Brooke Anne Richey is a leader in holistic vocal development. She is a 20-year singer, trumpet player and musical performer with a Master of Music in Film Scoring. Brooke inherited generational trauma at birth and later developed Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder during her upbringing. At the age of 18 she experienced a major injury to her throat in a surfing accident. She overcame these things through the development of her voice through music. Brooke lives by the mantra, "never stop being curious" which has been a fundamental motor in moving her forward past unforeseen hardships. She is on a mission to develop and amplify the voices of those who did not have a choice.
Brooke Anne Richey, Voice Coach
Tell us about you and your life! What should your readers know to understand who you are?
I’m one of those people who doesn’t have a core group of friends they’ve grown up with for years. I’ve certainly experienced those circles, but on the regular, I’m someone who has a few very good friendships, and I function as a nucleus, if you will, within that network. I do my best to embrace variety and live a balanced life. For the past 5 years I’ve lived on my own and right now I have a 3 year old siamese-bengal cat named Camille. He is the sassiest, loudest, hunting love bug with a kinked tail you’ll ever meet. I’m also a very active individual and love to move my body and stay fit. I’ve played with my intramural co-ed soccer team for the past 7 years, regularly go to the gym and CrossFit, and when I can, love to rock climb, camp and hike. Some of my hobbies are baking and shooting film photography on my grandfather’s 1970 Minolta.
What is the core mission and focus of your business, Wasp & Fig Sounds LLC?
Figs and fig wasps are in a dynamic of existence known as a symbiotic relationship; one cannot exist without the other. The motto for my business is: “Where music does not exist without story,” where I conduct all my work from a trauma-informed perspective and experience. Finding your voice, especially through the trials of trauma, is no different. Your story cannot exist without your trauma is one thing. Your voice, though, will never develop fully and you will never step fully into your power and your freedom if you do not connect with, identify, and release your trauma from your body.
The thing is, trauma takes lives. So long as it lives in the body, it will determine one’s steps. If it lives in the body too long, it deteriorates the brain. How do you think people really come to be diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s? Their brain was disorganized by a suppressed memory, too long ago, for too long. My mission with Wasp & Fig Sounds is to normalize trauma through the services and products I provide so that we stop losing lives to it; so that families stop breaking over it, so relationships can find healing, so that society can better function should we all embrace this side of the human experience. Embracing, instead of disregard, is at the heart of Wasp & Fig Sounds.
The services and products provided by Wasp & Fig Sounds help survivors navigate. Sometimes, you really do have to look for the experiences that happened to you because you may have suppressed memories or emotions. We help people identify trends, unique to their life, which may be the key indicators breaching the details of truth from their past experience. When a survivor unlocks what happened, then they are able to move forward in the development of owning their voice, stepping into their purpose, and amplifying their message. At the heart of it all: every person has a unique identity and voice, let them be free to live that out however they wish. Making space for trauma survivors is what enables them to find what I call, their life’s blank canvas.
What does it mean to be trauma-informed? How does this and any other factors set apart your business from other music education, production and coaching service providers in your industry?
Being trauma-informed means that either you’ve studied trauma through academia, you’ve lived around it, or like myself, you’ve actually lived through a traumatic experience which caused you to develop a disorder. As the CEO of my company, this means that anyone I hire will also be trauma-informed, or they will become trauma-informed through the on-boarding process, in order to serve our audience effectively.
Second, and a near tie with being trauma-informed is the fact that I’m a woman.
I’ve only been in business as an LLC since April 2023 and I have already had to turn away customers due to a lack of respect for personal and professional boundaries. A word of advice for any young business owner starting out: never compromise yourself, in order to keep the revenue flow from a customer. If that customer is taking advantage of your presence to fit into an alternative narrative that you are not comfortable with and they will not relent their actions despite your communication that the behavior is crossing your boundaries, that customer is not worth keeping. That customer is actually harming your business, since clearly, they are not joining you in your mission. If you, your psyche, or your well-being is being taken advantage of, your business will directly suffer as a result. It’s the energy you keep around, that is the reality of what's created.
Believe that the revenue will come from elsewhere, it will.
Could you describe the range of services or products offered by your company for individuals hoping to find or further develop their voice?
I’m a two-decade musician and singer, who’s worked through psycho-emotional and physical traumas to my voice. With these experiences as the grounding foundation for my mission, I want to be accessible to the full spectrum of individuals curious in nurturing and developing their voices. For 7 years, I even worked as a caretaker with a non-verbal individual with autism. For a while after that, I was known as the niche-individual to serve neuro-divergent clients and students. Sharing this to say, one’s voice is never out of reach, and each voice is unique. At the core of my artistic practice is singing and music composition. This is where I’ve adopted the concept that your life is a blank canvas. You can create whatever you want on it with your voice. If you are scared of stepping out, the canvas will never get painted.
As for developing that voice, you can work with me specifically through individual singing lessons. You can purchase a subscription, with ample bonuses included, or you can purchase a bulk package at slightly higher rates. You can work with me directly in your vocal development through 1:1 coaching. I have my 5-pillar framework I incorporate into our 12 weeks together, where we take a deep dive look at your beliefs, your identity, and areas in your life where your voice can be clearly received, mirrored, and amplified. My coaching program is designed for the voice that is just beginning to bloom. However if you are someone who is certain of your message and might just be facing some imposter syndrome in the midst of a life-transition, I am happy and welcoming to work with these individuals in a smaller time-frame.
