Kimberly Shires: I want other women to also feel that way, that your gender isn't something that holds you back. Sometimes it's in our minds you know, whether it's other people or ourselves you know, sometimes we impose that, but it's not a skill thing. I mean, obviously it's not a skill thing. We all have the ability to rise and we all have the ability to do what we're best at.

Michael Walker: It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high quality music but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

All right. I'm excited to be here today with Kimberly Shires. So Kimberly, let me pull up your bio here real quick. You own a studio called Hear Me Roar Studio in Silver Spring, Maryland, which is a production house that empowers female and non binary artists to articulate their musical vision. She has returned to music after a 15-year corporate stint, and she loves music genres of all different types. She has been globally recognized, including producing award winning tracks, winning a lyric contest, earning a women in audio engineering scholarship, and securing multiple music placements in film, TV, and ABC news. So I'm excited to connect with her today about what she's learned as it relates to vocal production and recording, and just the state of the music industry. So Kimberly, thanks for being a part of the conversation today.

Kimberly Shires: Thanks so much. Happy to be here.

Michael: Awesome. So let me kick things off, if you could introduce yourself quickly and share a little bit about your story. It sounds like you are returning to music from a 15-year corporate sense. So I'd love to hear your journey on how that happened.

Kimberly: Couldn't stay away. Yeah, so I've been a musician basically my entire life. Starting out as a child taking piano lessons. Of course when you're a kid, you're not so into it. But when I was in high school I absolutely with French classical music, of all random things. And it just did something to me. It just touched my soul. As a result, I ended up picking up the clarinet while I was in high school and just worked really, really hard at it. I was basically obsessed with it at the time. I just couldn't imagine doing anything else with my life, so I studied it in college and my whole dream was to be in one of the armed forces band when I graduated from college. Anybody who has been through music school knows though that it's quite the grueling process and you're really apt to burn out unfortunately when you're in music school. And that's exactly what happened to me. I had gone on a number of interviews, not interviews auditions for various armed forces bands and I had made it into the Navy band at the time! And I was gearing myself up for bootcamp and just something was just holding me back and I just couldn't quite get past myself in signing up for the Navy to pursue this dream. And it occurred to me: I'm like, I think I'm just burnt out! I just transitioned and I started working a corporate job and I put the clarinet down for, gosh, like 15 years, and then one day I woke up and I was like: what's going on? Why did I put this down? What happened here? And I suddenly realized I was like: wow, that was something I had never intended to do for so long. Obviously one of the first things I did at that point, because it was the aspect of music that I knew, was I went to the closet and I pulled out that clarinet case and I opened it up and I was scared to death. I was scared to death to see what kind of noise was going to come out of that thing after so many years of not playing it, of being so diligent at the time when I was really studying it. I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't that terrible. [laughs] I started playing around with it. Some of the things that I loved playing pulled up some of those old French classical tunes that I really loved and I joined a quartet, I joined an orchestra or something like this, and none of these things were resonating. And I was like: I really want to do something in music, but this isn't it. This isn't the thing. And so I got into songwriting and I started studying songwriting and just really honing in on the craft. I picked up the guitar; I had never played the guitar before. So I picked up the guitar at 40-years old, which is very late for picking up such an instrument. That is literally the hardest thing I've ever done. And I learned how to play the guitar, started taking lessons and just really digging into my classical background and my work ethic on that and just trying to not make a lot of mistakes and getting them ingrained and everything like that. So I started writing on the guitar, writing on the piano and you know, it wasn't good. It wasn't good at that time and just trying to find people to collaborate with and just working on that craft. Then I started developing and I was like, okay, some of these songs aren't so bad. And I started learning how to play them. Then I was working with a friend, actually, and he was like: Hey, I maybe I could produce some of these songs. He wasn't a professional producer, just someone who dabbled around in his own home studio. And I was like: okay, let's try it! So we started just messing around with one of the songs that I had written, and he just kept encouraging me. He's like: get a DAW, get your interface, get yourself set-up. You can do this! I was really hesitant at the time. I was like, no, no, that just sounds way too complicated. I can't do that. And he just kept encouraging me and encouraging me and he's like: dude, just do it. Get out of your own way. And I was like: you're right! Then the pandemic hit. And had all this excess time on your hand. And I dove in. I just dove right in and I took a course and I got everything I needed to get set up. Then I started just working out some of my own music and trying to recopy covers of other songs. Early on, I tried to recreate a Maren Morris song. It wasn't terrible. It wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible. But you