483 - Artist Case Study: The Niche Shortcut with Olivia Rafferty

0:02On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off, sometimes you just need a creative pep talk.

0:21Hey, you're listening to Creative Pep Talk, a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator. And this show is just everything I'm learning about building and maintaining a thriving creative practice. Let's get into it.

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3:00Today's episode is a little bit different. We have an up and coming musician and listener of Creative Pep Talk, Olivia Rafferty on the show today. Every once in a while, I see someone who listens to the show, whose art I really enjoy, and who is also doing something super interesting that I think all the listeners should know about because I think there's something really juicy and interesting to learn. And I think it could really impact your own creative journey. Olivia is an indie musician hailing from Northeast Scotland and whose music has been featured by BBC Radio Scotland and Folk Radio UK.

3:43To me, her music sounds like a really interesting mix of like Kitty Craft and The Sundays, if you're familiar with those two bands. This episode has some really juicy takeaways. ways. The first one is that this is another great example of a thing that we've been talking a lot about, which is the independent spirit in your creativity. It is so easy to sit around and wait for the institutional validation that comes from getting signed or getting picked up by a publisher or getting a prompt and a brief from a client. This episode is about what does it look like to be a self-starter. The second thing that I really wanted to talk to Olivia about was that it's an incredible example of how to quit trying to find your niche in your medium, like trying to find what makes me unique as a musician or what makes me unique as an illustrator and instead think about where are places that I belong or that I invest into where what's unique about me is that I'm an illustrator or what's unique about my contribution to that community is that I'm a musician.

5:01For example, we're going to go deep into how Olivia has created this really interesting niche as a musician within the world of geology. Yeah, it's as surprising to me as it was to you most likely. And there's just some really cool stuff that has come from owning that space and being the musician in that space. Her first single from the project dropped September 8th. And you can learn more about the geology album and Olivia's work at olivierafferty.com. Stick until the end for a creative call to adventure called Rocket. and we're going to talk about how you can find your own niche within the communities and special hyper focuses of your own life.

6:00Let's go.

6:17So you were on episode 395 and you asked a question and we did a Q &A episode and we shared one of your songs. And I wanted to talk about your latest project because I'm curious about like how this came about as well as I feel like it illustrates some core ideas from the show. but I wanted to see if you could give us an overview of who you are and what your creativity is all about. Yeah. So I am, my name is Olivia Rafferty. Do I have to do that? Hey, I mean, I'm going to intro you probably, but it's good to hear it in your voice. Yeah. So, um, I'm Scottish. I'm a singer songwriter that's based in London in the UK.

7:06uh one of my friends actually described my songs as Wes Andersonia for the ears which I feel like is like yeah a great sort of comparison um but so I I write songs but I think the main reason I really love doing music and stuff is I actually like really enjoy the whole kind of world building around it um and outside of singing songs and writing them you know there's like the storytelling and the visuals I make my own artwork for the music as well so it's kind of like the whole package like music allows me to kind of do everything that I want to do so in 2020 I did a project called 100 Tiny Songs which is I think where you first kind of stumbled across what I was doing yeah and in 2021 I released my first EP um which I think the 100 Tiny Songs kind of gave me like the impetus to actually do and then yeah so now I have got this album coming out in sort of singles coming out end of this year album coming out beginning of next year which is a concept album about geology and it's my first full-length album my debut that's amazing yeah um that feels uh big can people pre-save it I don't know really what that means but I've heard people say that you you can pre-save it i'm on a little bit of a tirade against spotify at the moment to be honest so i'm not telling people to do that but they can what are you telling them to do sorry you tell me what should people do to be honest i i would just love if people subscribe to my newsletter and then when the album comes out go to my shows buy my merch buy the cd which will be available as well um stream me if you want because i know so many people still use streaming but there are other ways to engage which will also enable me to make more amazing music in the future.

9:01So I want to talk to you about the album, Typical Forever and it's a concept album. You did it, you launched it on Kickstarter and I'm not going to make a joke about how it's not a rock album even though it's about geology but it was right there. I mean, you would be maybe the hundredth person to make that joke. Because it's right there. So I'm not doing it. For the record, I didn't do it. I said I wasn't doing it. Thank you. Let the record show. But first I wanted to see, like, how did this come about? Like, for your first album to be a concept album is a unique thing. And then also to kind of have a really specific focus that's also a surprising focus as a musician.

