Moderated conversation by Maryam Said (poolblood) between Riya Mahesh (Quiet Light) and Emma Gerson (lucky break) discussing balancing day jobs, cutting through the algorithm, and finding your people.
What pays the bills these days?
Riya Mahesh: Actually, nothing really pays the bills right now because I’m still in school. I’m in my third year of med school. Which is awesome, but also…It’s almost over at this point, so I’ll be getting a job as a resident doctor, which is just a crazy life. That’s where I’m at. It sounds crazier than it actually is. I feel like my life is actually super normal.
That sounds tricky to juggle?
RM: Yeah, I feel like a lot of [being a musician] these days, too, is choosing your own adventure. I think I could be touring more if I had a job that allowed me to move around a lot more.
But I do think that it is really special to have multiple things in life that you care a lot about, because music is great and I love it so much, but there are periods time where I feel like it’s not really giving me what I need and it’s making me sad or it’s causing me economic stress. So having something else lets me keep music as a sacred thing. It also makes me feel like I’m part of a community because I feel like sometimes when you’re a musician, especially a solo musician, it’s really easy to feel like it’s you against the world.
Emma Gerson: Wow. You’re giving Hannah Montana, rockstar at night, school by day. So last year, I was working a job in the music industry trying to learn as much about the business as I could. I was in an assistant position, which was like a 70-hour week and it really did not give me time to launch a music career, but I was still finding the time somewhere in there to make my EP. Same kind of thing where it’s like the time you’re spending making music is when you have a separate job, especially a job that’s very, very demanding, it makes the time where you’re spending making music more valuable.
Totally.
EG: Because I went from being in school and having all the time in the world to write and think or whatever, to then being like, “Okay, I have 10 minutes where I don’t feel completely depleted and exhausted. Maybe I should try to write a line or something.” But then I left that job because I realized that I really wanted more space in my life to really pursue music as a career because ultimately that was my dream, and I felt like now is the time.
RM: Yeah, I’ll have time in the morning to think about music and I’ll listen to mixes in the morning. I’m usually up obscenely early anyways because my schedule has shifted to where I start the day early and then end early. My music brain will turn on the second that I leave the hospital and I put my headphones back on. I think that that sort of life of being like, “Okay, I have these hours where I’m not thinking about music at all. My music brain is off and I’m thinking about something else very intensely.” And then once that’s over, my brain is just so much more free to come up with musical ideas.
EG: When I was working as an assistant, I didn’t have the space to do it [writing music] during the day, and all the music stuff I was doing was in a separate world. I think because of that, I came to value being able to do the music so much more. I think I wasn’t as lucky as Riya to actually genuinely really enjoy my job and feel passionate about it. I didn’t necessarily have that experience. I was dying to get away from my desk so that I could make my art. It was hard because I am such a productivity-oriented person where I was like, “I just quit my job and I’m not doing anything. What’s wrong with me?” But now I’m trying to embrace this time.
How do you guys feel about the current way of putting out music and this idea of “momentum?”
EG: I’ve watched this interview with Fiona Apple once I think, where she said, “You have an antenna up. And the antennas up, the antennas up, and then all of a sudden it goes… And it’s all the way full, and then you have to explode.” I genuinely feel like when I’m writing a song, it’s like the expression of everything that I’ve experienced up to that point.
I think there’s a difference between making art as a product and making art as an expression. That doesn’t mean that they can’t be the same thing, I think that they can be, in a lot of instances. As an independent artist in the TikTok era, it’s very much this individualist thing where it’s like…It’s the same bootstraps mentality of “If you want to make it, then you just have to make a thousand videos and you have to be blah-blah. You have to be as productive as possible.” And maybe some of that is true because it is a gamble, and the more things you put out there, maybe the likelihood increases or something like that.
But that’s not really what the purpose of art is, to elevate your own standing or voice or maybe your status. It’s not really supposed to be something that makes you famous, it’s supposed to be something that connects people. It’s obviously very complicated and nuanced, but I think if you’re an artist who wants to make a career out of your art, then it’s this very delicate balance that you’re always trying to walk of staying true to what your art is and staying connected to why you make art in the first place.