know, the first things you do, they're always kind of less than good, I guess you could say. [laughing] So I started just doing a lot of it just for myself and on my own, and nobody really heard it. And it was just like practice time. At the time, I was doing a lot of collaborating with people for sync purposes. As we started collaborating, I realized: hey, I can play that role of producer in this collaboration and we'll write the song together, and then let me try to lay down the tracks and let's see how it goes. Well, it turned out pretty good! A lot of those early productions I was doing in those collaborations, they were sounding legitimate. And then some of my collaborators that I was working with started offering to hire me to do other songs that they had written and they wanted to have produced. It had never occurred to me until then that this could be a source for me. This could be the place that I'm supposed to be. So I accepted those jobs, and it scared me to death. You know, the first time you're taking money from somebody to create something that you haven't been doing very long. But it turned out really well. To date, that song has nearly 2,000 streams on Spotify at this point. So we did pretty good with it. And I mean, for what it was, and it was something that was a sync song that we had produced for sync anyway. So it wasn't even an artist song, and to have that many streams is not terrible for somebody that isn't trying to get a following in that sense. So, that turned out well and then it gave me this confidence to just really start putting that hat on, cause I finally found, after going through the whole orchestral thing and I tried so many different things, I joined a Taiko group, I tried songwriting and I was thinking, well, maybe I can be like the songwriter for other artists, and I just tried on so many different hats and nothing really felt like it was resonating. Even the artist hat; I tried on the artist hat as well, and it was like nothing just like it resonated, until I put on the producer hat and it was like a huge aha moment. Wait, this is the thing! This is the thing I'm supposed to be doing. And after thinking about it a bit and just letting it resonate and think: what is the brand? I mean what, what makes me unique? I was talking to another producer friend in Nashville, and he was telling me that women producers are such a rarity in the industry. I mean, that's obvious. I think I knew that, but I hadn't really thought about it very much, and I never really thought much about my gender making me particularly unique. Then he was telling me this interesting thing, and this isn't a better or a worse thing, but that both men and women, the mechanics of our eardrums work a little bit differently. So we tend to hear things different, and if the majority of producers and audio engineers out there are male, if you have a female audio engineer, it's going to have a slightly different sound to it just because we interpret sound differently. Different doesn't necessarily mean better, but it will get your attention because like different is going to stick out. So it occurred to me that one of my differentiators is actually the fact that I'm a woman in the music industry, and I'm producing and doing audio engineering. So I really leaned into that and thought: how can that be developed into the brand? And then this whole women empowerment thing started coming about, and I can remember brainstorming on the potential name. WE went through a number of names. I was jotting down on a list and trying to think: what are the phrases that come to mind? Like: empowerment, femininity, just badassness is kind of like another thing. And then I'm trying to think, what are some phrases or some catches that really say that? And then one day "Hear Me Roar” just came to my mind. When that came to my mind, I'm like: that is it! It was like total resolution. That is the name of this company. And after that name just gelled and solidified, everything just really started falling into place, and rather quickly. So here we are today after a number of awards and several placements and several clients that I've worked with both in my local area and across the country and abroad, I've worked with clients in Germany, I've worked with clients in Australia, and so there are no boundaries. There is no boundaries cause I don't want there to be boundaries, and one of the things that I think can be a limitation with a producer is physical location that artists that are not in your locality can't come to your studio, but I didn't want that to be a barrier. So I wanted to empower women to also be able to record their own vocals from home, because it's not really a complicated thing. You can learn how to do it fairly quickly. You can do some tests of it. You can record some karaoke tracks, get used to it. After no time, you're able to actually do these recording from your own home studio, and you don't even have to be complicated about it. You don't have to have all these wall treatments that I have here. You just need to be in a good room that has good sound. These wall treatments are more for mixing than they are for sound recording anyway. But you can get a really great recording in a bedroom with the mattress and the carpet. It works just fine, as long as you can eliminate your room noise, and that's not that hard to do. Just turn the AC off and make sure nobody's mowing the lawn, and like you can pretty much go to town and, and the world is your oyster at that point. So I really want to empower women to be able to do that. Then you can take clients anywhere and you can work with anybody no matter where they are. I'm currently working with somebody who's in Germany and she has the capability of recording herself from her home studio, and that's what we're doing. It's cool. Like, we get on conference calls and just time zones: we find one that works and with modern technology today, there's no boundaries. There's no barriers to being able to do what you want to do.

