In late 2019, we sold all of our stuff. Our clothes, our shoes, our recording equipment (a Lauten Clarion Mic, a ToneBeast Amp, a Warm Audio WA73 Preamp that imitates the Neve 1073, a Warm Audio WA-14 Condenser Mic, a set of Focal Alpha Studio Monitors), & so much more.
We moved to L.A. on January 1st, 2020 with the money we made from all our sales. After purchasing an Epiphone Wildkat with a Bigsby (whammy bar) & a Gibson Les Paul, because we sold our Acoustic guitars: an Epiphone Masterbuild & a Fender Sonoran. Yes, you read that right — we went ELECTRIC after being acoustic the entirety of our collaboration together.

After almost 2 1/2 months in L.A., we were feeling so sick for almost a month straight after living in a house with renters who arrived recently from Wuhan, China. YES, you also read that right.

Our wonderful Chinese roommates invited us to their Chinese New Year Dinner, stayed up talking to us, we helped teach our new friend some English, he taught us some Mandarin, & Oskar even cut & faded our friend’s hair after his girlfriend completely hacked at it, trying to give him a haircut.😂 We became great friends to the point where our new friend called us “brother” & “sister”.
We were feeling sicker & sicker, & realized we probably had COVID, but at this time Fauci was saying masks were unnecessary & that they didn’t expect it to come to the US. Little did we all know!!!

We were feeling down & out that we were paying so much money in rent to be in California for the opportunities pertaining to the Music Industry, but we were so very sick that we were in bed most days.
We decided to plan a tour of The South to offset some of the financial burden living in L.A. was costing us. We then decided to drive home to Salt Lake City, Utah two weeks earlier than our tour to visit family, get some much needed rest, recuperation, & healing, & then we’d set out on our tour from Utah. We even bought 2 identical Gretsch Synchromatic Hollow-Body Guitars & sold our electrics to go on tour.

Our family was out of town for almost 2 weeks in Nashville when we came home & we decided we’d surprise them when they got back. Because of this timing, we were naturally quarantined without even knowing it & too sick to get out of the house anyway.
It was only a few days into being home that our tour collapsed, businesses started shutting down, & the government issued the “15 days to slow the spread” lockdown.
We plummeted into a hard & dark feeling of despair, fear, & depression after this. Feeling financially wiped out, no clear solution in sight, no money coming in through performing, & no plan. We found ourselves feeling completely lost.

We decided to take a risk in the spring of 2020 & get into debt with an AEA R44CE Ribbon microphone, a Universal Audio Apollo Twin X, more recording software (Pre-Amps & Mastering). Add that up with the Gretsch guitars.
We decided to start recording instead of touring & performing. We hoped this different style of equipment would get us closer to our “sound” or at least as close as we could achieve during that time. We thought that our new sound would also attract our audience to us like a magnet & cause more listeners to come our way, too, as we felt it was new & different.

Since the spring of 2020, we’ve recorded 3 singles: “Swim or Die”, “Boom Boom”, & “Keeper Brown”. We are proud of these singles, everything we’ve learned from the difficult sorrows we’ve endured, like so many others during 2020, & are excited for what the rest of 2021 has in store.
Last year was harsh, but we’re stronger than 2020 through Heavenly Father & Jesus Christ.

Sungait contacted us via email and asked if they could send us some sunglasses of our choosing to see if we liked them. Cool, eh?
We picked frames that look similar to shades we already have! Oskar owns a pair of RayBan Clubmasters that look like the ones I got from Sungait. Julia owns a pair of gold, round-framed RayBans, too, that look like one shades Oskar got from Sungait! We just love each other’s style enough to copy it for ourselves.
We were amazed at how fast the sunglasses came in the mail & couldn’t wait to try them on.
The packaging is super cool & sleek. They gave us a little metal screwdriver tool keychain for any tightening needs down the road, which we thought was so thorough & smart of them. They also gave us a dusting cloth for the lenses, a drawstring bag to store the glasses. & a plastic outer bag with a. ziplock on it.
We felt like it was Christmas opening the packaging to our brand new sunglasses! They sent them to us FREE, not even shipping was required of us. Just a post on social media.

