Chelsea Ursin

Chelsea Ursin is the creator of Dear Young Rocker. Follow her on Twitter here. Follow Dear Young Rocker on Twitter here.

One of the many reasons I love Dear Young Rocker so much is there isn't anything quite like it. How did you come up with the idea?
Thank you! I think the reason it’s different is the same reason my music and basically everything I make is kinda different. I’m one of those people who spends way more time creating things out of my own weird brain following my own instincts more than I do closely studying the works of others and learning the “right way” to do things. I’m a weirdo loner who doesn’t really care for following the rules and my work reflects that. I didn’t listen to many podcasts or try to figure out how they were made before I decided to make one of my own, because I hadn’t been exposed to them yet. 

Here’s the story: I finished my MFA in Creative Non-Fiction in 2015 and my thesis was a book-length memoir called “Bass Player.” The idea was to tell my story of growing up an alienated angry kid who could have ended up going in a lot of bad directions but who instead found rock music and playing in bands as a release for difficult feelings and a way to connect to other people. The story’s goal was to emphasize the importance of creative and physical outlets for adolescents, especially non-males who can end up being labeled crazy or troubled if they act out rather than being given something to channel that. Boys who act out aggressively are ‘boys being boys’ and given football or wrestling or a drum kit while girls and others can be quickly and unhelpfully labeled crazy or problematic and learn to keep it in and hurt themselves in the process. I knew my story would help others who had felt alone in their difficult feelings as kids and who found solace in music.

I worked very hard on the book but couldn’t get it published because I’m not famous and publishers don’t want to pick up memoirs by non-famous people. (Real book agents and editors told me that I didn’t have enough of a “platform”). This made me feel bad about myself - who was I to think I could have published a memoir? But something burned in me deep down because I had a mission. One of the whole points of my book was to show that women who aren’t famous musicians, who just play in bands on nights and weekends, are a real group of humans and how meaningful, or even how life or death playing music can be for some of us, even if it’s just seen as a “hobby.” How it helped many of us survive difficult times with mental health in our teenagedoms and how alone we felt in that because there’s so little representation. I was depressed for years thinking that the only way I’d get this thing that I’d spent 3 years and 70k on out to the world and start my writing career was to somehow, in addition to all that time and effort, find a way to also get internet famous first? But I was working my butt off trying to pay my rent and loans in Boston - working four jobs as an adjunct professor / barista, living with five roommates at 30, so I didn’t have time to think about it.

I started volunteering and then eventually getting paid to do some copy-writing and admin stuff for this NPR children’s science podcast Wow in the World while I was still doing those other four jobs, and after that first exposure to podcasts and writing a script for them, I had this epiphany. I thought man, I know a tiny bit about recording and editing audio, and I know how to write… I bet I could make a podcast. I remember standing in this college library on a spring day when there were no students in the building at all and I just started jumping up and down. My book! My music! I will make my book and my music get married and they will have a baby and it will be a podcast! You don’t have to convince anyone to publish a podcast you can just put it out there yourself! It will be like an old radio show with sound effects and music working together literally and metaphorically! I had no idea what an RSS feed was and probably couldn’t name more than three podcasts yet, plus had no idea yet that audio drama or creative independent podcasting even existed, and although I played music I’d never scored anything. I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know at that point but I didn’t care. I felt a fire and real purpose in my life beyond just pay the damn bills and feed your cat for the first time in a while. I had wanted to help people with mental health issues through music and writing.

I had even strongly considered a second Master’s in Music Therapy but knew there was no way I could afford it and had almost given up on the idea of being useful to the world in that way. I had found the solution to so many things at once in Dear Young Rocker. And then it became itself. I found a format for my story where instead of trying really hard to explain music and how it makes me feel and hope it translates, I could actually use music to make other people feel what I felt. I could actually recreate the sounds of myself learning instruments and making my first songs and put them right in it. Also unlike in a regular book memoir that needs an editor’s approval, I felt I had room to experiment so I added in a full letter to my younger self in each chapter hoping it could be valuable advice for teens that is empathetic toward what they’re going through and understands how everything really does feel like life and death at that age. I wanted to answer to that, and validate it, instead of talk down to them like a regular grownup might. It’s what I wished someone had told me at that age rather than the “get over it, stop being so sensitive” advice I had been given.

So all together I guess it’s a combo of a musical audio memoir produced in  a sort of audio drama style (yet non-fiction), plus an advice show. Choosing my category was really hard!

You have to be so proud—you started a show independently that was good enough to get the attention of Double Elvis. What advice would you give to other podcasts who have a dream of doing this?
Number one: Don’t bother imitating others. There’s plenty of new ground to be broken and people are hungry to find those who are doing so. Think of it as a grand creative experiment and enjoy the heck out of it and care about it -- that’s the only way you’ll be able to push yourself through the hours of work you’ll have to do. Even if your thing ends up not-perfect and very blatantly DIY like mine, if your heart's in it, and it stands out, it will eventually get noticed. Think of how many kinds of book markets there are and how few of those have been translated into narrative audio. You don’t have to make another true crime show! Memoir is still a budding one with plenty of room. YA Romance… period horror… spelunking drama... whatever…. think of any creative book or TV show you like and make the podcast version. There’s so much room in the pool and unlike books there’s not enough out there yet for anyone to say “you can’t do that.” I have no idea if anyone else has done exactly what I’ve done in the way I’ve done it both artistically and in a business sense, and so you can do it a whole new way too. New kinds of contracts can be written for new kinds of ideas. So number one and a half is to remember there are no rules of either what kind of thing you make or how it can be in the world.

