you think you look try-hard, when you realize you look different on camera than in the mirror, when you wonder what your friends from high school are thinking as they watch you lip-sync your own song on your iPhone, when your amounts of likes and pre-shares don't reflect all the work you hoped would pay off by now - that's what we call climbing cringe mountain. No matter what kind of art or even business you're in, climbing cringe mountain is the only way (with maybe a few rare unicorn exceptions), and we're here to comfort you that you can conquer your own cringe, and that it will be worth it (and maybe eventually enjoyable in the end). Listen to our music at Geraldene.

The temptation for artists and musicians to leave their 9 to 5's for the thing that they're passionate about is strong. Most of us never wanted our day jobs and the thought of doing them forever makes us cringe. In this episode, we're talking about the power of NOT leaving your day job, and the privileges it will enable you to have as a musician. We're breaking down how to make your day job work for YOU, as a part of your art's ecosystem in the long haul.

Is realizing you no longer want a dream you've chased and invested in for years terrifying or liberating? Maybe it's both. And maybe giving up on a dream is okay. But how do you know when it's time? On today's podcast we're talking about the cumulative process of realizing we didn't want what we thought we wanted, and what happened when we tentatively went back to the drawing board. Listen to the music at Geraldene.

Artists take rejection personally. It doesn't feel like it's only about your work - it feels like it's about YOU. Today we're talking about this common denominator of sharing your art publicly, and how to keep it moving when not being everyone's cup of tea, struggling to find your people, and not feeling successful all get swirly inside your head. Publishing art will always feel like a risk, but we're spending the next 30 minutes reminding you that it's worth it. Listen to our very rejectable music at Geraldene.

Last year was one of the hardest years of our lives. Facing pressure, questions, and impossibilities from all sides, we came closer than ever to giving up on our art long-term and focusing all our energy on generating income and finding more normal hobbies. Then, we had an incredible experience that really tripped us out and changed everything. This is the episode where we talk about that. We hope that someday you have an experience like this, too. Listen to the music at Geraldene.

Cowriting is what the professionals do, but why is it so vulnerable and awkward? In today's episode we talk about how we learned to supplement each other's weaknesses and expedite the writing process - consistently, together, and without the weird. Listen to our music at Geraldene

Calling all artists - raise your hand if you're still trying to figure out how to balance your music, your finances, your family, and probably your day job. This is our first episode of the Early Morning Musician, a podcast dedicated to what we have learned from making art in the margins for the last 10 years. In this episode we talk about the top 3 things we've learned from doing it *unsuccessfully,* so you can take the shortcuts and have it all. Listen to the music we're been talking about at our band Geraldene.