Michael: That is awesome. Thank you for sharing. I feel like that last statement you just made summarizes the story so well. One of the amazing blessings that we have here with us today with the internet and with technology and home studios is just how the barriers that used to exist can be swiped aside so easily.

Kimberly: They're not there anymore. I mean, cause I know you talk about it a lot in the artist development side of things and how it used to be that you'd have to be with a label and there was all these things that you would have to achieve before you could get your music out there, and now, you sign up for a DistroKid account. I mean, really, then it's just getting people to listen to it, which is another art form in and of itself, but to get it out there, it's really easy. [laughs]

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's almost like, the first part you mentioned getting it heard, that part's actually getting harder and harder with this. There's so much music and there's more and more music. But the ability to be creative and share that and distribute it is such a huge blessing and not something to overlook. I mean, one point I wanted to really appreciate about your story that I think is really admirable, and hopefully inspirational for people is how you came back to your music after 15 years of hiatus. I think for a lot of people, one of their doubts or fears might be sort of feeling like, I don't know, it's too late for them to get started; it's too late for them to kind of step into this. Like maybe they missed their chance. Could you maybe speak to that a little bit about your experience having transitioned from a corporate-type of role for 15 years and coming back into your music. Did you have any doubts around that and how did that come through for you?

Kimberly: So I don't think I had doubts because I didn't have a goal. My goal was just to live it again. I just needed to be creating and there was no externalized goal that I had at the time. And I guess still there isn't… I still do it cause I love it and, I'll get back to that in a moment, but it just brings so much joy to me just to work with a client and be able to watch their face as we start making their music into something more tangible than what was in their head and just those moments of being in the studio with them and like crying with them and laughing with them. I mean, it's so gratifying. That, unfortunately, isn't something that happened too much in the corporate world, for me at least. You know, there's goods and bads about it. But you know, it didn't feed my soul in the way that producing with artists is feeding my soul. So I don't think there was really any doubts or “is it too late”. I don't think this thought ever really crossed my mind. I mean, most producers are kind of old [both laughing]. There's a lot of people in their 50’s and 60’s still out there producing and it doesn't seem to be a barrier. So I think that was never a thought that crossed my mind. But I did want to say this cause this is just a cool story. How it happened; how this aha moment had happened and it kind of takes back to a time when I was a kid and I was telling you I had fallen in love with French classical music. I used to drive my car to the library down the street, and I'm dating myself a little bit, and I used to pick up CD’s at the library and I'd come home and I'd play them. And I don't know what got into me, but I picked up these French classical CDs, and one of them was clarinet sonatas by this French composer named Francis Poulenc. I put it in the car and I just sat there and I was awestrucken. I was absolutely floored by this piece, and I was immediately obsessed with it. I bought the music right away, the sheet music for it, and I started learning how to play it on the clarinet. It was a clarinet sonata, and I started learning how to play this piece on the clarinet. I wasn't even remotely good enough at the clarinet at the time to play such an advanced piece. I think I'd been playing for 2 years at that point, but I was determined, [laughing] and I was obsessed with it. I ended up playing this piece at my junior year recital in college. It ended up being a really great performance. So the one thing to remember is the composer, Francis Polonkin, this early introduction to him. Fast forward 15 years later, and I was barely even singing along to the radio. This is how much I had pulled away from music. I had taken a