9:47So I wondered if you could talk about where this idea came from. Yeah. Why don't we just start? there um god I'm gonna have to tell you like a short tale of woe basically um great which which we all love on the yeah so I was selected like during the pandemic lockdown back in living with my parents and I was selected to be part of this um online mentorship thing I got like two sessions with a mentor who has worked in the music industry for years and I thought wow what an amazing opportunity like they're gonna and I don't know you have this thing where you're like oh they're gonna be like Olivia you're so talented I can't handle it and I got the complete opposite in my first session she just absolutely like tore me down and rightfully so but at the same time when I recounted this experience to a lot of people they were like I don't know if you should have gone about that that harshly i was basically told that i'd wasted years of my life um and i think that's sort of any any artist who hasn't reached like some kind of standard platform of success yeah like that is just a shot to the heart instantly yeah um especially being told it by someone who you perceive to be an authority figure so I um I don't know in some sort of like masochistic um moment to like preserve how I was feeling I like recorded myself like talking and crying after the meeting and I was like I need to remember how I feel in this moment um I love that you did that because I have this the ADHD object permanence thing and I have a really really hard hard time accessing anything but how I feel right now.

11:41So I think that that, and it's a true artist moment there. I mean, that's. It really was. And it's not like, you know, I'm going to be like putting up on YouTube and be like my story, but I'm gonna, I think, I don't know, something about that was like, this is like one of the lowest moments you'll ever feel as an artist specifically. And I think that's often been like a jumping off point for doing things. and so she we we ended up doing another session together and she was sort of like I want you to apply for some funding and I want you to start thinking about a project and that's when I started to really kind of learn that project-based work is kind of the best way to actually propel yourself and get things done so I was like right what's my project gonna be what's my project gonna be and the whole like you've wasted your life was like floating around in my head again and again and being in the pandemic at the same time I was kind of like right there's this concept of wasted time and time moving really slowly and feeling like there's periods of your life which have amounted to like nothing or there's stasis maybe it's like mental health issues maybe it's like physical health maybe it's like you've been in the wrong like living situation or relationship for a really long time and you feel stuck how do I reconcile that for myself and for other people and so I started reading up a lot about time and got into kind of long-term-ism and this idea of like you know setting up society to basically not just think about the next four years which we kind of tend to do especially like in terms of politics and stuff but think about like the next 200 years for example and someone recommended me a book called Timefulness by Marcia Bjornarud and it was basically a trojan horse uh for geology and it basically just kind of explained all the general concepts of geology and made you understand this perspective that like the the world is old time is long and there are really really long stretches where nothing happens you know for example there's like there's like a billion year period in history that scientists refer to as the boring billion because like objectively nothing was going on apart from like the tiniest organisms just like limply floating and like slime or whatever so i was like i don't know i think just the more i read and the processes of like how mountains are formed and you know the oceans splitting apart and volcanoes and all this stuff and like the separation of continents and the reforming of them I was like wow you know so much of this stuff is so interesting and it's actually so relevant to like our lives as people and you know it's almost like these are all the way the world works is like a giant allegory for our own human experience I want to share that with people and that was sort of like my main drive I was like I have to just tell people about how cool this is so I didn't really set out to make an album from the offset I actually ended up starting a sub stack where I just kind of wrote about all these thoughts and then thought okay I'm going to write a song as well as writing about it so I did that over a few times and we just kind of share the demos on my newsletter and eventually I had got this body of work and was really trying to decide whether or not to release that or go back into a hundred tiny songs and like finesse them and release that or release some regular songs i'm saying this with like quotation marks you know about life and love um really some regular songs about just regular stuff and i spoke to somebody in the music industry and they warned me they were like don't do a concept album it's your first album which you know i guess if you're a pop artist would make sense yeah um and then i spoke to another person and she was like it sounds like you really want to do that then do it so that's that's kind of the origin story of typical forever really I just I just went for it from that point onwards and that was in January of 2023 I'd written it over the course of 2022 I really took my time like I wasn't pressured about it um yeah and then I started like basically creating the actual album from the beginning of 2023 onwards.

16:17One thing that really resonates for me is that I felt like my illustration didn't really have weight until I was writing a lot. I was writing for my blog and then my podcast. And there was something about the substance of that that started to change the the weight of the illustration and it kind of made me a fan of having these different ways of executing uh creatively both in form but also like metaphor versus literal versus you know whatever um did that it sounds like that kind of happened is that was that your experience yeah it's something that like I try and like put into practice now like when I write like any song like I'll do some free writing um and that normally kind of like gets me like deeper into the idea I found that like I would kind of write these essays and then the essays I think normally the essays kind of came after the songs or like I don't know I don't know if it was like what came first you know um but they were definitely like I wanted each song to kind of have a real grounding to it and a real world and a real like approachability for like anyone coming from any angle I wanted them to understand the story behind the song whether it's the geological story or the personal experience um and that would really basically make them connect with the subject I mean for example I've uh I've got a song called fossils which is about how objects in our life like and I always think about this like sparkly hoodie that I made my dad order off of forever 21 when I was like 15 and Forever 21 did not exist in the UK at all and bless me I think he paid like about 50 pounds for it to get here like this really crappy hoodie baby was beautiful and I loved that hoodie so much and it was really kind of emblematic of like my late teens I would wear it to parties and stuff and um it's gone I have no idea where it is now it's just kind of lost into that sort of detritus of your life yeah there's so many objects like that and like you know your favorite like cds or like albums that you had when you were a teenager or whatever um they all kind of disappear at some point like fossils you know like certain dinosaurs that aren't around anymore or like the ammonites and stuff and um even though they're not with you they are part of your bedrock as a human being yeah and so i told the story on my newsletters but like specifically about like this uh the band billy talent i was like really into as a teenager and I remember feeling so sad because I had this like future nostalgia about how I wouldn't have a crush on the lead singer anymore when I was older I was like oh he's so handsome but one day when I grew up I'm not gonna fancy him anymore and I just had this like real sort of sense of like I don't know just like this awareness of the future coming at me and knowing that something I love now will not be a major part of my life anymore.