We think their method of marketing in this way is VERY smart. A lot of people start businesses & expect to have clients or customers automatically find their product appealing enough to purchase. This is not the truth.
Business persons need to realize that it’s our job to make our products or services desirable for our demographics. Not the customer’s.
Entrepreneurs, including ourselves, often times think that simply putting out a solid product or service is enough, that it speaks for itself, & the fact that the quality is there will send it flying off the shelves. This couldn’t be more untrue.
Not only marketing your product, but marketing it to your specific demographic & creating a small universe where your product or service is so desirable that your demographic feels like they not only want it, but they need it is the entrepreneur’s job.
This is the one of the most difficult tasks in business, especially for musicians, as you’re literally selling yourself & your THOUGHTS, which become your songs.
These are lessons that feel like they’ve been being drilled into our heads recently. We’re doing our best to try to get our name & our music out there. It is so difficult.
We admire Sungait’s drive. Asking regular people without the biggest following in the world to market your sunglasses is genius. We’re all pretty tired of influencers who live in some pretend fantasy world, where they just so happen to be “caught of guard” in every photo they post, looking fabulous, posed, & in full makeup. It’s just not real. Influencers are the new commercials. We’re honestly so turned off by it.
Out of being destitute for so long, we tried being “influencers” & making brand deals for a couple years through probably 2017-2019. Most of our content was photos instead of about our music & it just felt like we were shorting ourselves. It felt so fake.
Now that we’ve stopped trying SO hard, this brand came to us. What? We didn’t even seek them out. We thought that was pretty cool. Their shades are actually really high quality, too, & reasonable in pricing.
It’s refreshing to not be strangling ideas to death & trying to hard to make a buck or get stuff in return for selling our audience brand stuff.
We just want to play our music & be full-time musicians.
Won’t you please have a listen? OskarAndJulia.com/Music

We’ve been watching the Edwin Sarkissian YouTube Channel with his BFF Gasparito, which we absolutely LOVE. Their videos have been making us laugh so much, even while being so stressed this last while. They inspired us to not care so much what other people think & make a fun cooking video!
Oskar’s love of cooking has gotten stronger & stronger over the years. He makes gorgeous meals & appetizers from scratch probably 4-5 times a week & always on Sundays. He is, in all seriousness, SO talented at all things cooking. I am not biased, because if something isn’t good I will not eat it. I just can’t. Wasting calories on something gross? What’s the point?! With Oskar’s food I seriously can’t get enough.
This time, we made Bacon-Wrapped Shrimp, & these were SOOOOOOOO good! I mean, anything bacon-related is pretty delicious, but the Pepper Jack Cheese & sided Sweet Peppers in there made it glorious.
Our family’s home is under construction, so the overhead lights are out right now. We just used one phone’s flashlight as the lighting & the other as the camera. We also brightened up the footage!
We hope you noticed the addition of our music in the background of this video! Let us know if you enjoy cooking videos like this!

We got a brand new Fender Blues Junior IV Amplifier!
We purchased it from Guitar Czar — a Salt Lake-local shop located in Murray. We also purchased a 2nd identical amp, but it will be available for us to pick up in a few weeks.
The second we got home, we took the amp out & Julia ended up playing guitar on it for over an hour, just loving the way it sounds.
By turning up the volume & turning down the “Master”, you get a nice crunch sound. The louder the Volume & lower the Master, the more distortion you get!
We haven’t wanted to be full Acoustic, because it’s always felt too clean to us. We feel as though the Acoustic Guitars & harmonies in our music make brand new listeners automatically think our music is Country (we get that a lot). We love Country Music. Especially artists like Hank Williams, Chet Atkins, Patsy Cline, & the like, but we’ve never seen ourselves as Country artists, even when we have a song like “Nowhere” in our repertoire.
Our goal when we first started writing together was to showcase that we can write in every genre. Now, we’re focused less on what other people think of our songwriting ability & more on what we like to write & want to hear.
In fact, on our debut album Wilshire Royale, we desperately wanted our music to get placed in film, so we asked our engineer at the time to make it as commercial as possible for film & TV. Our reaction to that now? “Yikes.”
We feel as though we’ve come to a point in our career where getting Film & TV placements would be absolutely AMAZING, but on our terms, & with music we feel comes from us & not from our filtered, overly-scrubbed-clean idea of what people want to hear in the background of a commercial.
We’ve also been STRUGGLING financially, which doesn’t go hand-in-hand with overly commercialized Pop Music anyway!
Through having absolutely no money & mounting debt for almost a year, we’ve had to be resourceful. We’ve had to think outside the box with our recordings, & get the equipment we were positive would get us closer to “our sound” — what we’re hearing in our heads while writing the song. It is so hard to translate what you’re hearing, how you hear the Mix, & what instruments you hear in the background when you have absolutely no money to create & delegate those writing decisions.
It’s tried us mentally, spiritually, emotionally, & even physically, but we’re still here, in the depths of humility & borderline shame, making music, & holding each other to our promise to each other to continue with our career & not quit when the going gets not only tough, but brutal.

