We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Danielle Moreland-Ochoa a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Danielle, appreciate you joining us today. I’m sure there have been days where the challenges of being an artist or creative force you to think about what it would be like to just have a regular job. When’s the last time you felt that way? Did you have any insights from the experience?
Artists are asked to do something astonishing. We are asked to support ourselves in a profession that lacks basic compensation while pursuing it with everything we have. If you asked someone in a “regular job” to show up to work and do their best and then go home and commit time to the work, but then told them they wouldn’t get paid, they would laugh at you. This is what is asked of most artists. We must desperately love what we do if we agree to these terms. I have had times where I have wondered if it would be easier to have a regular job in a field I wasn’t passionate about, and my conclusion is always the same. I only get one life and only have so much time. What kind of fool would I be to spend most of it doing something I didn’t enjoy simply to accumulate money. I love being an artist. Art is the driving force of progression and change in the world and those in it and I feel extremely proud to be in a profession that adds beauty to the world.
Danielle, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am an indie musician composing, producing and releasing original music under the name “your friend juniper”. I run a live music and art mini fest called The Fuzz and produce and write for other artists as well. To me, lyrics are the most important part of a song. Musicians are messengers and because music has played such a role in the progression of the world, I care a lot about my music being a positive influence. I hope to inspire people to love themselves and every living thing around them. I want my music to be loved by people all across the spectrum of experience and circumstance. I want to give people hope and make them think and act with love and compassion. I put a lot of effort in making everything I release beautiful from the music to all of my social media content. I hope to be a dopamine release for anyone who reacts with my content. I want my listeners to feel changed and deeply affected by what I put out into the world. I love the idea of my song being the song my listeners play as soon as they get in the car to feel motivated or the song they play to comfort them in a hard moment and. I release music in diverse musical stylings because it is what authentically comes to me with all the different kinds of music study I have interacted with and hope to be a genreless musician. Music has helped me so much throughout my life and I love the idea of doing that for others.
I grew up in Austin, Texas and Salem, Oregon and have known I wanted to be a performer my whole life. I loved singing from as early as I can remember and put on performances for my family any chance I got. When I was very young, my mom put me into theater camps and voice lessons and that became my whole life. Musical theater became a constant and huge part of my life. I was truly Broadway bound! My mom dedicated so much time making sure I could be involved in any opportunity to grow as a performer and has continued to be my biggest support. When I was 18, I auditioned for 10 musical theater programs and one contemporary music school in Boston called Berklee College of Music. My whole life had been leading up to going into musical theater study but when I got into Berklee, I couldn’t turn down the opportunity. Once I arrived, I realized I was far behind everyone else as a musician. I didn’t know how to play an instrument and had never written a song. I started teaching myself guitar and piano, pulled out all of my poems and wrote my first song. I fell in love with songwriting and composition and set myself on a path to become a singer/songwriter releasing original music.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
After graduating from Berklee I moved to Los Angeles with my now husband, who is also an incredibly talented musician, to pursue a music career and curate a live music show we had been dreaming about starting. We moved in January of 2020 and quickly got ourselves together to run our first show. It features 4 musicians and several vendors made up of local artists of all different mediums. We had three incredibly successful shows and then the pandemic hit. It was a huge blow since our time in Los Angeles had just begun. Everything moved online and running our live events, playing gigs, collaborating with other artists and getting music recorded were a no go. I realized I had to do everything myself so my husband and I invested the little we had into recording gear and started learning as we went to record, produce and release music. In school, my concentrations were songwriting and performance so I received minimal training in recording and production. It was a lot of frustrating work but I feel extremely grateful for that time of learning. I established my artist profile and brand and got involved in any online music community I could. I was writing short songs every morning and posting them. We also realized we had to create our own visual content so we again invested what we had and learned how to shoot music videos and social media content for ourselves and got good enough at it to the point where friends began asking us to do it for them. I now write and produce music and create video and social content for other artists as a freelancer and I love it. I as well work as a freelance musician making music for podcasts, editing and writing lyrics and collaborating on songs for creators all over the world. I like to think of myself as a Jill of All Trades and just love doing creative work for and with other creatives. I see my skill set as a huge silver lining for the difficult time I had as an artist through the pandemic.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
I don’t come from a family of artists. It has been difficult to navigate through the misconceptions and assumptions people have about being a musician as a career path. I find myself having to explain every aspect of what I do with my time and how I make money. We have to live in certain areas that would benefit our careers and they are often crazy expensive. We then are expected to have full time jobs to afford living there when being a musician is a full time job, especially now that the entities meant to help musicians want you to already have a big following and good numbers before interacting with you. We have to pay for advertising on social media and pay for PR companies to help push our music in the right direction. There are many showcases and performance opportunities that make artists pay them to participate. It’s all in the name of exposure and experience. It’s extremely frustrating.
I have had to do so much work for either very little pay or completely for free, which is just expected of musicians. We have to pay our band members even if we didn’t get paid for a gig. I managed the social media accounts for Underwater Sunshine Festival, created all of their social media content, marketed for the festival and wrote for their website for two years as an intern and never got paid. It was an incredible team and experience but it took up a lot of my time and I eventually had to stop because I couldn’t afford the time it was taking. I honestly don’t know how musicians without either family connections or money do it. We end of having to support each other in a huge way to help keep the playing field even. The way things are set up now are elitist and only benefit those who can shell out huge amounts of money. It is not a system based on true talent.
If you asked anyone in any other profession to work for free, they would laugh at you. It’s an unfair standard put on artists and now we aren’t only battling not getting paid for our work but are losing work opportunities to AI made content. I encourage anyone reading this to support artists in any way you can. If you work for marketing and your company uses AI, encourage your team to use real people and include them in the budget. Reach out to independent artists you listen to and ask how you can support them. Find collectives like Patreon who help creatives get fans and support directly. Think of all the ways you interact with art throughout the day and know that someone put tons of unpaid time into creating it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://yourfriendjuniper.wixsite.com/daniellemo
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yourfriendjuniper_/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yourfriendjuniper
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielle-moreland-ochoa-180160246/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz23PNtakbDCzHQl1BEknhA
- Other: LINKTREE https://linktr.ee/yourfriendjuniper TIKTOK https://www.tiktok.com/@yourfriendjuniper
Image Credits
Hugh Macdonald Nikki Williams