work trip to France and a friend of mine from high school who actually also played the clarinet, we took a weekend trip and we went out to Burgundy and we were staying at this kind of like a B&B kind of place. It was on a vineyard and they had a house jazz band, and the house jazz band was also gourmet French chefs, which was kind of cool. So they go back, they cook your dinner, and then they would come out and entertain you, and it was just such a cool place. As the night went on, they're sitting there playing, and I'm just sitting on this couch there in the room and I'm thinking, why did I give this up? I had this urge to get on stage with them and join. The young guy who was playing the piano, he had this old clarinet. It was so random that he had this old clarinet and he pulls it out cause my friend had told him I played the clarinet. He's like: [in a French accent] ah, clarinet here! The reed… it was totally a disaster. There was no way you're going to use it, and I was scared to death cause I hadn't picked one up in forever. So I was like: Oh, how cute, how nice, keep playing. And just kind of brushed it off. But deep inside of me, I'm thinking: why did I leave this? As soon as I got home, that was when I dusted off the clarinet. So I left that part of the story out when I was telling you earlier. I had found that old recording from college when I played this Francis Poulenc piece. I thought, let me take a little snippet of it, and I created a little post on Facebook: Oh, this was my junior recital and how much I missed being in orchestras, how much I miss playing music, and telling a little bit about how I was basically awestruck by Francis Poulenc. So I had befriended the young man who was playing the piano there in France. We were following each other on Facebook and he sees this post and he responds back and he says: that piano in the living room that I was playing, that used to be Francis Poulenc's piano! And I was like: get out of here.

Michael: Wow.

Kimberly: Get out of here. It was just like wow! If you don't believe in mysticism, you do it now. Cause it was like twice. And then it was like: okay, that's a sign I got to do this. So it was a very emotional moment. Yeah. And just realizing that that connection had come full circle again, and I just knew it was part of me. I knew it was part of me and it was something I couldn't deny.

Michael: That's powerful! Thank you for sharing. I love hearing the story. I'm sure everyone that's listening to this right now as a musician can relate just about the love of music and kind of getting back to the root of what made us fall in love with music in the first place.

Kimberly: I think everybody always has a story of what was that first piece that they heard or that first piece of music, whether it's a pop song, or whether it's French classical music, whatever it was, there was something that like touched your soul, and that was when you knew that it was something inside of you that you had to also create.

Michael: That's powerful stuff. What that brings up too is: part of your story I think is interesting is around the vacuum of Covid. Covid happened, and I know for a lot of us, that was a crazy time and threw all sorts of things up in the air and I heard this a lot in our world, especially, like, it was actually in some ways a blessing to have this like space or this vacuum.

Kimberly: I loved it. [laughing]

Michael: [sarcastically] Let's see AI design the next bio-virus. [both laughing]

Kimberly: I mean, I don't want to wish that on anyone.

Michael: Definitely don’t go on air saying that. No one do that. It's not cool. But the vacuum or the space that was kind of created, it's interesting when I hear that over and over again for a lot of people who that space or represented a time where they were able to explore their creativity and their passion and what a lot of people turn to at that time was their music and being creative and making music. It makes me hopeful for the future of artificial general intelligence, and creating technology to be able to replace, starting with dangerous jobs, things that humans are doing but like are actually dangerous, we replace those. Then we replace the monotonous jobs, the things that people do, but they don't really like doing them. I just imagine that we're moving towards a world where there's a lot more space for all of us to just do the things that we're passionate about and that actually bring us to life.

