Introducing Andreina Romero, spreading kindness through a podcast that gives voice to women in music
What service are you offering in your community?
I’m offering a podcast called Girls Talk About Music that gives voice to women in the music industry, but also to women who love music who have never had the chance to express their love of music. It’s a new podcast that I launched last fall.
My initial idea was to have very specific episodes, talk with sound engineers, photographers, singers, different people who work in the industry, and also talk to fans in different genres about their experience. I think it will evolve in having those conversations. It’s about bringing this female angle to this huge aspect of culture where we have been excluded.
What inspired you to offer this service?
The reason I started it is that I’m a podcast lover and I was writing about music before for a musician I love. I was maintaining his website, a fan site, and I needed to research and learn how to write about music. I started to listen to podcasts and realized that all the podcasts that I was listening to, were all men. I didn’t hear any female voices. And while I loved what I was hearing because I was learning, I was missing those stories. I didn’t understand why they weren’t there. So I said to myself, let’s find those voices. Let’s give our own opinions, let’s see what we have to say. Let’s see if our experience being music fans is different or similar, and regardless, just put something out there where we can talk, just have a conversation about music. Because I felt we’re completely excluded from the conversation, even the most frivolous conversation.
How do you believe this particular service can help people? What are the benefits?
First of all, representation in different ways. When I was growing up, I didn’t see myself on a stage, on an album cover, in a book about music, as a musician. I couldn’t imagine myself in that way. So just the fact that you can hear other women talking about music, I think that is already a huge start. A girl who hears a sound engineer can say, oh wow, and imagine that future for herself.
It can also help girls who don’t see themselves in the critical space. There’s not a lot of music critics that are women, or if there are, you won’t be able to name them as you would a male critic. So for a girl who’s picking up an instrument or listening to a CD, they can see, oh there, there’s the girls talking about music, we can talk about music.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m from Venezuela and we are a very conservative culture where only certain careers were encouraged and others, especially the artistic careers, were discouraged because they were not prestigious enough or you wouldn’t be able to make a living. I played music for many years, but because I didn’t have any “talent”, I abandoned it because it was not serious enough. So I had all these voices in my head that I didn’t belong, I wasn’t supposed to be doing that, I wasn’t supposed to love that. In Venezuela, our culture is also very critical of anything that goes outside the box a little bit. When I was growing up, it was the guys and all the intellectuals talking about music, and if you had anything to say about it, nobody would listen. I wouldn’t even dare to express an opinion, even though they were my age or a little older and we were listening to the same albums.
So just being able to say I love music and I want to talk about it, just to be able to put it out there, the fact that your voice is valuable, that somebody might want to hear that. Somebody might have some inspiration from it or learn something from it. Just the fact that it exists out there, that it’s not hiding in somebody’s basement, is important.
Those insecurities, you think you have to ask for permission to love certain things, to do certain things. You do not need permission. Girls can talk about music. Girls can love music. Girls are allowed to talk about their love of music. Girls can be fans of music. And nobody can take that away from you.
Why are people afraid to talk? Why do they feel the need to ask for permission? Because they fear the response. They fear mockery or dismissal or they fear being called ignorant or whatever it is. That fear that people won’t be kind to what you have to say. And that’s why you feel there’s no space for you. And that in itself is completely unkind, that whatever you have to say has no value. It might not be for you, but it might be for this young girl who dreams of playing drums or of writing about obscure bands from Norway. It’s the fear of people rejecting us or making fun of what we have to say. Being kind to ourselves is saying it, framing it in a way that makes sense for some people. Don’t fear the response. I think for writers and any creators, that’s a huge fear that people won’t like it or will criticize it or scrutinize it or correct you or just not be kind.
There’s a point where you love something so much, that the fear cannot be the measure of how you behave, of how you live. True freedom is when you don’t really care who reads it. I hope people read it, I hope people listen, but the act of doing it itself, of having gone through that fear and that process of yes, I can do this and let’s put this in the world, that is enough. Where there’s more voices, there’s a kinder world. We might not understand each other, we might not be into the same things, but there’s space for it. What got you into this activity? Why are you passionate about it?
Technology has changed absolutely everything. It has given voice to so many people. And the fact that you feel you have something to say, and that with a few different platforms, you can actually put something out there that other people can relate to, is truly amazing. I love writing criticism. Criticism is one of my biggest passions, not only music but films and books. I love the interaction that critics have with works. For me, it’s important that once you experience an album or book or film or piece of theatre, that you are able to process it. Everything is so fast these days! I love the processing, the conversation, the understanding of something someone put a lot of thought and hard work into making. That’s why I made it into a conversation-based podcast. It’s very much processing that experience together. I think conversation teaches us so much. Personally, now that I’m in my forties, I understand that conversation is one of the ways I learn the most. Maybe I’m an auditory processor. I learn so much through listening to people talk and explain their experience and trying to relate to what they experience. I think that’s why I’m so passionate about it. Let’s talk about these things. That encapsulates a lot.
