Music Diary #1: Jazz, Chickens & One Big Dinosaur

I wrote down everything I did this week as a singer-songwriter.

[cue theme music]

Hello friends!

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I worry that I’m not doing enough.

Not doing enough for my music, for my upcoming album release, for the next album I’m already writing… etc etc. The lists pile up in my brain and start to feel insurmountable.

The funny thing is, I do get a lot done. But quite often, every item ticked off the to do list is then immediately followed by the thought: WHAT’S NEXT?

As an antidote to this way of thinking, I wrote down everything I did this week for my music. So, here’s an insight into my day-to-day as a singer-songwriter…

🎸 Sunday

Today I wake up with a sore throat. I worry that it might be an oncoming cold but I know that it’s likely a ghost cold. I get ghost colds when I have an important thing coming up, especially a performance. I’ll feel a sore throat coming on and start worrying that I’m gonna get sick and have to cancel, and, and, and… and then it all passes by the next day.

I’m getting a ghost cold because on Friday I’m performing at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, for their late night event. I take some First Defence nasal spray which is disgusting, yet disgustingly effective.

In the afternoon I practice my setlist for the museum show. I follow a vocal warm up video on Youtube and run through my songs. I always feel sluggish when I have to start practising music but once I get through the warm up I feel ready to SINNGGGGG!

After practise I also go live on Substack and end up chatting and playing songs for about an hour while people dip in and out. It’s fun connecting with everyone this way and I wonder what it would be like to start streaming on somewhere like Twitch whilst I’m doing songwriting or practise. But then I think about how I can’t really add another “thing” to my list of “things” because I am a sucker for a new shiny “thing” and it will derail my plan for the next two months, which is SERIOUS ALBUM LAUNCH PLAN TIME. You cannot mess with serious album launch plan time!

💄 Monday

I go into central London to meet with Ed at a bookstore cafe. He’s also a singer-songwriter and together we’ve been working on a podcast about songwriting (out soon)! As I’m waiting, a girl sits down next to me in an incredible skirt — we compliment each other on our outfits. Once Ed arrives we do a quick post-Christmas catchup before cracking open our laptops.

The first season of our podcast was recorded over autumn and now there’s a lot of things to do to put it out into the world. We spend a couple of hours making plans and putting things down in Google Docs. Ed’s got editing to do and I’m in charge of the launch.

The cafe we’re in must be one of the few remaining ones in London where they use CDs for music. They put on a jazz album and it’s not calm, cafe jazz, it’s like cartoon jazz where it sounds like someone had the great idea of throwing all the instruments off the top of a large staircase. The CDs also skip sometimes so the combination of skipping CDs and insane jazz makes it hard to concentrate at points. Ed and I start snapping our fingers on the 2’s and 4’s and get back to work.

After that meeting I skip over to Covent Garden to meet my pal Gerri who is doing makeup for my album launch show in March. It’s the first time I’ve ever worked with a MUA (make-up artist!) and I’m kind of nervous because I feel uncomfortable with the idea of dressing UP for this show. But I have to! Because I am a star! Gerri gets his iPad out and does a quick sketch of my face while I’m talking to him, and then we look at pictures I took of rocks while I was in Australia for inspiration. In between discussions about makeup and geology we lament the dumb men in charge (it’s inauguration day in the States) and the TikTok almost-ban.

I practise my setlist before dinner and listen to a LOT of Savage Garden’s ‘Affirmation’ whilst cooking. This is my artistic process.

💻 Tuesday

I spend some time on my secret website. Since last October I’ve been basically building a personal website from scratch, for fun. I have been teaching myself html and css in the last few months and I’m getting to the point where I can actually make things look quite cool. I make a new homepage for my website and think about how I want to make a really cool website for my next album and code it all myself.

I text Leo who is a producer friend of mine that I’m writing/making this next album with. Youtube has been recommending me 90’s sample CDs that music producers and DJs used to use. Some of them sound creepy and cool and interdimensional. I send Leo one of these videos and tell him “I want to make something that sounds insane.”

