Finding Your Musical Identity (with Melissa Mulligan)

If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to hit the charts, the answer might surprise you! It surprises the artists who work with Melissa Mulligan, a recent guest expert here at Musical U. She’s coached singers who have topped the Billboard charts, who have gold and platinum records, who sell out arena world tours. She’s also the founder of Mastermindroad.com, which is the home of the Music Career Accelerator program.

I love Melissa’s take on talent and finding your artistic identity, whether you aspire to top those charts yourself or not. And so today I wanted to share the mini-interview I did with Melissa before her Musical U masterclass, which was on “Performance Secrets From An Industry Insider”. I hope you’ll enjoy it! I’ll be back tomorrow with a really cool clip from that masterclass to share with you. Let’s go!

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Christopher: Today I’m joined by Melissa Mulligan of Music Career Mastermind, where she draws on decades of industry experience to help musicians and aspiring artists of all kinds have more success and more joy in their music careers. She has specialties in vocal coaching, in creativity, in performance skills, and in career development. And I’ve been hearing more and more of her about her over the years from enthusiastic students.

And I’m so excited now to have her joining us at Musical U where she’s here this month to give our masterclass for all of our members, as well as being in with our Next Level coaching clients, helping them directly with their own creativity and performance skills. Welcome to the show, Melissa.

Melissa: Oh, thank you so much. I’m thrilled to be here.

Christopher: So I’d love to open with one of my favorite questions, which I imagine you’ll have a particularly interesting take on…

What does musicality mean to you?

Melissa: What a question! Okay.

Musicality to me is totally integrated with being human.

It’s just humanity. And people talk about “having musicality”, but I think about it more in terms of our ability to access our innate musicality. It’s there.

It’s there the way nature is there. And we could choose to enjoy nature and let it infuse us with its beauty. Or we can maybe get focused and say, oh, I’m not that type of person, right? When someone says to me, I’m not creative or I’m not musical, I’m like, well, maybe you just haven’t found the right window or door to open for you to access that, your ability to enjoy it or sense it within yourself.

Christopher: Fantastic. I love it. And I think one of the reasons I particularly wanted to connect with you in the first place, apart from all of the raving accounts we’ve had, particularly from Zac on the Musical U team, mister ZSonic, who introduced us, and what made me so excited to talk to you was, I think a lot of people in the music industry have a very particular view on talent and musical potential.

And I don’t want to badmouth anyone or throw stones, but it can feel sometimes like it’s quite an elitist or exclusive crowd that feel like you’ve got it or you don’t. What have you got? Like, do you have what it takes to be a successful musician? And I feel like, you know, your answer just now to “what is musicality” really demonstrates the much more inclusive philosophy you work by at Music Career Mastermind.

And so I’m keen to share with people, where did this come from? You are highly successful in the music industry at large, and you have this very particular perspective on musicality and on natural abilities. Tell us a little bit about where you came from as a musician.

Melissa: Yeah, thank you for that. And thank you for your kind words.

You know, I came to it, like anyone who’s passionate about it, which is being told, you either have it or you don’t. Maybe you’re just, maybe you’re just not good enough. Maybe you don’t have the “IT” factor.

Or even as simple as being told when you’re a child in a choir “these are the sopranos, these are the altos”. You know, it’s like, excuse me, my vocal folds haven’t even come in fully. How do you pretend to know what my genetic range is? Right?

I mean, all of that stuff is just nonsense. And it’s built on our culture’s obsession with fame being mystical and only given to those who have this innate thing that nobody can name. Nobody can name it because it doesn’t exist! It’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes, you know, like, that’s why nobody can describe it, because it’s not real. It’s not real.

Fixed mindset says there’s a fixed amount of talent that you’re born with, and that’s it. And we just know that’s not true.

And what really healed that for me was teaching. What really healed that for me was working with people who were “tone deaf” when I met them. And then through their decisions to work really hard on the right things, became professional singers and bands, like highly acclaimed bands, right?

And also through, you know, 20 plus years, I could never predict who’s going to be “the one” based on how they performed when they showed up. I can now start to see it based upon their love of creativity, their willingness to be vulnerable, their ability to get out of their comfort zone and have growth mindsets. So now there’s characteristics I could recognize in someone who will choose to pursue excellence, but somebody who comes in and sings the crap out of a song, I mean, look, all the restaurants in New York are staffed by those people. So that’s not a predictor of success or even excellence, really.

Christopher: That’s fascinating. I love how you put it there: We can’t explain it because it doesn’t exist. I might borrow that line in future!

Melissa: Absolutely.

Christopher: And tell us a little bit more about that journey, because you’ve been a very successful coach to individual artists. Now you’ve built this phenomenal company, Music Career Mastermind, where your Music Career Accelerator program helps people very directly and personally with both the creative side and the career development side.

Tell us a little bit about where all of that came from and the things you do now.

Melissa: Yeah, well, I, you know, like a lot of professional performers, I wanted something to do, like more of a sustainable income, but something also that fulfilled me in a different way. You know, being an independent artist, there’s a lot of that self promotion and all of that work on your own success.

And I think I’m born to be in more of a tandem relationship with other artists than just working on my own thing.

So I fell in love with vocal coaching, was very trained, and also felt that training never really helped with artistic identity. And vocal training could often get into people’s heads and make them kind of suck as an artist because they’re thinking in that fixed mindset about right or wrong, good or bad technique.