Kimberly: Yeah, and now that the world's like coming back… well, it has been back, it's like, you feel like that space is being taken from you and that's currently a struggle in like, cause now that I've started the studio and getting things built up, now you're kind of angling for time. How do I maintain my sanity while also doing this in a world that has come back full force and your in-person presence is on demand and it's a lot to juggle. So, I would say that's the current conundrum that we have.

Michael: Yeah, I totally feel that. It seems like all the stuff that we're focused on right now that we're building and kind of leaning into digital as a way to kind of create more freedom. I don't want to go too far down a rabbit hole here, but I spent a lot of time in the world of AI and technology and robots and the things that are happening. There's some very cool things being developed right now around robotics, and I do think it's going to create more space, create more opening for creativity and freedom, and less of that “we have to do something, not because we enjoy it or because we're passionate about it, but because we kind of have to”.

Kimberly: Yeah.

Michael: Cool. So, tell me a little bit more about what you're doing now. You're both a producer and you also work with other producers or you work mostly with artists?

Kimberly: Yeah. So, I do 2 things, but I would say the primary what I do is I work with artists and I both produce and I also do audio engineering. So a lot of my clients are local to the area in the Maryland, Washington DC, and Virginia area, but I do work with some people remotely. I work in a variety of genres because, I'm not sure if I actually said this or if this was self-evident, but all of my clients are exclusively women or non-binary, and that just becomes genreless at that point. Now there's certain genres that I'm better at, so I'm probably not gonna do a very good job on a really cool hip hop piece, so I'm probably not the producer for that. But if we have indie-pop, or anywhere in between indie-pop and Americana, this is kind of where I sit in any genre that's in between. That tends to be where my comfort level is, where I think I do the best job in articulating it. I think that's mostly because that's the kind of music that I listen to. So it's in me. It's the kind of music I enjoy, and I think you do a better job creating music when it's the kind of music that you also enjoy. Sorry. What was the question? [laughs] What are we doing right now?

Michael: Yeah, I was just curious what you're focused on right now in terms of your production. It sounds like you've really had an amazing journey as it relates to your own production and becoming a producer, and now it sounds like you're working with other artists as well, and kind of helping them bring their music to life.

Kimberly: Yeah.

Michael: I'm curious in that journey and having worked with other artists now, what are some of the common patterns or threads that you see in terms of, maybe some of the biggest challenges that they come in with and how do they overcome those challenges?

Kimberly: Self doubt. Self doubt. I think that's probably the biggest one that I see. It might be the fact that I'm a woman, and maybe just part of my overall brand, cause there's a lot of female empowerment that comes with my brand, and if anybody who follows us @HearMeRoarStudio on Instagram, you'll see a lot of that kind of stuff. I don't get into too much on Instagram. I mean, I know how to do it, but I don't get into too much of the techie type stuff there. It's more building community, uplifting other women in the community, and things like that. I think that really resonates with a lot of women that I work with. What I do find, this isn't so much a common theme as far as a challenge, but this is a common theme, is what I'm finding from a lot of the clients that I've worked with is they tend to bring me one of their most vulnerable pieces that they've written. I had a client who brought such a beautiful piece that she did, and it was a song that she had written after her mother passed. She actually credits her mother as being a co-writer on the song because she felt like her mother was speaking through her when she wrote it. So it was really important to her that this was raw and authentic and just as vulnerable as it could be. It was all a cappella. It was a cappella plus tambourine, which is kind of cool, and it just turned out so cool. It's the kind of song that she wasn't really comfortable bringing into just any studio. She felt really strongly that she wanted to work with a female producer on that because of the vulnerability of the song and how sentimental it was. She had a picture of her mother there in the studio as we were doing it. It was a beautiful experience. Another client, she brought me a song about how she thought she was done. She thought she was the end. She didn't want to produce anymore. She didn't want to. I mean, she wasn't a producer. She didn't want to create music for herself as an artist anymore, but she had one last song that she had written and she had written it about this: it was just about showing up for yourself and just being really, really gentle with yourself in that moment. It was such a vulnerable song also that she brought to me, but I think almost every client I've had, we have our moments of tears in the studio or on the intro call or something. It seems to be something that is a through line between me and everybody that I'm working with. So that feels really special that I'm being trusted with these most vulnerable pieces that people have written and they're so special to them.