Two: Just go out and meet people. I know how hard it is. I am an extremely shy person who says awkward things to people I barely know and I usually need a full week to stop going over and over what I said to who and how dumb it was. I actually take medicine when I go to networking events so that my hands don’t shake too hard, but when I started my show I forced myself to attend a minimum of one every two weeks. I had no idea what or who I was looking for or what to say. I didn’t even understand how podcast networks work or that agents and management and PR are just as big of a part of podcasting as they are in books and music -- but then what and who I needed found me because I was out there. Just be yourself and leave your house and if you live somewhere without a physical podcast community find it online. Also understand, I worked for a full year on this thing, traveled all over and met hundreds of people in real life and online and went into debt before being noticed, so don’t get discouraged too quickly. The audio community is the most supportive wonderful place of fellow art nerds I’ve ever gotten the honor of sometimes being a part of, so it will be worth it.

Can you tell us about the music on Dear Young Rocker? Are these songs you wrote now, or are they actually from Young Chelsea?
Real high school band songs! I re-recorded new versions trying to be as close to originals as possible, but I don’t have recordings for all of them so they may be slightly different. The theme song I wrote fresh for the show but people tell me it sounds like my current band Banana.

How much of Young Chelsea is fiction?
Hopefully none, but of course memory is fallible. I don’t have my high school journals and diaries because I destroyed them when I was 19. At that time I couldn’t stand reading how “over dramatic and immature” I had been and didn’t see how valuable those feelings actually were. It took me a long time and a lot of meditation to get back into that young head-space. It’s not a comfortable place to be, completely hating your own being, especially after so many years of training that ego out of me. When I get to that dark place to write it’s sometimes actually hard to get back out. Memories came back in tiny pieces that I’d assemble -- one day I’d have a flash of a song playing while I was in someone’s car and then a week later in the shower I’d remember where I was going in that car and who else was in it then another week later at the grocery store I’d remember that it was actually sophomore year not junior year because the friend in the back with me wasn’t able to drive yet. And then I’d Google the date of the Green Day show I went to and realize I must have went to that weird band practice before my friend said that thing that changed our relationship. It took three entire years to piece enough scenes together this way to write a book and another hundreds of hours of revisions of the podcast script. I also cleverly jump time using music to disguise the sections of my life that I just can’t remember or where I can’t entirely trust my memories because too many pieces are missing or I can’t validate them with any facts. I have my own code of memoir ethics with what memories I share. People think I have a good memory. NOT AT ALL. I am just a dedicated journalist of myself and a crafty writer.

What is your biggest goal for Dear Young Rocker? Why did you make it?
To make anyone who has ever felt weird, alone, or left out for something intrinsic about themselves and found solace in music feel seen and connected to others. Especially kids. If I can make one kid stop hating themselves for five minutes and start developing empathy for others which in turn helps their own mental state then I’ve accomplished my goal. Of course I want to help as many people as possible though. I had a difficult internal struggle over whether or not to stay independent. I was spending upwards of 30 hours a week on top of my jobs on this because I did the writing, hosting, editing, production, music composition and recording, and the sound design of this heavily produced show all by myself (never mind the admin stuff that comes with it). It was something that was giving me no monetary return, the opposite actually, and I didn’t have time to craft a Patreon campaign and then market myself enough to get it to actually help me. If I had had a good paying job that could support me while doing this I might have stayed indie. (Or I might not have been able to find the time to make the show at all. Teaching college means you have weeks of unemployment and weird hours.) But I wanted to move toward a career in immersive narrative audio (that was my secondary goal with this show) since teaching Intro to College Writing was barely keeping me alive and had no chance of upward mobility or health insurance from what I could tell... and applying to podcast jobs was also going nowhere since I wasn’t able to take on an unpaid internship and wasn’t blessed with the foresight to have gotten a radio journalism degree. I felt totally locked outside of that insular world. Even though I knew I had what it took to make a good production, that I had the talent to actually push the boundaries of narrative audio, no one believed me enough to hire me to do it for them, and as an unknown creator I couldn’t get in a room with podcast networks myself to pitch it as an original show for them, so I needed to show the world by just doing it myself and putting it out independently. So wanting to get into the audio field professionally, combined with my main goal of wanting my show to reach as far and wide and help as many people as possible is how I ultimately decided that whatever burdens being pitched to a network might strap me with, I needed to do it and I needed help doing it. Double Elvis came along and offered to represent me and a few months after they told me they were pitching me to a mysterious very large network, I found out my first season would be re-released on iHeart. I had to get my message to as many kids as possible and this distribution agreement they got for me would make that happen. From the messages I’ve received, I already know the show is making a difference. 

Are there too many podcasts?
Google estimates there are 130 million books in the world. 130 million pieces of thinking and culture and art. I think that’s a good thing and should never stop anyone from writing a new one. Let’s aim for that number of podcasts.

Who or what is being underrepresented in podcasting? What do you want to see more of? How can we make that dream a reality?
The biggest chunk of pods floating out there in RSS are by the same demographic that is over-represented in every other type of media. I won't bother naming them, they get enough flack, poor guys. As I said before I believe there’s room for every kind of book to have an audio equivalent. Not just every kind of novel and every kind of non-fiction book, but poetry books, literary journals, encyclopedias, dictionaries - all of it! Of course the closest to my heart is memoir. I want to hear podcasts from thousands of other people who’ve written about their incredible, specific experiences, especially those completely different from my own. I want my empathy challenged and expanded and what I really want is to hear sounds I’ve never heard before set to someone describing a life so seemingly different from mine and then to go “yeah I’ve felt that way too.” I know there are already many of these being made by people working totally unrelated day jobs, but these creators need recognition and resources. I really hope more production companies do like Double Elvis has for me, and look for that independent talent and help bring it to a bigger audience, instead of focusing solely on making podcasts by people who are already lucky enough to be a part of the industry.

Thanks, Chelsea!