Issue #045 has the amazingly talented Teagan Earley featured on the cover to talk about her musical project, TE/MO. As a treat, here are some more questions that Earley answered as a part of that interview! If you want to see the remaining questions, check out the full issue here!
Jenna Michaella (she/her) interviewed Teagan Earley (she/her) via Zoom on October 14th. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Jenna Michaella: I’ve seen your acting resume, and you have a long list of credits in the musical theater world. How does your experience in musical theater inform your work as TE/MO?
Teagan Earley: Because everything is fucking theater! [laughs]
Listen! Everyone is secretly a theater kid, some people just don’t want to admit it!
Louder for the people in the back! Yes! Literally! That’s the thing—we all think that we are the star of our own little movie in our head because that’s how our brains are wired to think. We can only complexly experience the world through our lens and our experience. And then, luckily, we have tools at our disposal, and if we listen enough to each other, we can start to experience things in a complex way from other people's perspectives as well. But you’re never going to find the same depth in someone else’s experience as you do in your own.
So, therefore, anyone who says they are not dramatic, anyone who says they’re not emotional—they’re lying. We are inherently such emotional beings and theater is just emotion with shape. That’s all it is. It's a live performance of human experiences—it’s different from experiencing movies or things like that. Even though movies have a different level of it, they feel like you’re looking at an experience through a window. But everything is theater.
And that was something I’ve been told by some people in the industry, “Oh, your music still feels too musical theater.” Oh, so it’s interesting? [laughs] Like my music is not like [said bluntly], “Yeah. Yeah. Hey. Hey. Let’s go dance.” Why would you not want to use music to explore? All theater is exploring a feeling or an experience on a deeper level. Why would you not want to use pop music to do the same thing?
Maybe I’m too cerebral, but I never want to escape in music. I want music to make me feel something. It has informed my music because it just has a different sound and presentation, but it’s all the same thing. As much as I love theater, I’m not as good at theater as I am at my own music. I don’t know that anyone would be because when you’re working with your own music, you’re working with your stories. With theater, it’s kind of like interacting with someone else. It’s the difference between the complexity of your own experience and depth of understanding because you’ve lived in this universe inside your head your whole life.
Whereas, whenever you pick up a play, it’s like you’re on a first date—you’re asking them the initial questions about their internal universe. You’re trying to get as deep as you can, as quickly as you can, in the realm of whatever that is, and it’s never done. Because you’re never going to be able to experience the level that you experienced in your own life.
It’s all the same. Acting for the screen is the same as theater; it’s just closer up, so you don’t have to send it out as much. Musical theater is increasingly just pop music, just more instrumented—it’s all the same. And it’s because it’s all based on the examination of human truths, which is something we’re all doing naturally anyway.
Yeah, if anyone ever tries to tell me that theater fans are too dramatic, I always say, “Go look inside a sports arena!”
Literally! Sports arena! Fucking Congress! Everyone is passionate about something because we are inherently emotional beings. So you’re going to attach your emotion to something. Maybe it’s your kids, your dog, the Bears, or a bill that’s going through Congress—everyone has that one thing that they would literally burn down a building for. Let’s stop pretending like that’s not the case—it just is what it is. It’s all just theater!
It’s all just theater. Speaking of theater, do you have a favorite role that you’ve ever played?
I mean, I think Judas [from Jesus Christ Superstar] is up there for sure because it's a fun sing. It was one of the most challenging sings I’ve ever interacted with, and I was in the best vocal shape of my life during that show. I had to be, to not hurt myself. But because I’m someone who’s a big literature nerd, and I was raised Catholic, so I knew about the idea of Judas. So you have the historical Judas interpretation from the Bible, and then you have Andrew Lloyd Webber’s interpretation of Judas, which is very different. And then, as an actor, are supposed to bring your own interpretation to the character.
What I love most about theater is when all of those things get to be in conversation with each other. That was the role—Judas and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby—where I got to do all of the things that I love, all wrapped up. I got to do the character research, the historical, the scripture—it was great. So I would say those two are probably my top.