While on tour in 2019 in Washington D.C., we were interviewed by Andie Judson, with HeartThreads at the time. It was such a fun experience. A few of the details in the video are slightly off, but otherwise, here is our story!
We both grew up in Salt Lake Valley, lived in The Avenues, attended the same church building, Julia’s family had season tickets to the children’s playhouse that Oskar’s family helped run, & even went to the same Junior High (just barely missed each other, because Julia is 2 grades older than Oskar). Even though we crossed paths so often in our lives, we never knew each other or met until we were fresh into adulthood.
Oskar had just turned 19 & Julia was about to turn 21 in 2014 when they met at Oskar’s band’s show in Draper, Utah. Like a movie moment, the crowd parted, Julia saw Oskar’s cool, slicked back hair & immediately knew it was him.
We had such a blast talking to each other that night, asking about each other’s music & songwriting, our dreams, our likes & dislikes, that we kept in touch & eventually started writing together. Our first song: “Between Us” on our Wilshire Royale album. Kind of funny — we wrote a breakup song before we ever started dating.😂
The video above shares even more fun memories. Enjoy!

In the last 10 years alone, the Music Industry has gone almost completely digital with the exception of some CDs still circulating & being sold, & Vinyl being on the rise for nostalgic listeners. This has created Music Streaming giants like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, & now, YouTube Music. With all of this new technology, there’s a lot of room for laws to catch up in regard to artists being taken advantage of.
Streaming becoming the new norm has also created an entire branch of the Music Industry where Independent Artists have a chance at a bigger platform to push their music on Social Media & in using Digital Distribution platforms like TuneCore, DistroKid, & CDBaby while staying independent. More technology for at-home recording is readily available for artists, who subsequently become their own recording engineers in many cases.
The use of file sharing has made it possible for a musician to send their recorded tracks to a Mixing Engineer, receive their Mixdown some time later, & shoot it over to their Mastering Engineer all within a few emails or shares. This is what we’ve done in the past!
Now, Oskar has been our Mixing Engineer AND our Mastering Engineer, all in one! We began our own recording journey with our last six singles, & out of those, Oskar has mixed all of them, & mastered “Hatchet”, “Move Along”, & “Keeper Brown”. He plans to Mix & Master our future recordings, too!
Our path to independence, as artists, has heavily involved learning the legalities & royalty logistics of the Music Business, not just the system of writing & recording music itself.
We’ve discovered the borderline monopolization of the Music Distribution world. Because there are only a few Digital Distributors that allow you to upload your own music & go through the process yourself, artists are strapped to their rules, their overpriced distribution fees & subscriptions, & their extremely poor customer service.
Of course, as always, there are smaller Distributors that are more willing to help artists, however they usually come with a contract or a requirement to also sign to their “label”, they don’t distribute worldwide, or they require you to find your own Publishing Administrator or Royalty Collection.
There are a lot of brick walls in being an Independent Musician. There’s also lot of greed in the Music Industry. Artists seem to collectively, across the arts, be taken advantage of because of our Right-Brain nature.
Oskar & I have identified as more business persons than bleeding-heart artists that don’t know their way around a contract & get taken advantage of. We’re fighting to stay independent. We’re also fighting for the other artists out there that want to be considered Entrepreneurs, not just artists with intellectual property that corporations can pry out of our hands & tell us we’re lucky that we got signed by them, so they can market us & make all the money off of our ideas. No thanks! Let’s leave that to the Recording Artists that work well with having Songwriters write for them — that’s where that scenario works & flourishes.
It seems Singer/Songwriters were mistakenly grouped in with Recording Artists a long time ago out of greed on the Labels’ part.
Publishing companies are also guilty of this, when they offer you a 50/50 Publishing Deal stating you’ll make the Writer’s & Artist’s cut, then re-record your song with a Recording Artist & tweak a few lyrics. Then your Master Recording isn’t even being used & you’re out partial Writer’s Share. Do we sound bitter?😂
After learning about Music Industry contracts by trial & error with the snakes in this industry, we definitely gained a fire under our behinds to change it for the better somehow. That’s what this video is about: wanting to make a change.
We want to make a Digital Distribution platform & a Streaming Platform by Artists, for Artists, NOT FOR PROFIT. We don’t take a cut; the artist gets paid for their work.
Now, don’t get us wrong, we understand that platforms like Spotify, TuneCore, & the like have developed their platforms, pay employees, & have made artists’ reach further while giving them the ability to stay independent. However, in all forms of technology, there’s always innovation, & there’s always a way to do it better. If someone beats us to it, that’s fantastic. The purpose of putting this out there isn’t to patent the idea. If anything, it’s to get this idea circulating that there’s a better way to Stream & Distribute music!