19:25Um, but it, you know, so I, I wrote about that, um, and also presented a demo of the song as well, cause I wanted people to really connect with the emotional human side of it, as well as the geology side. That's, I love that idea. I, especially as someone that has, is so prone to hyperfocuses. That's a very, it's almost, I love that you kind of romanticized it because I'm tempted to do the opposite when I, as I've gone through so many phases. I mean, it's helped me not to take myself so seriously, but it's also made me less romantic about my interest to where I'm like, yeah you're obsessed with this right now but guess what in three years you're not gonna give a shit so yeah does it matter like that's my nihilistic side so i like that i like that kind of there's a romance to also just being in it and i i think that's really um cool you know the other thing i was gonna say um i love that you went for the concept album because one of the things that i've you know when I first started getting into storytelling which is kind of what I really love in creativity I got really obsessed with I think at the time I felt like people were really anti stories having a message or having a meaning this was like maybe 15 years ago something like that um and every like but i was really obsessed with like allegory and how how when you have a story that has a super poignant thing that you build everything around it tends to work better now i'm not saying that that's a rule but it tends to work better then fast forward now and we have so many things like barbie and um you know soul from pixar where the meaning is on top of the symbol and for a for a minute i was like yes that's what i because i've been like so obsessed and then now i'm like uh we like we're losing the symbol which is the metaphor which is what where i think the power comes from of a story and so one of the things that you know this idea of like using things like fossils and geology and rocks and all this is like, these are like really archetypal things.

22:08They're things that like are a thing in our mind of like, what are these? And it feels so, I've been like really hoping that music would swing back that way because so many songwriters a lot of the most famous songwriters right now they're all like the slice of life or like the particular like my friend sam and me at the dollar store like so literal and i oh yeah you know i think it's just a it's not a good or bad it's just kind of a swings back and forth so hearing you talk about that is so satisfying because i'm like I want some of that I want more yeah yeah do you mean like sort of I don't know it's kind of like going general but not like spoon feeding stuff to people I think I mean I have my own thing with pop music at the moment where I find like I don't know if it's a I think it definitely is a kind of I'm gonna say radio one thing and in the UK that is like the mainstream right the mainstream pop music uh I think a lot of people are making songs about like how bad they feel right now which I'm like yeah it's it's part of like the general collective consciousness but there's this kind of new awareness of like anxiety and stuff but like i think a lot of people are cashing in on that as well and so it's like we're walking down the street listening to songs which are going i hate myself and i don't know what to do like um i don't know i i think like i i like things to be like parceled up in a way where it's kind of like you listen to the song but and you get a feeling of what it's about but you might not necessarily like be hit over the head with it yeah um all the time I mean like I think that's how I like my art and how I like my stories anyway you know it's like don't don't tell me what it's about let me feel it before I know it and it's a hard time to do that's a frustration that I have.