So I decided I wanted to create something where the outliers, the creative weirdos, everyone from pop punk to rap to screamo to country to whatever, could have a safe vocal style that was sustainable without limiting their creativity. So I loved doing that.

And then about maybe ten years into that, I got very dissatisfied with vocalists obsession with being the best. You know, American Idol, The Voice, everybody was making singers feel like life is one big talent competition. And that’s how you get the brass ring, by out-singing somebody.

And again, I felt like artistry was really starting to suffer and people were getting very confused about how to get the careers they wanted.

And that is how Music Career Mastermind popped into my head. I was vocal coaching people who were charting, you know, charting on Billboard and doing really well. And then someone else would come into my studio and say, you need to help me belt, because I want to get a record deal.

And I’d be like, oh, sister, no. You need to write songs. You need to write songs. You need to figure out who you are artistically. No one cares if you can belt. That’s not how this works.

But they weren’t hiring me for that. They were like, I am paying you to help me, belt.

I wound up getting together with other industry professionals whom I love and adore and have a very similar growth mindset approach to artist development. And, yeah, it was about seven or eight years ago we started this online academy Music Career Mastermind, and it’s been the greatest love of my life.

Christopher: Amazing. Yeah. And I so admire how you make it such a holistic program, both in what you provide and in the, the responsibility you take for helping that creative person to develop.

I know that we really see it at Musical U, where people come in with a very tight box around who they are as a musician or as a singer or as an artist, and they think they just want to work on this one thing and that’s what it’ll take. And we like you try and help them see, no, it’s part of a bigger whole. And what you think you might need to work on might be the least of the things that you actually could put in place to really help you thrive and succeed.

And I love how you guys in particular work on that artistry and creative expression and artist identity as well as a lot of the practicalities around, you know, recording and producing your music, getting your music out there, having a successful career on the back of it. So I just so applaud the work you do because I think it is very, very distinctive, very remarkable, and very needed.

Melissa: I think I needed to hear that today, honestly. Thank you.

You know, we frustrate people who come to us and say, I don’t want all that. I just want to hire you to teach me how to get a fanbase on social media and I’m like, I can refer you to so many people who just do that. But if I don’t understand your music and if I know you don’t have a way of recording it yourself consistently to make great content, I don’t want to take your money and give you something that’s not actually going to help you.

I know it’s what you think you want. Go somewhere else, and I’m sorry, but I’m not available in that way, you know, for you to just click a button and say, I just want this. I just want this.

Like, no, this is, this is real coaching here, you know, so you can go buy a program.

Christopher: You definitely find that for the right person that really attracts them, that resonates. If anyone’s watching or listening to this and feeling like that is what I’ve been wanting, like someone who really understands that bigger picture.

Tell us a little bit about what you have going on and how they can find out more and get involved.

Melissa: Oh, sure. Well, mastermindroad.com is where I have a pretty extensive resource library there of videos where you can hear me prattle on. And I interview multi-Grammy-winning producer Mike Mangini, who partners with me on a lot of this stuff. We talk through artist development, what it means to produce your own music, creative energy. We talk about a lot of stuff. So there’s great resources there.

And then there’s also more information on how you could reach out to get some individualized feedback.

Like, it’s literally, if you’re going to take the time to watch my videos and then send me music and your questions, I will listen, I will get back to you and we can exchange voice notes and see if you wanted to get involved with our more holistic artist development program from there.

Christopher: Fantastic. Perfect. Well, we’ll have the link, it’s Mastermindroad.com, but we’ll have that link in the shownotes along with this episode, too.

Thank you, Melissa. I can see we have dozens of people queuing up, waiting to get into the masterclass, so we better wrap things up. Give us just a little sneak peek of what you’re going to be covering in the masterclass for members today.

Melissa: It’s going to be good stuff! We’re going to talk about performance skills, and I’m going to show how the exact same performance skills I teach to people getting ready to go on an arena tour are the exact same ones I teach to somebody who wants to sing for the first time at a family party for their 40th wedding anniversary. You know, the mental leap and the mental work that we have to do is always the same.

So we’re just going to share some best practices, mindset tips and some other preparation techniques and get everybody performing at a higher level.

Christopher: Love it. Fantastic.

Well, thank you so much for joining us for this quick pre-masterclass interview, as well as for being our guest expert here at Musical U this month, Melissa and I hope to have you back on the show again soon!

Melissa: Thanks so much, Christopher.

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Isn’t Melissa awesome? She is just one of my favorite people, and I hope you enjoyed that mini interview as much as I did.

I’m going to be back tomorrow on our next live stream, our next episode, to share a clip from that very masterclass, which I think you’ll find really enlightening.

Also coming up later this week, we have another episode of Coaches Corner. I have my second “meet the team” interview with Mr. Zac Bailey, a.k.a. ZSonic, and I think I’m also going to do a solo episode talking about the weird experience of being the visible spokesperson for Musical U, the kind of figurehead of the company, I think I’m going to call it “I am not your guru” after that Tony Robbins documentary from a few years back.

And just to mention, if this talk around talent and identity and figuring out what truly matters to you resonates, then you are not going to want to miss this weekend’s live training, which I’ll be presenting.

It’s called Discover Your Musical Core. You can register for that for free at yourmusicalcore.com. And I would love to see you there live.

That’s it from me, I will see you on the next one. Cheers!

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