Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Karalyne Winegarner. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Karalyne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
One of the greatest risks our band Flight Attendant has taken – is one we all take quite often: the risk of failure; or rather, the risk of not being inherently good. As an artist, there’s a constant and endless questioning of if what you were doing is simply good enough. Are the lyrics to your song meaningful? Are the chord progressions and the way you’re playing your instrument comparable to other professionals in your field? Is it new enough? Is it familiar enough? Is it too familiar? Are you marketing yourself in a way that is seen or are you just creating art and then wasting it by throwing it into an endless void? There’s a risk that you spend your precious time creating something just for the final product to be bad, or worse, be good and then no one ever hears it.
I am willing to risk being terrible, if it means I at least tried. This is because there have been a few impactful circumstances in my life that let me know the pay off of one success is worth a lifetime of failures. There have been moments on stage, moments with fans or even just the moment I saw my mom smile while dancing and singing in the living room as a kid… there have been enough collective moments and memories to make it all worth the risk. Plus, everytime you fail, you learn and grow. For every bad show, shit song, missed note… you learn and make the next show and song better.
Flight Attendant has this pre-show ritual we do, where right before we get on stage, we all huddle up together, take our final pulls from the backstage bottle and somebody will ask with a knowing grin, “Are you guys ready to play the best show of your lives?”
We know that everytime we play a show, we learn from it and get better. That’s why before every show, we remind ourselves that all that practice, all those shows to empty rooms, all those thrown out duds of songs- led us to this moment, this set and this show, where we are about to play the “best show of our lives.”
If we have to write another 1000 songs before getting a hit, then so be it- but we aren’t stopping, All of our risks, failures and missed marks just make for a more intricate story and life. Without the shadow of failure, our successes would have no depth, and our wins would be much less beautiful. So, I will continue to risk failure and being “bad,” at something if every-time I fail it means that when I finally am “good,” and when I finally can measure some success – it will be that much more beautiful. In the meantime, the couple hundred fans we have, and my mother’s smile, will be enough to drive us to keep creating, playing and risking failure.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
We are a self-managed, self-booked, self-promoted entity of musicians who play Avant-Rock-Pop music, known as Flight Attendant. We are a band of 5 members (Nikki [viola] from LA, Vinny [guitar] and Derek [drums] from Boston, Peyton [bass] from Indianna, and myself/ Karalyne [singer, keys] from Kansas City, KS). We all found each other in Nashville while bartending together, and going to school for Music Business. When we found each other, our previous music projects had come to a lull, so we began jamming together. Through shared tastes in both music and whiskey – we became the band, Flight Attendant. Being a musician is not really a field you “get into.” Music is simply part of being a human. Some humans find joy in performing it, and some find joy in listening to it. It’s as simple as that. But, in order to sustain that symbiotic dream of playing our music to people that want to hear it – we also had to teach ourselves how to become the entire music industry with just 5 people.
We have all learned how to become audio engineers, lighting techs, digital marketers, radio marketers, booking agents, entertainment lawyers, publishers, publicists, sync agents, producers, copy editors, videographers, video editors, grips, directors, graphic designers, web designers, clothing designers ….. Being a songwriter and a musician came naturally for all of us. Being an entertainment Swiss Army Knife, is something we have learned.
Just this week I sent probably 500+ emails to various media outlets promoting our upcoming tour (dates below), edited 9 new videos for tour ads, picked up 3 extra bar shifts to pay for those ads, booked us a radio appearance in Chicago, and put down some synths on a new track. I (Karalyne) have also started a social media business where I help other brands and artists manage their social media presence via content planning, content creation, video editing and posting – so I’ve also edited a handful of short-form video posts for other clients and posted them with relevant hashtags and captions. I grew one country artist from 0 to 250k+ followers in 9 months through strategic content creation and… well a whole lot of ad spend. Our band can’t afford to promote ourselves the way some of these artists can… but what we lack in money, we make up for in grind and dare I say it – talent.