Michael: That's awesome. Yeah. Music is so great. It's such a special experience.

Kimberly: It’s healing!

Michael: It sounds like what you're saying is the songs/the music, it's about what it's connected to and about the experience and the meaning behind it, and so it's sort of like a medium through which to express and be vulnerable and to share those experiences. It sounds like one of the core themes of your brand and in your mission/your purpose, that why you're here is to empower women and music

Kimberly: Yeah!

Michael: The name of “Hear Me Roar” is sort of speaking to giving a voice to women in music, and maybe the point there is that traditionally women haven't really had a voice to fully express some things that have been repressed.

Kimberly: Yeah.

Michael: I'd love to hear you share a little bit more about that mission and right now, kind of the current state. There's obviously a much bigger movement now around some of these issues, and there is much more movement/many more people talking about it. So it feels like it's having an opportunity, as needed, to be able to express more. But I would love to hear from your experience what that looks like for you, and what kind of voice you want to be able to share.

Kimberly: That's a great question. So I have always believed that the female voice was always powerful. I've never been one of those people that coward behind it or like: Oh, cause I'm a woman, I can't do this or that. I've never been that person; I've never seen my gender as a barrier in any way. When I first started this production thing, it didn't even occur to me until this other producer said something that that was a unique factor. So I've always seen us as equal, and I think that's an attestment to how I was raised, and just maybe the environment that I grew up in, being in more of an urban place, but for me, it's never been a barrier, and I want other women to also feel that way: that your gender isn't something that holds you back. Sometimes it's in our minds, whether it's other people or ourselves. Sometimes we impose that, but it's not a skill thing. I mean, obviously it's not a skill thing. We all have the ability to rise and we all have the ability to do what we're best at. I found that, as I started this journey, the fact that I am a woman, I think, has been a major asset. A lot of my clients are so interested in the fact that they can work with a female producer. That's very enticing to a lot of people, and it's got a lot of people in my community talking. I think I'm the only one that markets myself as a producer in my local community. I'm probably not the only female producer that's here, but as far as people who are marketing themselves as a female-run business, I think I might be, if not the only, one of the few. But not only from the female community, but also from the male community and other male producers that are around me. People have just really embraced it, and then really embraced me, really have embraced the brand, have just done everything they can do to help me, and cheerlead for me, and it's just been a really welcoming experience for me showing up to this plate as a woman. I don't know if it would have been the same if I was a man, because I wouldn't have the brand positioning for sure. That brand wouldn't exist if I was a man, so I'm not really sure what my unique value for a proposition would be if I was like a man. But it's allowed me, I think, access into things that I didn't expect even. It’s exceeded my expectations a lot. What I love about, in general, the women in audio community globally, there's a lot of platforms for that: different groups coming together like women in audio or the she rocks something. There's all kinds of different platforms out there that are really trying to coalesce females in the industry, whether it's artists or audio production, or audio engineering, or producing. There's all these different angles and they have all these different communities that really come together. It's a lot of cheerleaders, which is really great. I'm curious what your experience is. Do you experience a lot of cheerleading in your world?

Michael: I'd say absolutely. You mean as it relates to women in music?

Kimberly: No, I mean just in general. I mean, both actually.

Michael: Yeah, I would say that this community, I feel very grateful for it. It seems like just in general, it's a very uplifting community. We're always looking to support each other. I know we've had a few panels where we've had a women in music panel, and we've tried to speak to: I think there's a movement happening right now around women in music, and women’s rights in general, and there's also more discussions that sometimes can be very polarized around trans rights and things like that. I would say our community, I would say this reflects hopefully the larger music community as well, has been really encouraging and a champion for all of us. Cause we are like: a rising tide lifts all boats.