RM: What Emma said resonated with me. When you asked that question, Maryam, the first thing that came to mind for me, too, was a Fiona Apple quote, but a different one. She’s on some late night talk show—I don’t remember who the talk show host was, but they’re like, “Oh, what happened to you? Six years went by and you didn’t put out any music. What were you doing?” And she was like, “I was literally not doing anything.” She was like, “I was maybe watching some TV, but nothing more than that.” And she’s just saying it in the most nonchalant tone because that’s normal. It’s normal to take a break from creating.
It also makes me think of this Sade quote where she said, “Oh, I feel like it’s really important if people want me to make the music that I make, that I step away from the limelight and actually live my life so I have something to write about.” And I think that those two concepts have really stuck with me. And I also think a lot about these artists that I admire, like Fiona Apple, Sade, Björk, you name it. Would they have thrived in today’s music landscape? Would they have been able to keep up with the TikTok outpouring or constantly promote themselves on social media? And maybe, maybe they would be able to…
But I think that the music industry thinks that there’s a one-size-fits all model for musicians. And I think that they especially think that that’s true for solo female acts. They’re obsessed with this idea of, “Oh, you can have this amazingly well-crafted image, and we will sell all these visuals of you and people can have access to your pictures on their phone and these…” It’s all about the visuals and the aesthetic or whatever. I feel like you can’t just… You can aestheticize it to some extent, but to some extent it’s someone’s life. It can’t really be an aesthetic.
So yeah. That’s why I cut myself some slack when my music is not that successful because I’m just like, “I’m sure some of my heroes would be really unsuccessful right now.” It’s brutal. It’s a brutal environment. But that’s not to say that I don’t think there’s amazing music that’s being made right now. It used to be that you had to sell your soul to get some recording executive to sign you on, and you had to record in this big fancy studio. But now if you have a MacBook, you can be a recording artist. So there’s some amazing music out there. I think that music is amazing. I just feel like the music industry needs to figure out how they’re going to adapt to the current circumstances because they literally think it’s a one-size-fits-all model.
EG: Yeah, it’s tough because I think post-COVID, a lot of venues really got hit hard. And I think it depends on where you are. I definitely feel in the Bay Area that there’s an amazing music scene here that’s blooming and growing before my eyes. It’s cool to see. It’s so funny because sometimes as an independent artist, there is this chicken or egg thing where you need to play to get exposure, but venues are hurting so bad in so many ways that when you go to play sometimes you’re literally having to bring all of your friends just to break even.
First of all, there’s pay-to-play places which prey on artists. Never do that. And then there’s places where you go there, you play, you don’t make any money because it’s essentially the same thing as a pay-to-play thing where they’re like, “We’ll give you 50% after we hit 200 bucks or whatever.” And it’s like you bring all your friends there and who has that many friends, really? You’re not even exposing yourself to anybody new because you worked so hard to get all your friends there so that you might even make it over the cap.
That is the part where social media I think can be really helpful. An artist that I saw… Not to be #hopecore. I know it sucks to be an independent artist right now, but—
I love that. #hopecore is incredible.
EG: Not to be #hopecore, because I agree with Riya in every sense of it is desolate, especially as a young female solo act. It’s hard out here. But I got to open in the Bay Area for Shauna Dean Cokeland.
RM: Oh my god, I love Shauna Dean Cokeland.
Who is that?
EG: She’s a folk punk artist. She’s great. So in 2021, or whatever, something weird happened. I don’t know how this happened, but it was one of those magic golden nugget moments where someone who’s actually an authentic artist cut through the algorithm and was constantly on my “for you page,” or whatever, and she got a ton of followers which was really cool and amazing. All on her own.
I opened for her in the Bay Area, and she was going on a tour. I think it was her first headlining tour, and she had never played in the Bay before. She’s from the East Coast. It was at this co-op called The New Farm. It was so funny. There was a hardcore band practicing in a silo across from the stage, and you could hear as she’s playing a solo acoustic fucking set.