Voice by Wasp & Fig Sounds also offers online courses designed from a musical background and trauma-informed perspective. Pitch Your Voice, is my flagship course that guides individuals through imposter syndrome and onto the next step in their lives. By the end of the 6 weeks, you will have accomplished something new, re-establishing confidence in yourself that you can pursue and achieve anything you put your mind to. Soon I will be releasing a few more courses for singers and composers. We’ll also be launching a monthly membership for those who want to strengthen vocalization around their identity. The main focus of this group will be on increasing self-awareness of how one communicates, holistically.
Last but most importantly, I’m an active musician. This year is carving it’s work out for me with upcoming film scoring projects, musical theater writing, album recording and performing!
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
When I was about to graduate high school, I decided to take a break before going to university. When all my friends were starting their first quarters in college, I traveled overseas solo. This is very common in other countries, to take a gap year and travel, but as an American, this isn’t all too normal. Americans are conditioned to be on a fast-track, work-hard, play-hard race, something I didn’t see myself having the bandwidth for upon graduating high school. So I opted for a pause. (Unknown to me at the time, was the trauma I had experienced and suppressed, disabling me from keeping up with that pace.)
Not ready for the intense commitment of university, I flew to Australia and lived there for 6 months, participating in a leadership program for the duration of my time there. Actually while I was there, we did an outdoor challenge to prepare us for the second phase of the program. Our whole cohort was split into 3 groups, and van by van were dropped off on a dirt road after dark, with vague directions to reach our campground. We had to carry our chicken with us (the next night's dinner) while hiking under an Australian night sky with our packs on our backs. I was deemed the leader of our group that night. Our group arrived first to our campground by my navigation and leadership. When I came back to the states, I had a very easy spring quarter to transition back into my life. I’m always taking the slow, stress-free ways to navigate through life. Often, this can mean I’m going forward in my steps alone. However, more often than not, stepping out alone is the right way to navigate to where you need to be. Frankly if I had never stepped out on my own, you wouldn’t be reading this interview!
What is the top priority you’re working to shift in your industry?
Picking up off that last note from the previous section, I do not believe in the starving artist lifestyle! You should never compromise your home life, pleasure, comfort or safety for the sake of your art. It is toxic. This is how we end up with artists who are desperate for connection and wholeness because they sacrifice pieces of their hierarchy of needs, just to say, “I’m a film composer”. What does this mean I’m doing to make the shift? I’m redefining how money comes into the music and film industry through my practice.
Here are a few examples of how I’ve increased revenue flow into the music industry.
I up-charge on trial lessons. Up-charging for a one-time occurrence, a consultation (which yes, could only ever be a one-time occurrence) does two things. It conveys your value to your potential customer. It also creates an incentive for them to come back for your discounted subscription rates. It also gets you paid! When you don’t charge for your time of a trial lesson, this also conveys to your customer that lessons are not worth much. The only reason to give a free lesson is to be generous. But you can still be generous — just not at the expense of your livelihood. An easy way to be generous is to allow for an occasional reschedule if you have a no-reschedule policy, or to give some extra time at the end of a lesson to provide clarity on a topic for your student or client.
I issue voice lessons under a subscription framework (this is separate from vocal coaching). A subscription framework means that my students sign up for a designated day/time to meet with me. If they don’t use that day and time, they don’t use it. They don’t get a reschedule because the subscription rate is a lower average hourly rate than a bulk lesson purchase. It’s also more of a headache to operate on a “by-the-lesson” basis. It doesn’t secure consistency or balance in your work. You might have consistent revenue from a constant turnover of new students – but what does this do to your craft? It keeps you teaching the same things. It limits what you can really do, because you are not scaling your students' progress, simultaneously with how you run your business.
As an independent film composer, I charge commission projects per the client. Regardless of your artistic medium, I would highly dissuade you from marketing rates for commission work on your online platforms. Charging per the client has a few benefits. It sets me up to get to know my client before I provide them with an estimate. If I know where they are coming from: a 6 or 7 figure salary versus someone just starting out or someone who has access to grant money, then I have some kind of indication of what I could charge them. What you charge is the key indicator of the amount of effort you can reasonably put into the project, and what kind of outcome you can get. It’s important to converse about this with them, prior to just naming a flat price. If you care about the project and the client, as well as your personal well-being, you will work to get that number where it needs to be to provide them with the best quality project you can create from that budget. This also sets you both up for the reality of the outcome, before you send something off to them for review.
Lastly, more partnerships! The music and film industry has been known for having a lack of financial resources. If the budget is non-existent, create a partnership agreement. Either a one-time exchange or an on-going partnership has so much benefit for both parties involved. I would argue that these partnerships are better than consumer servicing because at the end of the day, you are both there for the art, not the money. You are both there for the love of the work and what you can create. Creating from this frame of mind is what inevitably creates the best outcomes. Working like this and viewing these partnerships as opportunities of investment in your craft and the industry, will pay-off down the line, so long as you showed your best work and brought your best self to the collaborative space. The commercial business industry is notorious for these types of partnerships and affiliates. Why shouldn’t artists follow the same model?
Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far.
As a trauma-survivor, getting discovered will likely be my greatest achievement. I didn’t want to be seen for decades, but I kept creating and kept up my mantra, “never stop being curious”, in order to overcome my trauma and really find my voice. While quietly building soundscapes in the shadows, I had also reached a point with my C-PTSD reprocessing, where I didn’t have the bandwidth to commence on any real measurable outreach. I didn’t have the energy to submit resumes, cover letters or applications. I needed the opportunities to come to me. Being invited to become an Executive Contributor to Brainz, as well as being discovered by Kobalt Music where a few of my Black Bird Collective songs will be used in television, are just a few ways I’ve seen my investments in my craft and in my healing journey, begin to pay off.