Kimberly: Yeah, totally.

Michael: And the music industry, we need each other right now. We need to kind of come together to improve things because it has been kind of broken for a little while.

Kimberly: Yeah. And I really feel that in my local community in the Washington DC area. It's very much a rising tide lifts all boats kinda feel that I've always gotten from the very beginning of getting to know people and just developing those relationships and connections. I've just genuinely felt that from the beginning that there's been nothing but just cheering everybody on, which is great.

Michael: It's important.

Kimberly: [stage whispers] It's not like that in the corporate world. [both laughing]

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's important. Yeah. I mean, that's a fundamental worldview and it's interesting too. There's a couple of different ways that you can grow and build a community. One way that you can build a really strong community is by being very polarizing. You can make it very much so about “us versus them” and throwing rocks at the other.

Kimberly: Not my vibe.

Michael: Yeah. It's not really my vibe either. I've seen some interesting ways of looking at it where maybe instead of it being another community or another person, it’s more like “you versus self doubt” or something that epitomizes evil. It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, even, I don't know, when I think of books or stories like Harry Potter. You have Voldemort, who's sorta like the epitome of evil, or in any movie or story, you kinda need that embodiment of evil that's like a “hero versus evil”. I do kinda wonder: is there a rally around, is that an important part of growth and life and building a community, or what does it look like if you actually truly live in a world where there is no evil, there is no Voldemort. There’d be less drama and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. [laughs]

Kimberly: I mean, as long as there's a unifying force, right? That's what pulls people together is some sort of unified force of collective objective. It doesn't have to be an adversarial thing.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, sometimes the way I look at it is around challenges. It does feel like it's kind of like riding a bike, where in order to have balance, having motion or moving towards something, but at the same time, you have to balance that with: if you're always trying to get somewhere else, then you might never fully appreciate where you're at and connecting with that. I’d love to hear your perspective on that as someone who has lived in the corporate world. Like you described, it’s very different than the place you're at now with really coming from a place of soul. What's your relationship with goal setting and having objectives, versus being fully present and appreciating each moment as it comes?

Kimberly: I mean, I never thought of that as an either or thing. I'm a big goal person. I'm a big objective person. I'm a very action-oriented person. So I think it's hard to get where you want to go unless you have a vision of where that is, and then you're taking tangible, actionable steps to get there. But those steps are in the present, right? So like the actions that I'm taking, I'm taking right now. We're on this podcast right now. We're talking about my business, we're talking about your business, and those are actions and that's a very present thing, but they're in line with the goal. So I think it's about making intentional decisions about which actions that you're taking. It's like: are they aligned or are they not aligned? And if it's not aligned is there still a reason to do it? Like, it's really fun. Maybe I want to do it because it's really fun, or it feeds my soul in some other way, and it's not necessarily related to what the objective is, but I still want it in my life. I think that there's room for that. But you know, if you're really being very objective based and you're thinking about where you're trying to go, and you think of an action or an invitation to something and you think it always kind of goes through my mind: is there brand alignment? Is it helping me get where I want to go? Is it hurting me from getting where I'm going to go? Is it neutral? And then you make a decision on whether or not you're going to actually do that thing. But once you're doing it, you're in the present and hopefully enjoying every moment of what you're doing with that.

Michael: That's a really well articulated answer to that question. [both laughing]

Kimberly: Sometimes I surprise myself.

Michael: Having intentions, having goals, but also recognizing that you have to actually take those actions in the present moment.

Kimberly: You can’t just think about it, can you? I mean, I guess you can. Sometimes, you end up doing them because you're thinking about them, but they're not being super intentional about it. But generally speaking, you can't just think about it and it's going to happen. I'm a very strategic person, and I think about maybe too much things that I'm doing, and what I'm going to do, and the meaning of it, and the value of it to me, and the value of it to my community.

Michael: It's smart. Yeah. I mean, one of my favorite quotes is that: planning is invaluable, but plans are useless. I think that really speaks to what you’re describing right now.

