Before all the COVID lockdowns and restrictions on travel began last year, I was in Belfast last February for Output Belfast 2020, a music conference by day, a music festival showcase by night. During the conference, I met Josh Rabinowitz of Brooklyn Music Experience, an experienced global music leader in the American advertising industry. He said something to me during a networking dinner that surprised me. “You have a voice for advertising.”
One big part of my plans was directly connected to the music industry, and that part was no longer viable once live music was put on pause indefinitely. I wrote about my hopes for critical change in the industry in this previous blog post. I sincerely hope that what we’ve seen in the last 14 months leads to lasting changes in how artists and others working in the industry are perceived, respected, and fairly compensated.
And then it came to me. What if I did a podcast? I could do that from home. But what would the podcast be about? What would I need to get one started? Who would even want to listen to me talking? How would I drum up enough interest to attract an audience? My anxiety was running wild. I was trying to run before I could walk.
I had casually mentioned my idea to Carolina Isabel. She’s a radical reiki master I met through a female entrepreneur virtual convention I had attended last autumn. Carolina told me about a podcast fellowship that she’d seen advertised on Instagram and suggested I look into it. I applied to the fellowship, I was accepted, and here we are.
During one of our Fifty Feminist States fellowship workshops in March, we conducted short interviews with our classmates, which we then edited on our own. Beyond the basic editing techniques we used for interviews conducted at festivals for There Goes the Fear, editing and producing self-recorded audio was entirely new to me. Below, you can listen to me being interviewed by L’Oreal Thompson Payton to learn a bit about astrology and my background with it. It has been posted to my Soundcloud with permission from both L’Oreal and Fifty Feminist States’ host and producer and our fellowship program leader Amelia Hruby.
