🌈🏔 PRESENTING: TYPICAL FOREVER

MY DEBUT ALBUM IS OUT TODAY!

Today, my debut album is out in the world: Typical Forever.

I have long wanted to record and release an album. But it always felt like such a complicated thing.

I started this project in 2022, and the process involved so many questions I didn’t yet know the answer to:

How do I know I’ve written an album? How do I record it? How do I know what instruments to put in each song, and what they should play? How much money does it take to make an album? What happens with mixing? Who masters it and why is mastering important? Will people give me money to make an album? What if I have to raise my own money? Can I do a Kickstarter? How do you get your songs played on the radio? Who do I ask to help me with my ideas and strategy? How can I get lots of people to hear these songs?

But the biggest question I asked myself was this:

🎶 Am I allowed to make an album?

In the era of Spotify playlists and Tiktok and streaming, artists are pushed to prioritise singles and EPs. Things which can be quickly released in order to draw in more listeners.

An album is more risky. And a concept album?

I remember sitting down on a zoom call with someone in the industry who worked with Florence and the Machine and Ed Sheeran. She told me not to release a concept album as my debut. It would alienate new listeners. It wouldn’t introduce ‘me’ as an artist.

But… I think that ‘Typical Forever’ is the perfect introduction to who I am as an artist.

🌋 Who Is Olivia Rafferty?

I am an artist who loves a concept! I love the bigger picture, the stories in the songs and in the spaces between them. I will go to a LIBRARY, read BOOKS and write PAGES of notes in order to hone in on what I want to make. This was definitely true of this album. This album has a bibliography, for chrissakes!

And it’s important to me that all of my collaborators understand the story behind the project, and each song. I think that knowing the story always makes the experience of recording, playing or producing more meaningful.

The stories behind ‘Typical Forever’ also touch on the core of my songwriting ethos. My mission statement, if you will.

All of these songs are about geology, but they’re also about being a person. My biggest reason for writing songs, although it’s often been a subconscious reason, is trying to make sense of this life I’ve been given and this world I live in. Everything we experience here on this planet is mysterious and beautiful and terrifying and writing songs about it all is the way I can grapple with the everlasting mystery of being alive.

✨🌎 The World is Magical

I set off on this path of geology after someone in the music industry told me that I had wasted years of my life. That I had “nothing to show” for the years I had been writing songs and developing as an artist.

Those words hit hard, and I’d be lying I said they don’t still pop into my head on my darker days.

But here’s the thing: mountains aren’t built in a day. There are secret processes happening all of the time on this planet. Tectonic plates are being broken down and built as we speak. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge grows by 2 centimeters each year. And you can’t undermine that, because, once upon a time, that painstaking process created an entire ocean.

Did you know India was once neighbours with Australia and the Antarctic? Did you know its journey up into the Eurasian plate created the Himalayas? Did you know that, in the grand scheme of things, the Himalayas are relatively new?

Did you know that there is a period of time that geologists refer to as ‘The Boring Billion’, where it seemed like nothing was going on??? Nothing more exciting than a primordial soup marinating for millions of years?

What ‘Typical Forever’ says is this: it’s okay to take your time. It’s okay to look back on the life you’ve had fondly and understand that, in a weird and winding way, nothing good you have today would exist if it weren’t for every experience you had before it. Who you are is made up of a bedrock of layers and layers of all the people you once were — each one plays a role.

We can count on ourselves to change, and we can also count on ourselves to stay the same.

Everything is typical forever.

🎧 Where Can I Listen?

💿 Want to buy the album? Amazingly, I have managed to sync this release up with ‘BANDCAMP FRIDAY,’ which is a day where Bandcamp waives its fees and all revenue goes to the artist.

Bandcamp is the best place to buy the digital version of the album. Go check it out and buy the record today! (and CDs will be available soon!)

📈 Kickstarter Friends: If you bought a digital album download through Kickstarter, that should be in your inbox by now.

💻 Streaming? Check it out on Spotify, or Apple Music or Youtube Music.

🪩 Anywhere else? Just search “olivia rafferty typical forever”

Endless thanks to the Geologists’ Association’s Curry Fund, the support of which enabled me to get in the studio to record these songs in the first place.

I have so much more to say but for now, I’ll just say — go listen and enjoy!

Love you all

Olivia