24:09Um, even when going to make books, like feeling like, uh, you know, we're in the time with the short form video where you have to tell me what is the point of this in the first 0.2 seconds? We all know like art, the best art is not like you don't really, maybe you're attracted to it. It's mysteriously attractive and you don't really, maybe you never know what it's about, but, but maybe 10 years later you know what it's about for you at least you know so it's yeah it's it's that's a it's a difficult thing to navigate you're going on tiktok being like did i write the children's book of the summer you gotta do that yeah oh god um okay so and then the title where's the title come from the title comes from this book so i'm just seeing if i can see it on my shelf it's by a guy called oh god malcolm something is his last name it's from a book called hutton's arse and it's by a guy called malcolm something and um he basically has this amazing quote where it's like it's talking about the like the uniformity principle which is basically what kind of like the um science of geology and like the investigation of it is based on and that is basically we have to come up with like a general rule and understanding that the way that the world works now in terms of like really basic processes like gravity and it's raining and water erodes rocks and all that kind of stuff is how everything happened like how the world has always kind of like that's been the rules of the world for the last 4.6 billion years yeah um and so he says something like what we see around us is typical forever and has no difference from the past and I really like that because I sort of found that it was you know it kind of said pretty much the main message of the album for me which is you know the way the world works is typical forever it's always been that way the way we react and interact with each other and exist as humans we've kind of been we have the same drives the same emotions the same feelings as we have like in the past and even even in like the past of our own lives it doesn't have to be in the last like 18 million years or something um and it's also how we are is typical of how the planet is as well like life is just life whether it is like a person a fly like the the earth like mount everest or whatever like we all kind of go through processes which are kind of similar really and you know i sort of like went through a different my boyfriend really wanted rock music or something like that i don't think no and he'll probably get mad if i say that but you know people were like why why don't you just do like you know rock music um but i you know don't want to give people the wrong idea because it's uh more sort of like folksy uh Americana type stuff but um yeah I I just thought Typical Forever was a really good summation of the themes yeah yeah that's really uh it kind of leads me all over the place I like the idea of um it reminds me of like the white light refracting into the rainbow like all of these it's all just like the universe being one thing and kind of working in the same rule book and it kind of evolves in these different formations.

27:48When you started doing this project, both in just the creative aspect, choosing to do the concept, choosing this as your debut and to focus on this instead of the other pile of songs that you had, and then also like launching it on Kickstarter, what were you afraid of when you were doing that? I've launched two Kickstarters. I don't know about you, but I know the day, but the whole time planning, I'm like, this is going to be sweet. Like, boom, boom, boom. We're going to do all this stuff. And then the day we're doing it, I'm like, oh, my God, no. This is, it's so vulnerable. I feel like it's never done one.

28:26You don't know how, it doesn't really matter where you are in your career. It is a super vulnerable thing. So, yeah, just in any of that, what were you kind of afraid of? Yeah, well, I mean, especially with a Kickstarter, you're kind of asking, like, your friends and family to put, like, a monetary value next to, like, how much they care about your office. yeah which is insane but um so going into this project I really think that like there were a few things that I maybe should have like been bothered by but like I wasn't um and the main fear that I had was actually just like how do I get the resources to do this how do I manage because like making an album I don't know I really can't compare like what I do to other art forms because for me i have a very one dimension well not a very one dimensional but i have like a kind of one-dimensional view of like oh if you're a book writer you write a book and obviously it's like you also need a publisher and an editor and da da da da and like if you're painting pictures you're painting them but like if you're recording an album you need a lot of people involved with a lot of different skills like you know it's like i'm gonna be singing the songs i'm gonna be playing acoustic guitar in the songs and piano and doing the backing vocals but hey i need a studio to get inside to actually record this I need engineers in that studio I need a mixing engineer I need mastering and I also need the bloody money to start everything so at that point I had done an EP and I'd pretty much done it like with one producer and then taken that away finished it off myself and then randomly found a good pal of mine on Instagram who ended up mixing the project for me It was a very limited team.

30:08And I knew that I was going to have to expand for this project because it was like on a much larger scale. And I also wanted to work with different people because I feel like I need to take those opportunities to kind of expand my network and expand the kind of people that I'm working with in order to like produce something like bigger every time. yeah so i just had absolutely no clue and i had been applying i'd done like a project with a friend where we had written songs based off of like craigslist posts and we had tried to like make an uh like some funding bids um with like a couple of organizations based in the uk and we'd been rejected from two different like major organizations and in the uk you're kind of like well that's it like if i don't get money from help musicians no i don't get money from prs which are incredibly competitive especially if you live in London because they want to spread their money out across the whole country so you know if there's like 2 ,000 like musicians in London they're gonna go well you know would rather give like money to people who live in bloody Derby and like Inverness or something you know so I was sort of like how how do I make these people care about like what I'm doing like and I'm an early career artist I've not made this incredible piece of work which is going to blow everyone's minds like my track record on Spotify so far is like this EP that I've done and it's really beautiful but it's not like you know uh Sabrina Carpenter levels or whatever not that I'm trying to be her but you just sort of really worried about like the quality of the work and what you're kind of presenting and that faith that people need to have in you to give you the money or join the project before they've actually seen you leveling up I think if that makes any sense so yeah I was just scared about getting the resources and also I think um so I mean I'll quickly tell you about like how I basically got the initial start was not through the kickstarter but from i emailed a geologist essentially um who i'd gone on uh a walk with in london and they took us through london and kind of pointed out what all the different buildings what rocks they were made of and where all the rocks came from it was like this building comes from north dakota this building comes from china it was amazing so I emailed her and she said well you know there's actually the geologists association in the UK has a fund called the curry fund which is about supporting projects which promote public engagement and awareness of geology this would be really good and what I didn't know was she was actually on the board um and so she was like oh you're fine you'll get in and so I spent a lot of time writing a funding application and um they gave me enough money to get into the studio basically which was amazing which really was that first burst of okay i can do this and i don't know i felt like i duped them a bit because like my application wasn't being reviewed by people in the music industry they were like geologists sitting around a table going oh that'll be lovely and so it was so much easier to kind of sneak that past them i mean yeah but that i mean that one of the reasons i wanted to talk to you was that maybe the number one reason was that So in the first half of my career, I was constantly thinking about, okay, what makes me different as an illustrator rather than what makes me different as a podcaster is that I'm an illustrator.