I am so proud of how far we have come as a band completely on our own. We have booked tours in 6 countries, sold out shows in 3, gotten written up in Rolling Stone Magazine (thanks to our friends over in Jive Talk), been featured on MTV Germany, had our song, “Therapy Couch,” hit heavy rotation on 2 terrestrial radio stations, booked 2 festivals for 2024….and managed it all on our own. We are still a LONG way from being a “successful band,” but with 1 radio hit, and the energy to stay on the grind, I have no doubts about our future successes.
TOUR DATES:
4/13 – Clarksville, TN // Revel House
4/19 – Knoxville, TN // Scruffy City
4/21 – Boston, MA // The Middle East
4/23 – NYC, NY // Mercury Lounge
4/25 – Philadelphia, PA // Ruba Club
4/26- Baltimore, MD // Holy Frijoles
4/28- Raleigh, NC // Pour House
4/29 Asheville, NC // The Grey Eagle
5/3 Nashville, TN // The Basement
6/14 Kansas City, MO // Boulevardia Fest
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
Vinny, Derek and I (Karalyne) were lucky enough to study Music Business at Belmont University together. While some of that education was extremely helpful – like what I learned in Strategic Reasoning, Logical Mathematics, Marketing Psychology and Audio Engineering…. Some of it we had to unlearn the hard way. One of those lessons we had to unlearn was the old, “Always get it in writing.” Well, as a tiny indie band with not much of a leg to stand on, “getting it in writing,” often is not in our benefit. Handshake deals were frowned upon in my entertainment law classes – and yet handshake deals are what gets our band in the door.
When I say we are “self-managed and self-booked,” it’s not to say we are doing it all ourselves, it’s just saying we haven’t signed any contracts. Or at least not any big ones. We have a hundred hand shakes, a thousand favors and a million friends scatter across the globe and that’s how we are moving this ship forward. Learning from our friends that are finding success, not burning any bridges, taking every meeting we can and shaking hands with every single agent and entity that is willing to help us – is more powerful than signing one, non-compete contract that forces us into a singular lane.
For our first record, we started the journey on a handshake, and I pushed to get the whole thing in writing way after the fact. If it would have stayed a handshake, we may have been able to leverage the whole first record to get a record deal more easily. Instead the first record is burnt as a leveraging asset for a future deal because it’s tied to the studio that recorded it. If I would have waited to get the thing in writing until we had another label interested, I could have gotten the writing to favor a new deal – instead the contract was boilerplate, and favored no one in particular which now does not serve us quite as well. Handshakes are great, and the moment you need more than a handshake, have your own lawyer draw up an agreement. Because while we are all friends on both sides of the deal, it takes a professional lawyer to keep you from screwing yourself over, despite everyone’s best intentions.
You get more in the bank if you use the handshake.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
What’s the most rewarding part of playing rock and roll music with my best friends on stage to a packed house in a new city, 2 shots of jameson in, feeling like a million bucks, watching 3 cuties in the front singing all the words while wearing your merch, then having someone tell you after how one of the songs means the world to them, then getting in a van, going to stay at some hostel or hotel, waking up reminiscing on how amazing the show was the night before, then driving to a new city and doing it all again?
Or what’s the most rewarding part about getting to take your feelings and your life experiences and express them in a musical way that immortalizes them for all of eternity?
Practicing music, be it scales on the piano, vocal runs, or memorizing new words is FUN. Doing it with your friends is FUN. Every single part of being an artist is the best part of life. I couldn’t possibly pick one thing that is the most rewarding… but hold a gun to my head and I would say:
The most rewarding part about being an artist is the thought that our music could make someone’s day a little better and brighter and that our path of creativity and self expression could provide an avenue for others to feel more comfortable and empowered to express and create for themselves. Art is life. Art is Joy. If our art can inspire other artists to create more, then we have helped bring more life and joy into this world. What’s more rewarding than that?
Contact Info:
- Website: flightattendantband.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flightattendant_band/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FlightAttendantBand
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/flightattendantband
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@flightattendant_band
Image Credits
LIVE PHOTOS BY PATRICK PHONGSA, LOGO BY CASS KRUGER, BLUE PRESS SHOT BY CHRISTOPHER CRUZ