Today we’d like to introduce you to Lindsay Teske
Hi Lindsay, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
The Band Bible is the return to my roots that I didn’t know I needed. I was lucky to find success in music journalism while I was still in college, and though I wouldn’t say that writing came to me easily, I loved it. Even when it was challenging to me and trying to think of the right way to phrase something was driving me up the wall, I still loved it. I loved the specific kind of hard work it entailed. However, when I got to my final year of college, I got worried about being pigeon-holed as a writer. I don’t know why I panicked about that so much. I was going to be graduating with a public relations and advertising degree, so it was clear that I could do other things well, but I had a lot of fear over being seen as a one-trick pony because of how interwoven my career was with the journalism work I was so, so lucky to have been doing — especially at that age. So, I moved to London, did a master’s in entrepreneurship, and started a music PR company where I represented emerging artists.
I had wonderful experiences while doing that and I’m so grateful for each and every good moment along the way, of which there were many. I accomplished things I never thought would be possible and met some fantastic people. But, it wasn’t always that way. I also had some really negative experiences while running the business. Of course, negative experiences are going to come hand-in-hand with just about anything, but I realized that somewhere along the way, I stopped loving the work enough to make dealing with the inevitable ebbs feel worth it. I had one “final straw” moment with an incredibly difficult client, and that forced me to confront the fact that I had no interest in continuing on in the manner that I was. PR is hard work, and it’s often tedious and boring. The passion I once had for doing it via my own medium outweighed the difficulty, tedium, and boredom. But in the absence of that passion, I was left with nothing more than those elements alone, and they took center stage as a result. It was time to evolve and move on. It just wasn’t making me happy anymore.
However, it was while I was running the business that I created what began as its newsletter, The Band Bible. It’s about the business aspect of being an artist, and its purpose is to give emerging artists a toolkit to refer back to as they begin to make initial business decisions about their careers. This is done through bite-sized interviews (they’re five questions total). Each issue features a different interviewee who is either an artist themselves, or who is making a difference through the work they do in helping artists to grow. It ends with me asking each interviewee to pick a “commandment” to leave in The Band Bible. The newsletter is a chance to celebrate the interviewee’s accomplishments and career, while also obtaining their perspectives on what they think up-and-comers need to know. The Band Bible was always the component of running the business that I loved most. I can’t overstate how much I cherished connecting with others and sharing their stories. And, of course, I hope it makes those who are just starting out feel like they have somewhere to turn for career advice. Being able to play a role in making industry knowledge accessible to those who do not have management, a label, etcetera is incredibly important to me. In fact, it’s so important to me that I decided to continue to do The Band Bible alone and move on from the other areas of the business.
Deciding to lean into The Band Bible feels like a homecoming. I missed writing. I missed connecting with lots of different people. Those aren’t things you get to do the same degree of fullness in PR. I think I had to barrel into PR and have that detour in order to understand and appreciate that my place in the music industry was actually exactly where I began. Having gone through that journey has allowed me to approach writing with an even bigger sense of love than ever before — and that love is so, so alive. I’m the happiest I’ve been professionally in years. The Band Bible allows me to pair writing with an effort to make the industry less hostile to newcomers, which was the primary reason I launched my PR company. So, I feel like I’ve finally found the way I’m going to try and make that difference in the way I’m meant to be doing it. It took a while to get there, but I’m grateful for the ride along the way and delighted to have reached the destination. This experience also taught me a lesson about entrepreneurship I hadn’t learned yet, which is that it’s so important to give yourself breathing room to change. It’s okay to build something, destroy it, and let it rise from the ashes once more in a new and improved form.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
My decision to lean fully into doing The Band Bible is pretty recent, so there’s still quite a bit that I’m in the process of working out. Chiefly, I have to get a job! I don’t mean a part-timer either. I have to get a 9-5. I want to be super candid about that because I think it’s important to highlight that making big career changes like this, while liberating and right, comes at a literal cost. I’ve chosen not to take on clients anymore, so I have to get other work. Now, my days are split between various undertakings for The Band Bible (which is more time consuming than one would think) and doing applications and interviews. I sometimes struggle with feeling like I’m giving too much time to one and not the other, and put a lot of pressure on myself to try and balance my time as evenly as possible. Of course, that’s not always possible and the logical part of my brain knowns that, but I stress myself out by trying nonetheless. Having to adjust to this new schedule, and then having to adjust to a new schedule again when I get a job, is definitely on my mind. I know I’ll figure out how to balance my time in the end, but going through that process and figuring out what does and doesn’t work for you isn’t always easy.
These are all challenges I knew I’d have to tackle when I decided to proceed with just The Band Bible, and while I do have some days where the uncertainty surrounding this transition feels like a lot, I don’t mind. I knew it was time to move on from PR when the love wasn’t enough to make the challenges feel worth it to me anymore, and now, I once again love something enough to make the challenges feel worth it. To me, that’s everything. After all, life is always going to be hard to some extent, and it’s about choosing which version of hard you’re most willing to endure — if you can indeed choose, that is. The process of looking for a job and restructuring my schedule is certainly hard, but I’d choose that any and every day over the version of hard where I was keeping myself in PR for no real reason.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m proud of how The Band Bible creates access. When I was creating the newsletter, I often thought back to artist interviews where someone mentions having been at a party with some sort of titan in the industry who gave them a mysterious piece of potent career advice. I thought about all the good that could come if words of wisdom from fantastic people in the industry were made public and accessible to anyone — not just those who have the capital to be in those rooms. I wanted to play a role in creating a world where these conversations didn’t exclusively happen behind closed doors anymore and stayed limited to a privileged audience. That’s what I hope to always do with The Band Bible — remove these metaphorical closed doors and invite everyone into the room. Coming up today as a new artist is an absolute minefield, and that’s by design. It has only become harder for anyone who doesn’t already possess some version of privilege to get off the ground, and this is a point that we never should have arrived at as a culture. People are feeling like it’s not even worth bothering to pursue their dream, and that’s grave. So, I hope The Band Bible is able to give people a starting point to begin to wrap their head around navigating the industry, to feel like they have a sense of direction. I hope that by creating a platform where folks in the industry can offer their advice for emerging artists, emerging artists will feel even a little more seen and emboldened. To create a space where those doors can be opened is something I take incredibly seriously, and the desire to make that space as good as I can is primarily what keeps me going.
Can you talk to us a bit about the role of luck?
I love this question because I don’t want to make it seem like anything that has happened to me has been an act of magic. I’m very aware of my own privilege, and that privilege has played an enormous role in my career. I think about that literally every single day. I’ve worked incredibly hard, but I was also in an advantageous position from the jump. My career not only started from working as a music journalist, but everything that has happened to me since (obviously, including pivoting back to writing via The Band Bible) has been connected back to it in some way. I only started working as a music journalist because I could afford to do an unpaid internship at the publication I later ended up writing for for a number of years. That’s it. I am acutely aware that I owe everything to an ability to take on unpaid work when I was twenty. So, that said, luck has played a gargantuan role in my life. I don’t deserve any of this more than anyone else, I just had the fortune of being able to work for free without consequence. I feel it’s important to not make light of this because classism is a huge barrier to entry for any creative career, and writing is no exception. I’m an example of someone who was able to get in the door because of the way this system functions, and I know that. That luck is the only reason why I got where I did.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://carnivalofoddities.substack.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carnival_of_oddities/?igsh=dTh3eTA1YzQzYTZ2&utm_source=qr#