33:46Or what makes me different as someone who likes psychology is that I'm an illustrator. And I feel like imposter syndrome will stop you from going into those rooms, but you become the most interesting person to them in that room because everybody else is doing what they're doing. Yeah. And I honest, I think it's such a good hack for creatives. Yeah. I mean, like having gone to like a music college and playing gigs in front of other musicians, there is nothing more soul destroying because they're all sitting there going, oh, see, I wouldn't have done that. so if you're in a situation where like you're the one musician and I you know I did this I went to I've now played the Yorkshire Fossil Festival twice that's so cool as as their sort of musician in residence and you know people go wow you're incredible and I'm thinking oh I really flubbed that chord they don't see that they see someone who's got this incredible skill set that they don't have and it just makes like the whole experience of like that festival for example so much richer because everyone's bringing their own creative interpretation of the theme, as it were.

34:57Yeah. I love that. And then also, you know, you get the thing of just, just like you said, there's a competitiveness to the people that are in your industry. And what ends up happening is you can really connect with people without that. And you have this shared excitement, but also mutual respect. And it's just, it's something I don't see creative people do a lot. And I was really excited when I saw you digging into this in a significant way. Again, that was not a pun. No, I don't do puns. But the other thing I just wanted to call out real quickly was the, I think there's another really cool example of you doing this 100 song project prior to this yeah that's a huge testament to this notion of not waiting for people especially for people in the music world almost every musician i've ever talked to and i get i'm not a musician so i can't understand yeah but i love your project because i think everyone can record a bad, like a, not a bad, but low recording, like a low five recording.

36:11Somewhere bad. I'm just saying you can throw something on where, because so many musicians and for good reason know that it's a collaborative thing. It's an expensive thing to really get in the game. But if you let that stop you from making songs, recording stuff, writing stuff, you're going to be, you're never going to be ready to go do, to go into the studio. And so your journey is really inspiring on that level too. Thank you. I mean, like, I just think about like the artists that I really, really love. Yeah. And it's like, like Daniel Johnson, Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, like David Byrne.

36:48And like, you know, people like who just make stuff where it's like, you can tell the song comes out no matter what the recording medium is. Yeah. Because they've just written a beautiful song. and when when I did 100 tiny songs like I recorded everything on my iPhone and like you know I even had a microphone at one point I made a point of not doing it through the microphone like I literally would just hold my voice notes up to my face and hold it to the Casio keyboard I was working on and I'd like put it together in the like in dot like in Ableton but at the same time it was like I wanted to take all the preciousness away from it because it would be fun and like I really just like uh wanted to have fun um because for me I think that's also like a big part of like my creative practice like and I've tried I've tried to be serious like I've tried to be like the Phoebe Bridgers of Scotland and you know what it like it didn't really fly because it wasn't who I am like I like to have fun like I make like to make silly songs about like toothpaste and like buying milk and you know all this kind of stuff and you know I I feel like there's still like a life for a hundred tiny songs and I'm not quite sure how and if I had like another you know not a pandemic hopefully but another like stretch of time where nothing happens I would love to do the project again and see what comes of it um but it was an incredibly valuable process for like honestly it was just like loosening things like just loosening that like constriction you feel around uh production value and stuff and like yeah one of those songs became happy new year which you played on one of your episodes um it was honestly just like a really good exercise in basically sitting down and sketching which i think is something that not a lot or personally as a songwriter i don't do every day yeah um and i think probably a lot of artists wouldn't say that they do it every day as well either because you think you've got so much going on but if you yeah that that exercise of making myself make something every day it became like a diary and like a sketchbook and yeah also like one other thing like about that which kind of made me sort of gave me like a real good idea of what I wanted to do going forward was I finally had something to talk to people about when it came to my work yeah um I you know I could approach and I think for me for such a long time I felt like I couldn't approach anyone like approach people I admired or approach like you know people who could maybe help me out because I didn't have anything going on whereas I could then turn to anybody and say hi I'm Olivia blah blah blah blah blah oh by the way I'm working on this you can literally go see it happen real time and engage with it and it actually like gave me so much confidence to just approach people because I was like I've got a work in progress that you can see right now something is happening with me there's a talking point now all the newness is faded and useless oceans away from the place i call home the years drag on But only I'll grab to the top of that fountain, the wind and the rain.