The crowd there was good. It was like 30 to 50 people who were not from her town. They’re not her friends. They were there to see her, and they’re all these 13 to 15-year-old girls there to see her. She was talking about US imperialism and all this stuff to this crowd of teenage girls who had found her on TikTok. So I do think that if you are an artist and you have something to say, your people will find you. They have to be given the opportunity to find you.
RM: I do feel like I’m glad that we got all #hopecore for a second there because I do feel like… And also, I was definitely getting all boomer about TikTok.
EG: No, you’re right though.
RM: It’s really just because I don’t know how to use it and I don’t like it. And every industry person I’ve ever met has been like, “You need to get on TikTok.” And I’m like, “I don’t know how to use this app.”
But I do feel like I would be very ignorant if I didn’t acknowledge the fact that for me, too, I feel like a lot of my fan base…I grew up in Texas and now live on the East Coast, and my fans are everywhere. Right now I’m in Boston, but I play a lot of shows in New York, and so a lot of people in New York can keep track of what I’m doing based off of my Instagram. That is really helpful because also it’s like…I don’t know how it would be if I had to put flyers everywhere.
Also, with the whole aesthetic thing too, I do actually really enjoy different aesthetics and I like being able to brand the album. I just feel like it’s tough when people expect you to live that way. There’s a big disconnect for me between the way that the albums are [and my real life]. My albums are really concept albums, but then my real life is different from the albums. The songs are based on my life, but the visual world is different from my real life. And I think that’s where I’ve really struggled with the whole branding thing because I’m in the hospital from, what, like 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM almost every day. So I’m just like, “Oh, that’s my life.” And everybody just expects you to have this really well-thought-out vision for what you are aesthetically. And I still just, every year I’m changing so much that I just don’t know what I am or want.
EG: Yeah, I think it’s so interesting because I think there are different kinds of artists that you see where there’s artists who are performance artists as much as they are musicians, and then there’s people who are just musicians. One of my favorite musicians of all time is Elliot Smith. Elliot Smith was just Elliot Smith and he was cool because he was himself. And obviously it’s different because he’s a man, but I think if you can find… And it’s so surprising to me, Riya, because I feel like Quiet Light, the visuals are just so perfect. They’re wonderful. Don’t change.
RM: That’s so nice.
EG: Yeah. But I think it needs to stay fun. The way that I feel about lucky break is I just want to make stuff that my 13-year-old self would think is cool, and I just want to enjoy it, enjoy the process. I think I really was really worried because originally I was putting music out under my own name and I was very perfectionistic about it. I didn’t put anything out because I didn’t feel like I liked any of it. And then something magical happened where when I took my name out of it, I was like, “Oh, this is a character. I can just do whatever I want.” I recently was like, “I can’t stand TikTok. I don’t know what to do.” So my friend Elliot was like, “Why don’t you just start blogging your life or whatever?” I have this shitty camera that I got for my 11th birthday and I’ve started taking it everywhere with me and just literally recording my life. Then I put it in iMovie and it takes me… It’s a little bit of a commitment. It takes me a couple hours, edit it, and upload it to YouTube. And I’ve only been doing that for four weeks now, and I’m like, “Wait, I want to make YouTube, maybe, my main thing,” because I actually really enjoy this, and it’s cool to get to see, I don’t know, my life in retrospect. It’s really weird. I’ve always been a journal-er, so it felt pretty natural to go into archiving my life through just the camera.
And I also feel, Riya, like what you’re saying about TikTok, even though I think there’s this thing in the music industry where everyone’s like, “Go to TikTok, go to TikTok, go to TikTok.” It’s like, I really think you just have to exist a little bit on TikTok. I do think the cream rises to the top. I think if you’re a good artist, you’re committed to what you do, you have your thing that you are and you believe in, people are going to gravitate towards it regardless if you’re on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. Because I think TikTok and Instagram now are more reactive.