And I’ve done Mary Poppins, and that’s just delightful because you get to work with young people. I love doing children’s theater because I get to help them experience this for the first time. They deal with just as complex emotions as we do; they just don’t have the vocabulary to explain them. I think it’s really powerful to give them a conduit that uses their vocabulary, showing them that we know that they are experiencing the same complex emotions that we are. So I would probably say Judas and Daisy, even though one is musical theater and one is not.
We’ve mentioned it constantly throughout the interview, but I discovered you and a lot of other talented singers through EPIC: The Musical. So, I have to ask: what has it been like for you to be part of that community, and how has it influenced your own life, your work as TE/MO, and other projects you may or may not have going on?
It is one of the most beautiful communities I’ve ever been a part of. I don’t know what it is about Greek mythology, but wow, does it bring together the most incredible people! I think because it’s so ancient no one really owns it. It doesn’t really belong to anyone—it’s just a universal thing. It’s an expression of human truths in a very fun story form, one that contains adventure, romance, jealousy, triumph, and rage. But at the core, it’s just humanity expressed in a really fun way.
And I think that paired with the fact that it doesn’t really belong to anyone—even the Greeks are like, “This was ours in the first place, but we’re not mad if people are excited about it”—they’re probably pretty excited because then they can talk to you about their history and stuff! I think there’s just something about it that brings together people from all walks of life because everyone can see themselves in those types of stories. And because of that, you get a truly diverse, truly welcoming, excited, passionate, cerebral, complex community. It’s just a community of really, really wonderful people who are so excited about being human, and therefore, excited to engage with other people who are excited about being human. You don’t get that everywhere else.
EPIC has created an awesome community in that sense. I do want to give Jorge [Rivera-Herrans] a bone here—even though he’s like my older brother who I pick on all the time—he has always said, “If you’re talented, awesome! But mostly, I just want to work with good people.” He wants to work with people he can hang out with, have fun with, and who can tell the story in a way where we’re laughing in between takes, going to get acai bowls when our day is wrapped. He wanted to work with people he liked and enjoyed spending time with, first and foremost. I think that, from the very beginning, helped inform the whole process and the way the community is run in general because there’s not a person in this cast who isn’t a delight in real life. This entire cast has some of the most talented people I’ve ever worked with. But they are also the best people, and that’s so special.
So, how has it influenced my life and career? It was the meteor I never saw coming. When I started working on it, I was hire number one at EPIC, but it wasn’t even hiring at that point. It was just Jorge being like, “Can you do me a favor? I need someone to do female voices on this thing I’m writing.” And I figured we’ve already worked together on a million other things while we were in school, might as well add this to the list. The minute I first heard the songs, I knew it was something. You can just feel it—you can feel the authenticity brimming under all of it. There was something really special about it from the beginning. Did I think it would turn into what it’s turned into? No, but did I think it was going to be something really special and something that could change the world in some way? Absolutely.
To go from him FaceTiming me, asking, "Hey, does this make sense for someone of your voice type to sing?" to now where we’re doing appearances, performances, concept albums, and all of that—it’s changed my life. It’s touched every facet of my life, and it changed my career in a way that I didn’t expect. But I am so glad that it went in that direction because, again, I get to work with really great people now. That’s not always the case in theater—you can kind of get a hit-or-miss sometimes. So, the fact that I know I will always have this family—even if I go off and create something on my own—I get to come back to this family and be like, "Hey, what do you guys think of this?" They’re my people. I get to engage with them in that sense—not just working on this project we all love so much. It’s really cool.
I mean, it’s been the ride of a lifetime, and I’m so grateful that I’ve been on it for so long. And I intend to be on it as long as he wants me there because it is really one of the most special projects I’ve ever been part of.
It’s amazing to see how much it has blown up over the years. It’s crazy! It was “Warrior of the Mind” that really got big. Like, here’s EPIC! And it was just you and Jorge singing a duet, and that’s when people were starting to say, “What is this? Where can I see more?”
My "aha" moment for that—I mean, it is so weird because it really only exists [online] most of the time. It hasn’t been staged yet, it hasn’t been made into a movie yet. There’s so much about it that is still contained to the web or virtual entertainment. And that’s not bad, it’s just hard to conceptualize. I’m still going in for storefront theater in Chicago, and it hasn’t changed my day-to-day life too much, other than occasionally someone will recognize me from it. It weirdly’s like Hannah Montana. I feel like once I log off the phone, I take the wig off and I’m just Teagan.