40:11Take a beautiful fountain and move back. And I will go. I will tumble down at the ground. And I'll run, I'll run away

40:40Cascade, Cascade, Cascade

41:09I was thinking through like book projects for creative pep talk related material. And one of my ideas is creative projects as a, I realized like as I'm going back through, we're about to hit 10 years. So I'm like kind of in a reflective space space and thinking about like through line. One of the biggest through lines is just projects, project based approach to creativity. I literally probably have at least a book's worth of stuff to say about it. So I'm not going to do that now. But part of it is just kind of what you just said, which is it has this level of ownership where at any point you can do a project.

41:50There's no, no one has to say yes to that. And all of a sudden you're at the party and people are like, what are you up to? And I'm like, well, I've got this project. And you're like, oh, it's a project now. It's like literally you just, you know, doing your little thing in your room. But it's so empowering. And there's so many other great aspects of a project. But yeah, I love that component of it. The other thing I was going to say was I loved what you said about, I can't help but underline things that I think are really juicy and interesting. So for me, when you were talking about the songwriting bit, I was thinking about this the other day.

42:29I hadn't listened to Passion Pit in a long time. Like, you know, it's been a long time. But I was listening to the really good running music, and I was listening to them yesterday. And on this particular version, the end has like these acoustic stripped back versions of their songs. and I just thought just what you were saying like for me it came up this idea of the coffee versus the cup is the way I usually talk about it like the essence versus the packaging and that the songwriting for most people like you're saying you know Dana Johnson and David Byrne and like the song could be expressed in a bunch of ways often the way it gets expressed the cup you put in has to do with the time, the era, all kinds of different things.

43:19But underneath it is something really, uh, timeless. And that's the things like the a hundred day project with music is such an example of, or writing or whatever, almost all types of creativity. There's an essence that you practice in almost any circumstance. Yeah. Um, and that is, even though the packaging does sometimes make or break something that, that the essence is the thing that matters and you can always be kind of developing, crafting and enjoying doing that, you know? Absolutely. Yeah. I agree. I I'm just going to say, I agree. Yeah. I just got a little bit excited there to talk about that aspect of it um and so okay so were you before you launched it were you worried about like okay this is pretty specific um like what are people gonna think about an album about rocks like what what you know what were those the fears that were coming up or what when you're talking about the kickstarter yeah yeah yeah i am i had already kind of gathered like a bit of excitement about the project because the geologists association had kind of pushed it out to their audience of geologists and i had already performed at yorkshire fossil festival at that point because someone got in touch with me through my newsletter about it so i already had like quite a bit of like support from that the geology community yeah the rocks community and i also like here here's one here's an interesting thing because I had actually been talking about this project for like the last like year like the last year basically you know I I started I decided to um you know I started talking about geology in 2022 I had written all the songs over that period and was talking about on my newsletter I then got the funding in like March 2023 and I was talking about it talking about it talking about it and part of me was like oh my god have I like ruined this for everyone I've been talking about this album for two years now.

45:32Like, that's insane. That is like a very not Beyonce move to make. But I think when you're an independent artist, you need to do things differently. And through talking about it so much, I built up this audience. So that by the time I came to do the Kickstarter, everyone was like so on board because they knew how much this meant to me. And they knew what the songs were going to be about, like vaguely. And they were so excited. I finally you know got to reveal the album cover I spent I spent a lot of time looking on Kickstarter though and I think before I made the decision to do a Kickstarter I was worried about how successful the project would be and then when I went on to Kickstarter and I looked at all the projects that had been like funded especially the music ones I was like oh they they all got funded yeah and and the ones that didn't get funded are missing really huge crucial chunks or they're asking for way too much or they're asking for nothing um and I was like I can I can present something which is going to work like I can I know I can um so I wasn't scared I think um I think I was kind of scared about like maintaining the momentum and for me like purely from like a like energetic posting on social media place like i am very like on and off when it comes to social media like i go through periods where i'm like you know just like going nuts on stories and what have you and then like there are periods for example right now i've scheduled everything for the week and i don't want to bloody look at it yeah so i get like that i really i really can't be like consistent but i did write out like every post i was going to make Like I wrote out like every email I was going to send and I tried to draft as much as I could.