Kimberly: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah! I was gonna say something about that.

Michael: So good. Yeah. The act of setting intentions, the act of setting goals and planning where you're, we're going, having a vision is extremely important, but we don't wanna get too attached to that specific goal. Planning is invaluable, but the plans themselves are useless.

Kimberly: Yeah, because you want to be open to other opportunities as they present themselves, because there's some things that come about that you didn't think about and make a lot of sense to do. If you're just too rigid about: this is what I'm going to do, if it doesn't fit into this rigid definition and under these parameters, then I'm not going to do it. To hell with it. That's not really… 1) it's not fun, and 2) it might sidetrack you cause you might get all the way down, just like I kind of did back when I was wanting to join the AirForce/one of the armed forces bands. I was pretty tunnel visioned about it, and then I got to that point and I was like: nope, nah, I don't want to do that. Then it was just like: okay, throw out the baby with the bathwater and do something totally different. You make dumb decisions like this sometimes. But being open minded to those opportunities as they present themselves and then thinking: how does that align to where I want to go, and if it doesn't really align, is there still a reason to do it? Is it a viable alternative? Is it adjacent in some way that still helps propel me forward? Or does it transition me into something I'd rather do? Just like my friend saying “you should produce” and I'm like, nah, I want to be a songwriter. Well, I could have buried my head in like a song writing anthill or whatever, and there's value there if that's for you, but I enjoy songwriting, but that wasn't for me. That wasn't what I was supposed to be doing. I still do it and I still work with my clients on songwriting, and we'll do a write-to-produce type of… Actually, that's what I was doing with Megan, where we can start out with a concept and we create the entire song, and we go all the way through the production and all the way through the audio engineering of that. So it's like souped nuts that you can do. For that, I need to continue to develop my craft as a songwriter and I enjoy that. But as a profession, it's not the thing that calls me.

Michael: All right. Well, Kimberly, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story.

Kimberly: Absolutely!

Michael: For anyone that's listening to us right now, who is interested in connecting more, and maybe reaching out related to music production type things, what would be the best place to connect?

Kimberly: So my website and it's really easy to remember it's HearMeRoarStudio.com. There's a contact form in there, and you can sign up for my mailing list, and I will send you a monthly newsletter and tell you what we're up to. Also, I like to put a lot of educational stuff in there too, so things that help artists. We talk about a variety of different topics from recording yourself, to songwriting. It could be like any random topic. I I talked to a lot of artist friends and I ask them what they're interested in knowing, and then we put together some resources for that. So it's helpful. It's not just about what we're doing. Also a little plug, I talked a little bit about recording yourself. I have a free e-book that you can find also on my website in basically the same place. It's an ebook about recording your vocals from home. It's a step-by-step guide that takes you from what equipment you need, and what you can purchase on a budget, all the way through how to connect it, what are some troubleshooting things, how to prime yourself for it, how to practice for it, how to get a good take, how to gain stage. All kinds of different stuff. So it gets a little techie too, but all in a very digestible way. It's an easy read and it's a fun read. My good friend Erin Michelle helped me put this together. She does a lot of consulting with us here at Hear Me More Studio. She did a lot of the editing work on it and it looks beautiful and that's 100% credited to her. She did a great job.

Michael: Awesome. That sounds like a great resource. You said it was HearMeRoarStudio.com?

Kimberly: HearMeRoarStudio.com. It's the first thing you find when you Google it.

Michael: Awesome. Well Kimberly, thank you again for being on the podcast today.

Kimberly: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Michael: Yeeeaaaah. 

Kimberly: Yay!

Michael: Hey, it’s Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today, and if you want to support the podcast then there’s a few ways to help us grow. First if you hit ‘subscribe’ then that’s make sure you don’t miss a new episode. Secondly if you share it with your friends, on social media, tag us - that really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review it’s going to help us reach more musicians like you take their music to the next level. The time to be a Modern Musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.