RM: I feel like on that point of discovery not really happening on TikTok and on Instagram brings me some hope that it’s returning back to just discovering things like IRL. I feel like the kids, people that are 15 and 16 right now, probably get so much more of a thrill of going to the show and listening to the opening act and hearing something new that they didn’t find on their phones because that’s how we used to find new artists that we liked and stuff. You’d just go to a show and you’d go to see the main act, then you would enjoy the openers, then you’d become a fan. But I think that that art has been lost during COVID when people really weren’t playing shows and now it’s coming back.
I think that people are getting really into going to shows and partying and DJing. I think that’s amazing because everything is cyclical, and it’s like the over-saturation of the internet has led people to think that, “Oh, maybe there are cooler things if I log off.” And I still think Instagram’s so fun, the internet is so fun, but there’s nothing that’s better than going to a show and being so mesmerized by the artist and being in a room full of people who you don’t know, but you’re also connected by the music. It’s a really almost religious experience.
Right now , there’s been talks about unionizing the music industry and artists unionizing. I wonder what that would look like in the future?
RM: Yeah. I’m all about unions. I think UMAW is doing some really great stuff with unionizing artists. I do think that there does need to be reform in terms of the way that the economic aspects of music happen, just because so many people are just uploading their music online and not seeing any returns from it essentially. But I have hope that that’s going to change and get better. I feel like it’s unfortunate that’s the way that it is right now, but it’s affecting so many people that I find it hard to believe that it’ll just continue to be like this, but maybe it will.
I do think that, yeah, it’s a balancing act between trying to live your life and also trying to make money, which is what I feel being an adult is…I’m learning. But I feel like every year I learn a little bit more about how to be responsible, but also let loose a little bit. I don’t know what to say about the music industry as a whole because I don’t really work in it, but I hope that they’re trying to make some changes and trying to make it more equitable for musicians. But until then, if you make music and you believe in your art and it’s fun, there’s no reason to not keep doing it and to do whatever you can to be involved in music.
EG: Yeah. I think making a living as a musician is certainly doable. You just have to be playing fucking constantly. And that’s something that takes years to build up. If that’s genuinely what you want to do and you dedicate yourself to making a living gigging, then you can do it. It’s just like there’s going to be sacrifices involved. As for unions, I’m always pro-union. I think that artists, if you’re choosing art as your career, it’s essential that you have a network of people. You have an abundance of resources in your network. You have to have other artists around you, you have to have people around you who are supporting you. As simple as it is getting people to shows, that’s your network is getting people to come into your show. Making a living as an artist is this act of how many people can I put around me.
Yeah. Connecting different people around the world.
EG: It’s a choice. If you decide, “I’m going to make a living as a musician,” you’re going to find a way to do it. It’s not going to be easy. Obviously you need to have some sort of safety net underneath you. Don’t take risks that aren’t calculated. You have your day job, you have whatever it is… A lot of things have to fall into alignment, and it’s different for every single person. Like Riya said, it’s “choose your own adventure.”
Emma Gerson Recommends:
morning meditations
when in doubt, go outside
change the scenery as much as you can. When changing scenery makes you tired, stay in one place until your boredom turns into inspiration. repeat.
deli sandwiches
a new pair of $1 thrift store sunglasses can give you enough confidence and charisma to get you through any identity crisis.
Riya Mahesh Recommends:
The Sweet East (movie) directed by Sean Price Williams
Homemade soup in winter, my favorite right now is chicken broth + coconut milk + your choice of thai curry paste + kale + great northern beans + lots of black pepper
Drawing even if you’re not very good at it
Everything written by Sam Shepard
This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Maryam Said.
Maryam Said | Radio Free (2025-03-25T07:00:00+00:00) Musicians Emma Gerson (lucky break) and Riya Mahesh (Quiet Light) on the challenge of making a living as an artist. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/25/musicians-emma-gerson-lucky-break-and-riya-mahesh-quiet-light-on-the-challenge-of-making-a-living-as-an-artist/
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