47:26But the response like just blew me out the water. Like we got the project fully funded in five days. And like it was over 50 % funded in the first day. And I was really, really like, I have got to get that. The special mark was like, if you do 30 % in the first day, you're good. And I was like, got to get to 30, got to get to 30. And it was like 11 o 'clock. and I'm like oh god just like no thoughts just watching the numbers go up and up and up and you know if there's like a dry period I'm thinking it's all over but um it it happened and it happened because a lot of like people I knew like family and friends were like so aware of the project that they contributed people that I thought might contribute like maybe didn't contribute but then people who I never thought would like toss anything my way like random people from the past you know like these like specters like would come up and it's like put a little bit money in the pot and it was incredible and it really connected me with so many people that I hadn't kind of been in touch with for a while as well yeah um and like oh I was gonna say one more thing I think it was just yeah it was an amazing marketing tool as well yeah because i got selected as one of their kickstarter projects we love um a few days in and that kind of pushed it to a lot of people's desktops there are some people who are just on kickstarter to be on kickstarter and support things and i think my um i do think and like part of me i think from now on is kind of going to go more concepty like with albums in the future because i think if it was like Olivia Rafferty writes songs about heartbreaking love you'd be like nah I'm okay actually who doesn't okay yeah so um I I think having like that kind of edge really drew a lot of people in who were just kind of passing by on the website you know yeah so it really like can it it was um it was honestly like such a beneficial like thing all around thankfully I got a lot of fears out just by being so meticulous with the planning stage and double checking like showing the page to like family and friends like a week before like telling everyone I was going to do this a week before as well like I really decided against the whole surprise I wanted to give people as much lead up as possible because I am not someone with a massive platform I had like 250 subscribers to my newsletter and just a thousand followers on Instagram and I raised four thousand five hundred pounds in five like in well in 30 days I raised three thousand five hundred pounds in five days so yeah it's it's amazing and I think there's so many good little takeaways I love the thing you said about not being Beyonce and not doing the drop because I think we look at that gets so much fanfare and attention that we all think that I'm going to blow them away with this thing but you don't realize like that you you're not Beyonce I'm not Beyonce we can't just do that and actually the the talking about it letting people be companions on the journey gets investment and then also you just realize like nobody's paying attention to you closely enough.

50:45Like the 80th time you said it is the first time that they clocked that you were doing a thing. Um, and so I think that that's just really essential. And I, uh, the other thing I put down was, I think it's great for people to hear about Kickstarter as, um, pre-sale and a PR thing as a way to just create momentum and kind of, the scarcity of like, this is happening right now. So you have to pay attention. There's all, and then also just the different ways that it gets on different radar. And the other thing I'll just highlight is the thing about, oh, okay, maybe it is about heartbreak and love, but, you know, on, on the surface, it has this other specificity.

51:35And I think that a lot of people don't realize that most things that take off start with a diehard core audience that were appealed to through a specific niche that said, this is what this is about. And you already know you like that. And then they fall in love with it from the packaging, but then they get into the coffee, they get into the essence and like, Oh, this is great. Even like the podcast is the same where I started out, it's always been a creative podcast, but being an illustrator first, before I was an author, a lot of people thought it was an illustration podcast. And then a lot of people were telling their friends or who are musicians and writers, like, you should listen to it.

52:19I think you would like it. It's, you know, something beyond that. And the same happened as we moved into like, it be more of a creative thing. And now, you know, I think the latest review on Apple is from a psychologist. And we have a lot of people from all over the place that don't think of themselves as traditional um creators and and so i think that's a great um it's a really it's a counterintuitive idea to try to appeal to a small group of people and it but it's really powerful it is it really is and it is just like that man like i have made friends with um like people who are specifically like geology like earth science like influencers yeah yeah on um instagram and stuff and like there's just some really lovely people who have been like so supportive of the project and like it is that thing where it's like and i and i think like sometimes you need to like people who are consumers need to give like this grace period to kind of get into a piece of work and it is about that particular their entry point you know like the concept is interesting and stuff like i'm not gonna get people by like playing my song or like on tiktok and being like song of the summer you know because people are gonna be like oh okay whatever flick on to the next thing like people have to hear it a lot and people have to be like engaged from the off and like unfortunately like i'm not gonna get people engaged if i'm just like standing kind of like authentically me wearing jeans and a t-shirt just saying this is a song yeah you know like the only way i'm going to get people engaged if they're like oh this is an intriguing topic i want to how could you possibly write like a song about geology or whatever and then they listen to it and they might listen to it again they might listen to again and then it becomes like a part of their playlist or like their favorite song of the moment or something you need especially with music might not be the same with visual because you see everything in one go but with music you need to give people time and you need to create ways for like people to like be given time to like your song yeah that's so much a part of like what we like in terms of um music i think especially is just that repeat thing makes it meaningful and you have experiences where you connect it to other things but the other thing that comes to mind is as we're talking like obviously a lot of times on the show we're talking about creative practice, trying to like the stuff that happens around your work and ways to get it out there, et cetera.