Naturally, we went shooting after our Anniversary Dinner & it was SO FUN!!!
We shot an AR15 & an FN SCAR Series rifle something or rather (can’t remember the name)! The big gun made the AR15 look & feel like fairy dust.
Oskar recently got some high-waisted pants from ASOS to try out that 20s/30s/40s style & had his mom, who is an incredible Tailor & Seamstress alter them & give them cuffs at the bottom! They look flawless & he wore them for our Anniversary with his cool double breasted suit jacket we got him for his birthday in November.
We thought Oskar achieved & reached his true form when his double-breasted suit jacket came in the mail, but what we didn’t realize was that his high-waisted dress pants tie it all together! He looks like a 1940s movie star!
One cool thing about Oskar is he doesn’t wait for the perfect moment to do something he wants to do — he does it when he gets the idea.
Oskar noticed that my dad was giving away a lot of nice ties from the past, & had his mom alter them to be thinner ties. This is one of them (in the photos).
We can’t afford tie bars from more expensive stores, so we purchased a pack of these $7 pins. I think it came with 3 or 4!
We can’t just go & spend $ on a lapel pin, so Oskar made one from scratch with some of the leftover tie bar pins & took a flower off a bouquet of fake flowers we bought for very cheap.
He used a pocket square he’s had for years & years, his hat he’s had for years as well, & a dress shirt he’s had for the same.
Oskar always keeps his things nice & takes care of them so that they last. He steams his own shirts with a steamer my brother generously gave us.
Coincidentally, my cool, stylish dad wears the same size shoe as Oskar, so a lot of the time, Oskar inherits really great quality dress shoes from him.
Finally, the jacket. We found this cool app called Rakuten that enables you to make cash back on lots of online & in-store purchases.
We also bought the jacket for Oskar’s birthday, which just so happens to be about the same time as Black Friday, with a coupon, we got it down to basically half off!
​I love that Oskar is resourceful, authentic, & inventive.
We have wonderful families who help us, support us, & allow us to explore our style, like this!

We used to buy wholesale clothing, drop it off to a local screen printing business, and ship out our merch ourselves. We love supporting local businesses & always will, we just don’t have the money to keep a tangible inventory right now. Luckily, with redbubble.com, we were able to generate merchandise designs all online & RedBubble prints & ships the merchandise to our customers! This is awesome for us right now, in our current situation!
We’ve got two different “lines“ of merch right now — our business logo & our album artwork logo. There are T-shirts, hoodies, leggings, long-sleeve shirts, stickers, mugs, water bottles, blankets, bedding, backpacks, duffel bags, magnets — you name it!
We are just so thankful to companies like RedBubble that value artists & are trying to help. 2020 was so hard. It’s nice to have at least SOMETHING work!