Meet Julie Pusch and Astrid Vineyard of The Oopsadaisies

Today we’d like to introduce you to Julie Pusch and Astrid Vineyard.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
Astrid: We blame my mom. The Oopsadaisies is really her fault. Not only did she introduce us to each other (Julie was a former voice student of hers visiting from Los Angeles, and I was planning on moving there, so we met at a café in Vienna to talk LA) but the fact that she taught us both to sing is the only explanation we’ve ever found for our voices blending with each other in a way that is almost eerie.

Julie: Once Astrid moved to LA, we quickly became friends, and I asked her to sing with me on a score for a short film. The first time we sang together, we couldn’t tell which voice was our own. We’ve both spent our whole lives singing with other people and had never experienced anything like it. It’s like we really just became one entity.

Astrid: Shortly after, we started writing songs together. I had never gotten into that creative space with someone else like that before, and it was a really beautiful experience writing and recording our album, Funny Box, together.

Julie: Astrid grew up in opera houses around her mom, and I grew up in orchestras playing the violin. We both had a classical background that created a similar foundation for us both to relate to when we began writing together. We’re also both actors and are in the process of involving more theatrical elements into our shows.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Oh, if you could have heard the laugh we just had. It’s really been an enormous journey of self-discovery for both of us. Collaboration is not always the easiest endeavor, even with your musical soulmate. It’s a giant learning curve, both professionally and personally. We really became each other’s greatest teachers while we made our album, which is sometimes an enormous gift, and sometimes an enormous frustration.

It’s giving creative birth to something, and as soon as you’ve finished and are ready to release it into the world, you stumble out of the cave of the studio into the blinding sun, and it’s hard to see where you’re going. There was a real mourning period- a sadness over that part of the process being over, and a feeling of disorientation in navigating the next steps in publicizing our work.

With the most creative part behind us, we found ourselves at a loss in figuring out the business side of making and selling (LOL) an album. Making a living as a musician in this day and age isn’t easy, to say the least.

Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about The Oopsadaisies – what should we know?
We love making music together. Having integrity and holding the weight of the effect of our words with great intention is very important to us. The definition of “oopsadaisies” is an exclamation made when encouraging a child to get up after a fall. That’s what we want to do with our music- create a space for people to tune in to and process their feelings.

Sometimes music is an escape from your feelings- what we create is more of a space to dive into them. Music is a much more powerful tool than it’s given credit for. We’re inundated with it, and spend a lot of time tuning it out. Our music has a lot of complexity and layers. We ask a lot of our audience. We made an album that is meant to be listened to from beginning to end- we take you on a full journey. The world has become too fast

Everything has to be truncated into digestible teaser trailers. We’re trying to seduce people into slowing down and finding enough stillness to really listen to music again. We really love to collaborate with others, whether it’s dance companies, artists, filmmakers, or people who are simply out there trying to make the world a better place. We’re currently raising money to create a video in affiliation with the non-profit No More Tears.

NMT was founded by Somy Ali and is a non-profit organization that provides help and safety to victims of human trafficking and domestic violence. We’re collaborating with Holly Johnston’s dance company, Ledges and Bones, and director Bann Roy to create a video that gives both gravity and hope to these situations and will provide information on how to both give and receive help.

We’re also at the beginning stages of working on some larger mixed media shows that we’re very excited about. We will be sharing more about that on our website soon.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Julie: Perseverance. We’re good at creating the content, and putting our whole selves into our creative process. It’s hard to find the stamina to keep publicizing and promoting ourselves.

Astrid: We’re working on that one…

Julie: Flexibility is also an important quality. When we collaborate with each other and with other elements like dance or film, we have to really keep ourselves open to reinterpreting our own work.

Astrid: And for me: joy. Maintaining the pure joy of creating something beautiful and sharing it with others. It’s easy to get overwhelmed in this industry, and at the end of the day, you have to remember why you are doing this in the first place.

Julie: Agreed. In some of our more recent performances, we’ve really had to battle a lot of obstacles- floods, having to move, restructuring and rescheduling shows… I think that if we had to feel completely ready for a show, we would never have one. We really have to dive into the commitments we make and see how much we can create within them, down to the final hour. That’s the exciting part. We could decide at some point to just polish from where we are, but we keep expanding what we’re doing until the soundcheck.

We have an enormous amount of trust in our own capabilities, and in the performers, we work with. Every show is like an experiment in seeing how much we can conquer. We’ve really learned how to lean on each other to make that happen. Every performance, we take a new leap into the unknown.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.theoopsadaisies.com and http://www.juliepusch.com
• Email: theoopsadaisies@gmail.com
• Patreon: http://www.patrion.com/juliepusch
• Instagram: theoopsadaisies
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/The-Oopsadaisies-834791199898791/
• Other: https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/theoopsadaisies

Image Credit:
Lucinda Wedge, Esteban Cortina

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