54:53But I noticed like, as you were talking about connecting to people in this field, I just realized like, oh, there's a part of me that is also selling it to creative people, like making these connections. Like I have really interesting connections with people in psychology like and i realized like oh part of what i'm doing by trying to encourage people to to put a serious investment into their interests and not be afraid to make niche things because it'll help your creative practice or creative business or whatever i realized like oh part of that is like a bait and switch for me because i'm like the truth is the real value is the connection like these people are probably interesting people and you're having this like human like this experience that yeah sure it's good for your you know um momentum or whatever but it's also just like rich life like it sounds cool to talk to these people yeah yeah yeah it's kind of that thing where it's like i don't know sometimes because i do like i write a lot of my newsletter as well about like creativity and stuff and it kind of sometimes feels that you're like it's not for you it's not for you if you're like an estate agent forget about it um but you know it is it is for everyone I think being creative is like a very human thing the other day I was literally just thinking about like my school friends those are those those are them that have grown up to do uh jobs which aren't creative you know like practicing law or like you know journalists or whatever and they're I was just like reminiscing about like back at school where like one of them had like written a song and printed up the lyrics and wanted us to like read it or the other one who used to like post poetry on her Bebo which was like a MySpace for the UK you know like and all these kind of like little sort of like attempts as teenagers to just kind of express themselves and put them out there and it's like you kind of I don't know sometimes I think you're at fault of like discounting like people that you don't see as creative you know where it is like this is for everybody um and it is about connecting connecting to yourself and connecting to other people yeah wait one last question before you started the hundred uh song project and then this project so all the way back then what do you think you got wrong about what it looked like to have a creative practice around making music like what what's the big biggest shift in your approach or mindset from today versus then i think it is like the trying to figure out what the path is and who is the i mean i always like just think about your storming the castle analogy you know where it's like i'm walking down the major path i'm getting to like the guards and the henchmen being like i would like a music career please i'm not going forget about it you know um and that I have to kind of go around I spent so long um truly deeply wishing for a mentor to like come out of the sky and stand in front of me and go Olivia you want to be Olivia Rafty the singer songwriter I'm going to tell you exactly how to do it come with me take my hand let's go and you don't have to think about it and that is what I was waiting for I actually got like kind of mentorship when I finished music college with one of my old teachers and it ended up being incredibly unhelpful just because we weren't like a good fit I was trying to do what he wanted me to do I was trying to write pop songs for Capital FM and was just dragging myself down in the process and I think when someone I think it is like I need a broad range of input from people um I remember doing like I think I did like a reel or something on Instagram about this where it's like I need like a lot of advice from a lot of different places and then I'm going to take 25 % of this advice 50 % of this advice 70 % like of that advice I'm never going to take somebody's advice 100 % yeah but I am going to take what I know in my gut works for me from people that I respect and some people who get it wrong like I I still will take a little bit from them but like I'll just take less yeah you know like nobody is an authority and I've realized that like I I am my own authority um on myself and I've got so much that I can learn from other people but at the end of the day like I and I think a lot of creative people have like the I mean it's probably why you started the process it's like you probably wanted someone to tell you what to do and you became that person for yourself you know it is that thing where it's like I think in kind of telling ourselves what to do we help other people and that advice will be taken 50 percent like 75 percent or whatever from other people but it is about uh feeling safe enough to become your own authority on your practice.

1:00:16Yeah, I think that is really brilliant, completely true. I think that there's no substitute for discernment and testing. That is all you have. And it doesn't matter who's telling you what they're telling you. They're not on your path. And it gets to this thing of the pathless path idea. that you hear and kind of a mystic tradition of like, there is no person that has lived what you're going to live or can do what you're going to do or, and you're going to have to make it up too. Yeah. And I'll say this one thing as well, actually, like I realized that the way I got things done was like, do a bit of research, make an educated guess and then do that.

1:01:07Like you're never going to get the exact set of steps but if you make an educated guess it'll take you somewhere you know and it's like it's kind of like i don't know you're thinking right how can i make um a beautiful puppet of a cat i don't know and you know you get all these cardboard box and you make a cat shape and you know it's not like you know the tried and true practice from like the cat puppetry school in milan or whatever but you've done it and you make this like shitty looking cat And then everyone goes, wow, how original. What a beautiful cat. You know, it's like you just do what you can with what you've got.

1:01:43And in that in itself is original and authentic to you. And that is exactly what it's maybe the most powerful aspect of a project for me, which is it is the ability to test a hypothesis. It is the ability to test an educated guess. You take all the advice. Hopefully you get, you know, people in your life that are somewhat mentors, but realizing that nobody knows, including you, you'll never know until after it's over. And so the project has this thing of here's a start, here's an end. And then you can reassess and the things you got right, you could double down on and, you know, all that kind of thing.