But the moment when "Warrior of the Mind" really popped off was when Grace Van Dien—the actress who plays Chrissy in Stranger Things—posted a video where she did the little Greek mythology filter with that sound, and it went super viral. I was watching someone from one of my favorite shows use the sound that has my voice on it, and she doesn’t even know! That was the first moment where I was like, "Oh, this actually has a lot of eyes on it right now," and it’s only continued in that direction. Every time I see it, it blows me away.
I’ve experienced a lot of growth because of it. People followed my trek in EPIC and then were like, "Oh my gosh, what else is she doing?" They had the interest and generosity to look at my other projects, and that’s insane. No artist who just started writing songs two years ago gets to say that! I pinch myself every damn day, and I thank whatever forces are above us for that because I feel so lucky that that’s been my experience. The fact that I get to say I’m part of a project that connects with so many people at once over something I did—that’s a really special thing.
It’s crazy to see how social media changed the game with everything.
I remember the week Jorge decided to start posting, he was like, "I don’t know what to do. I’m holed up here at my parents’ house [during quarantine]. I’m just gonna post a video every day so I can hold myself accountable." So that motivated him to post a progress report every day. And to do that, you need something to post about so it kept him writing. I thought it was a great way to hold yourself accountable while everything is so weird and we don’t know what this industry is going to look like on the other side of all of this. That was just our assumption. For a week that’s all it was, but he had hoped that some people were going to see it and it was stuck at 20 views.
Then, all of a sudden, he did an open-verse challenge on a really popular account or something, and it blew up. That meant people suddenly were finding his page and overnight, he had 5,000 followers. His videos were getting views on views. It was bonkers, as soon as it took hold on TikTok, it was game over. The project was never going to be the same. It blew up so unbelievably quickly from one random thing he did and spent no time on. It’s just crazy!
I’ve never seen something with so much power that I understand less! And I’ve been on TikTok for a minute now because he was like, "People are starting to ask who you are, and maybe you should have a page." And I was like, "Okay..." I didn’t even have anything on it for a while, and overnight, I had 5,000 followers…for a blank page! Just because people loved what he was doing and wanted to see what I was gonna do next. And then all of a sudden, my TikTok career blew up! I was like, "Now I have to post because…what? What happened here?!" It’s the weirdest job I’ve ever had, but I love it. It’s an adventure every day, but definitely the weirdest job I’ve ever had.
I feel like it’s hard to conceptualize what those numbers actually mean. And then you think about it, and you’re like…WELL.
I think I still have next to zero conceptualization of it. The fact that there are people who are actually showing up to my shows who I don’t know. People who I’m not begging to come since they’re my friends. It’s people I’ve never met before, but who like my work as they’re seeing it online. It’s just something I still haven’t fully processed. Even with just EPIC in the last year, the numbers on these songs are bonkers. I love every second of it, but some days I’m like, "What is my job? What do I have to do? I have to stay in the algorithm today? Okay, that’s where we’re at."
One last fun question to close this out—because I think I’ve officially beaten my friends for the longest interview we’ve ever done. [laughs] Try beating that, Jas and Laurel! Now, other than the Athena songs: what is your favorite song from EPIC?
People ask this question all the time, and I feel like every time I give a different answer because I’m never prepared for it. Right now it’s "Love in Paradise." I’ve been obsessed with [Barbara] Wangui’s voice ever since. She was one of the primary hires when this thing was starting up. And the same with Talya [Sindel], frankly. That’s part of why I love "Puppeteer" so much—her vocals in that are next-level good.
It goes back and forth between those two a lot, but also "God Games" and "The Underworld." And Poseidon! Eurylochus! How can you pick one? So, when people ask me, I’m like, "Do you mean today?" Today it’s "Love in Paradise," but yesterday it was "Get in the Water."
But I think this next release will be the best one yet, in terms of the art and everything going on. I’m very excited to see the results because I know he’s worked so hard with so many people on this one to make sure it has the maximum impact. I’m excited to see what’s up because even I don’t know everything. I just know some of the songs, but not beyond that.