One concept in music is the male nerdy music fan who has a million albums and he knows every detail about them, and I wanted to draw out that nerdiness from my guests as well. You love sound engineering? Go all in! Tell me why you love it, tell me about the technical aspects that make the hair on your arms stand up, tell me about the process. I want to learn about it, about what moves you. I like to talk about form, the shape of things, how things evolve, about craft. So that’s what I want to draw out of people, and I guess podcasting is one of the ways you can do that. You can have conversations with people about a topic that you love. I love many things. But I love music and there was nothing like this. I never heard two girls talking about music, so I thought, we have to do that.
I had to overcome that hesitation. I had to give myself permission to say, I don’t see it out there, maybe I have to create it and be the platform for other women to come and talk. And it’s true I never had the chance to talk, and that’s why. It’s about confidence and forgetting about permission. I don’t need the permission to go for this. And technology has done that in such an amazing way where you just learn something that you love, find a way to do it, and if you do it with love, some people will find a way to it, hopefully. That’s all I ask.
How is the act of processing related to music?
I’ve always tried to understand why I love what I love. That’s the question I’m trying to answer at an aesthetic level, theoretical level, every level that I can. Why do I love this and not that? Why is this album moving me so much and not that one? Is there something I’m missing, something I haven’t learned yet, why am I not getting this?
So questioning my own response to things, being analytical in that way. Learning how to be open-minded as well. You take up an object of art that is really popular and it’s not moving you, ask why is that? And why does this song that nobody knows, touch me so?
And the other part is that I love talking. I understand through talking. I have a blog as well called “The Things We Love”. One of the reasons I started that is that there was no space in my daily life to express all the things that I had inside. You go to a concert with someone and you might have a 30 minute conversation in the car about your experience. It was transcendental to you, but then Monday comes and that extremely beautiful, moving experience that you had is put away in a drawer. That’s not enough for me. I just experienced something that moved me, taught me something. I felt so many different things, what does that mean? So I need to go into the processing. I need to write and do a podcast so I don’t bore my friends with my opinions and my ideas. They move on, they don’t need to process it in the same way I do. So the funny thing about technology and podcasts is that you have these very fragmented culture spots, you’ll find an audience for absolutely everything. Somebody out there might want to go through that concert experience.
In everyday life, there’s no space for this. Maybe the art of conversation has been lost. Part of my culture is conversation every Friday night among family members. That’s when you talk about every topic, and conversation is how I process things. Thankfully, the internet has created these spaces where we can have these conversations in different ways to process things. They have a value and if we don’t explore this value, all this work goes to waste for me. And that’s the role of the cultural critic. And some of my favourite writers are critics. Because they do that work for us of pulling the meaning, disentangling information, putting it into context. Why did I feel those goosebumps, why did that song made me cry, why can’t I listen to that song in certain times? A cultural critic, a conversation, will do that analysis and get to the heart of it and give it the value it deserves. We consume so fast without paying attention. Art deserves some thought!
Also, how beautiful to be able to preserve these moments in real time. I’m so passionate about interviews, doing this exercise of processing different things together. And for other people to be able to listen in to that, I think there’s such value. There are cultures that are oral cultures, for example the Indigenous cultures, and that has value as well. There are things you can’t bottle and can’t possibly preserve in that way, but podcasts and blog posts, they capture specific moments in time, specific moments in your process of understanding something. Because 5 years later, you might be in a completely different moment of understanding, so the conversation is going to be different for sure. But I think whatever is being done right now during the pandemic or lockdown will either age very well or age very badly, but it’s necessary because it’s fast moving and it needs to be preserved as it is right now. So talking about music right now is really important because we might not be able to go back to those things. Once we move on and go back to the new normal, we might not be able to tap into what we were feeling during those early days. So maybe the things we create right now are imperfect, but still capturing them is necessary, so we can go back and explore them.
Why does kindness count?
It’s the only thing that can keep things going. If we don’t have kindness, everything is lost. We have lost so much. We are all in such different spaces. If we don’t have kindness to pull us together in understanding, then what’s left? I’ve been really interested in the different responses of people during this time, and it sounds cliché, but I think the only thing that will pull us through this moment, and any moment, is kindness. We need to put ourselves in somebody else’s position for 2 seconds before we react.