💿 Wednesday

After work I meet Leo at his tiny studio in East London and I show him a sketch of something I made before Christmas: an upbeat & offbeat thing involving sampled guitars. I’m a bit nervous because it is a very rough demo but he loves it and we jump on the track to start fleshing it out: creating sections, adding in basslines and doubling up things here and there. As the session goes on I get more hyped: standing up, pacing round the room and jumping on the piano to play melodies I hear at different points in the song. I play a line that I can hear in the final chorus and Leo records it on guitar. Dah-dah-dah-deeee.

At some point in the session I realise that I am so happy that I am just making music that I WANT to make, rather than music I feel like I should be making. Looking back I feel that I have taken on a lot of people’s advice and opinions about what sort of artist I need to be in order to be successful. But I think my idea of success has changed a lot in the last five years. To me, success is being able to realise my artistic visions and share them with people, rather than hitting those narrower milestones of a particular venue or a particular radio show.

After the studio I go home with a copy of the track so far. It’s hard to ‘come down’ after a studio session or a performance because you just want to revel in the music feelings for a bit longer before going to sleep. I enjoy giving the demo several ‘just one more’ listens before finally turning out the light.

🐓 Thursday

Uh-oh. I wake up feeling OFF and WEIRD. I wonder if it has anything to do with my late night or perhaps nerves for my Friday performance. Have I eaten properly this week? There could be a few reasons why.

I take it slow and spend the morning in bed rearranging my ‘to do list’ for the week. I take some things off my plate and remind myself that today’s priorities are practising my setlist and choosing an outfit for the show. Still feeling kinda bad, I decide to get some REAL FOOD in my system.

In a little bougie store ten minutes from my apartment I impulse buy some borderline too-expensive organic chicken thighs. Health. I take the chicken home:

I bite the bullet and cook the chicken. It is DELICIOUS. With a renewed feeling of success I go and practise my songs.

🦖 Friday

Arriving into Oxford, I walk through the cobbled streets in the dark, me and my guitar weaving through people on bicycles and students already starting their Friday night bevs in the higgledy-piggledy pubs.

When I get to the museum I find that they have set me up LITERALLY in front of the T-Rex, which makes me laugh in delight. After a quick soundcheck I ask one of the staff if there’s somewhere I can warm up properly and she offers me her office. I do my ‘lah lah lah LAH lah lah lah’s in a room with books on gastropods and viral diseases.

Before my performance I get to explore the museum as the late night event goes on. There’s loads of activities but I find myself spending most of the evening in the lecture theatre, where someone is doing a talk on dinosaur representation in science and media.

Then it’s time for meeeeee to singggggg! I go to the T-Rex and get introduced (to the audience, not the T-Rex), before launching into an acoustic version of Cascade. People around the museum wander up, some take videos and pictures. The acoustics sound amazing in the main hall and my inner monologue during the set is relaxed. It went well. Straight after playing I say my thank yous and goodbyes and run to my booked taxi — the train home to London is in fifteen minutes!

When I get home I find a parcel on my doorstep— the CDs for my album have arrived! I make peace with the fact that I am definitely not going to sleep any time soon. I decide to go live on Subtack to open them and accidentally send an email to everyone saying “Olivia is going live on Substack” which is embarrassing because it’s literally almost 1am. Two people tune in (hi Kimber and Niko!) and together we witness the tiny unveiling of the CDs. They look amazing and I am so thrilled at the novelty of HOLDING MUSIC I MADE IN MY OWN TWO HANDS.

🧼 Saturday

Weirdly I don’t sleep in as much as I thought I would. I spend the morning in my pyjamas and import the photos I had taken last night at the museum. After editing some videos for social media, the rest of the day is spent doing non-musicy things, like buying shampoo, wandering around John Lewis and catching up on TV.

🪩 Join Me In The Comments!

1. What was the most exciting part of your week?

2. What’s a behind-the-scenes part of your job or your artistic practice that you wish people knew more about?

3. What did you listen to this week?

4. This email was an experiment! Did you enjoy it? Should I do more?

Want more? Check out some ways you can support me & my music:

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• buying my music on Bandcamp

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  Til next time! Be good,

Olivia 🌈✨🏔🎶