The founder, CEO, and Director of Artist Support for The Artist Minds, which provides awareness, education, and action to promote the well being and longevity of the lives of music industry professionals. A multi-state licensed mental health therapist, coach, consultant and advocate, she has over 12 years of clinical experience and specialty training in trauma, grief, self-harm, eating disorders, mindfulness, co-dependency, anxiety, depression and conflict resolution.
"The transient lifestyle of people who tour doesn't just affect the artist."
"We had this shift in the industry where people were all of a sudden coming off the road and adjusting to go, like, 'How do I do this being at home thing all of the time'?"
"It's just like any family who's got a head of the household who's working and then they're out of work for whatever reason, the pressure does fall down on the family because it's not just what the individual is feeling personally as far as fear, as disappointment, as uncertainty about the future, but now this also impacts my family... Sometimes it brings people closer and sometimes it drags them further apart because of that."
"It's a certain level of vulnerability as well because while we have a certain persona that we put out and go, 'Oh, I'm not going to let any of this stuff bother me,' but we're all human. This stuff is going to bother us. We want to be liked. We want to be validated, especially in an industry where we're putting out a product that encapsulates our personality and it encompasses our life, we want to be able to have that."
"I think that calls into our self-confidence in our abilities as well... We can look at it from the mindset of, 'Am I not as good as I thought I was? Am I not as popular? Is my music not relevant anymore?' Or, on the flip side of it is, 'Yeah, I may have less Likes and less followers, but, the people that follow me and Like my posts are consistent and those are my core people'."
"When words fail us, music is what speaks for us."
"We would show up at the venue at 4:00 in the morning, ya' know we would serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner, do the dressing rooms, and we would see the road crew come in, and the management come in and seeing how everything was set up and how everything was broken down."
"They have a different view on life because they are so creative, because they think with a different part of their brain than the rest of us and because what their livelihood is affects them so differently than everybody else."
"It can be a mental health issue because if we're doing something that doesn't satisfy or fulfill us, that can lead to depression, it can lead to anxiety."