Kindness is the most profound thing we can give each other, starting with yourself and then others around you. Even if we were out of this context that we’re experiencing right now, kindness is my default position. I always try to give the benefit of the doubt to people. I will try to see, why is this person rushing through traffic, why are they going through a red light. My default position is that this person may be experiencing something that I have no idea of. Even if that person is behaving really badly, he or she might be experiencing some mental health issue.
Maybe because I’ve suffered from mental health issues, I can see how other people might be suffering, but that’s the default for me, always. You need to be kind. The main thing that I teach my son who’s 10 is be kind to people, be gentle with them, try to see what they’re going through. It doesn’t mean being taken advantage of. Even when you disagree with somebody, even when you don’t believe what somebody else is saying, the way that you address that person, is with kindness. You might get through to them. Kindness is the key that opens almost every door. You can disarm most people with that key. And this situation we’re in right now, you see the reactions, how people use social media, how people complain, and I think, you just need to be kind. Kind to yourself first of all, that’s been the lesson to a lot of people. To not compare yourself to what other people are doing, but also understand what other people might be going through. Even those people who are protesting because they want to go out and they have different hidden agendas, some are just desperate to go out work. We have to understand that there’s a whole range of experiences in the world.
It’s funny because a lot of people can be kind to others but not kind to themselves, and I’ve been in this position. Especially women, we are very harsh with ourselves. In my youth, I experienced eating disorders and all kinds of issues with body image and lack of self-confidence, so I was very kind to everybody but terribly harsh with myself. Everybody is allowed to eat, but I can’t eat, you don’t deserve to eat. Or everybody is allowed to sleep but you don’t deserve to sleep, and then I only sleep 4 hours a night because I need to torture myself. These were realities at some point or another in my life, where I needed to do all this work, earning the kindness, like I had to earn all kinds of things. I’m over all those things but I think it’s a lesson. Nobody needs to earn it. You give it, they don’t need to earn it. Kindness is for everybody. That’s how we should relate to each other.
Is kindness contagious?
Absolutely! I think the clearest example is when you see one kid being kind to another. When you see one kid breaking the chain of unkindness in their school or playground, you can see how the other kids immediately react and they all start being kind to each other. And in adults, people resist kindness, I think it’s a fear. People feel vulnerable. People hide behind a lot of things. People who are behaving badly are hiding something. So they might resist a little more.
But just a kind look across the street, that makes a huge difference! Just that experience of somebody seeing you, it changes your whole experience of walking in the world when somebody is kind to you. In the most trivial transactions, like if you go to the store and your cashier is super kind to you, that small moment in your day ripples out in how you’re going to be the rest of your day. And the same for you, if you were lucky enough to get up in a good mood that day and you’re feeling great, you might actually bring that to somebody. Sometimes somebody brings it to you, sometimes it’s you that brings it to somebody else.
Some people resist more than others, but you leave it there. You plant the seed, and it might take a little while, but that person will come around. You plant those kindness seeds. You respond with kindness to people who are having a bad day. That’s why mental health is so important because if you are good within yourself, you are able to plant those beautiful kindness seeds when you go out in the world.
When you suffer from depression (and lots of people are going through it right now) and you wake up and you actually feel good, and you go outside and you have a kind interaction with someone who is walking their dog. It’s weird with the social distancing, but you look at the person and say hi, and they know you’re not separating because you are awful. It’s because we’re being kind to each other by doing what we need to do, already that changes your whole perspective. But it’s because you woke up in a good mood and you could go and spread it around. And hopefully somebody will do that for you.
We can’t all be kind at the same time because we’re all in different spots every day, but in the greater contexts in our daily lives, this is absolutely true. Nobody is in the same place as you. We need each other for that energy to move through us. I believe in kindness so deeply. And that’s the message of Dr. Bonnie Henry here, and I think that’s why she’s been so successful. She’s been the one that’s driving that message of don’t judge other people. Let’s be kind. I think that has been a huge part of the success of our response here in BC. You start from a place of kindness, not from a judging place.
How can people get involved with what you’re doing?
People can subscribe to the podcast Girls Talk About Music. It’s a very new podcast, only launched last fall. There’s only about 5 episodes out now, but the plan is to continue. It’s available on Apple podcast, Spotify or Stitcher. People can also find it on Instagram @girlstalkaboutmusic
I also have a blog called “The Things We Love” where I process things. It’s personal writing tied to some work that I have experienced that people can visit.