Storytelling is an essential tool for musicians to connect with their audience on a deeper level, and in this episode, Bree Noble explores this powerful concept with guest Kendall Cherry—the founder and executive ghostwriter of The Candid Collective. Discover how crafting compelling narratives can help you market your music more effectively, build a loyal fanbase, and create a lasting impact on your listeners. Kendall shares valuable insights on incorporating storytelling into your music and marketing efforts, drawing from her experience as a ghostwriter and content creator. Learn how to weave authentic stories into your songs, stage presence, and online presence to truly resonate with your fans.

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Stories Sell: Leveraging Storytelling In Music And Marketing With Kendall Cherry

I am here with Kendall Cherry from The Candid Collective, and we are going to be talking about story. This is one of my favorite subjects. I love to talk about story because story is so powerful. Story is so important to us as musicians, as songwriters, as the way that we present our music. Story is everywhere as the way we market ourselves. We’re going to get deep into story in this episode, but before we do that, Kendall, I would just love for you to share your background with them. How you got into being so focused on story and what we’re doing when you were younger in relation to music.

Kendall’s Origin Story

I’m so excited to be here and to be chatting about this. This is definitely one of the topics. I am normally talking about storytelling all the time, but it’s more in a business or marketing context. I’m really excited to jam out, pun intended here but really talk about storytelling in relation to music because it’s just been one of the biggest things throughout my life.

I’ll start with what I do. I am Ghostwriter. I write content for business owners if you are on LinkedIn or you get an email newsletter from someone. I pretty much write content day in and day out, either from my own byline or on behalf of clients. When I was younger, my dream job was to be a singer songwriter, or more so a songwriter, and I took that path and was studying writing and all of the things so that I can be a ghostwriter of songs.

It’s really interesting. I did the Nashville thing. I worked in the music industry when I was in college in several different types of jobs and roles and was always writing. Ultimately, I took a different path. I did a corporate communications path before starting a business as a ghostwriter. I find that when I peel back the layers of what I do now, so much of it is the storytelling that I learned from songwriting. There have been times I’ve written literal poems for clients in their newsletters or their content, which we all know I’m pretty much just writing a story. Some of my clients will tell me I’m like a slam poet.

I’m just always had that very lyrical stylist speaking lyrical style of writing, which obviously informs the content writing that I do for clients. So much of it, especially the storytelling, is something that I picked up really young and didn’t really know, I’ll say, like the inner workings of it. I never really formally studied it. It’s just one of those things. You have these gifted children. It was always something that came to me naturally, and especially because music for me was the vessel of how I learned and studied it when I was younger.

My husband is an English professor, a literature professor. We’re always having this conversation of why are stories so compelling. Stories that a lot of times you know are not real. What is it about stories that we hear, whether it’s in a song or in a piece of literature, or a poem, or even just on a podcast, somebody telling a story? What is so compelling about story?

Why Are Stories Compelling?

I think for me, when I think about story, it’s many things. I know for me, I’ve experienced some of the highest highs and some of the lowest lows regardless of my path in life. I always find story regardless of the medium that it’s coming through. It’s always this bigger universal truth that’s being communicated. Some of my most heartbreaking songs are written by artists I have nothing in common with, or the song isn’t even necessarily about what I’m going through.

The universal sharing the experience, sharing the energetics, zooming someone in on a really specific scene, even, it may not necessarily be verbatim what I’m going through, but the tone of someone’s voice, the words they’re using to describe it, I find it’s one of the most vulnerable ways we can communicate with each other. Yet, it’s one of the most universal ways for us to connect on different levels regardless of if we’ve had that experience or not.

I write for clients, but I’m also a memoirist. One thing that I’ve learned and studied so much of memoir writing, which is no different than a song about your life is no different than a book about your life. So much of that process is about identifying what is it in your story that you want to highlight so that it can communicate some universal truth or universal exploration for someone else. That’s why a cancer memoir, if I read one of those, or if I hear a song about loss or something like that, the loss may not be exactly what I’m going through, but it’s still one of those songs or those stories that still resonates. It’s because I have some common thing in between, whether that’s the story, the experience, or it’s just the feelings that I’m having that was intended by the writer or the author to really communicate, so it feels the same.

I think that’s really true. I have this song that talks about being in the hospital and being in the hospital for a long time and really wanting to get out but still being too sick, that kind of thing. Just the way I’m describing it about the why can’t I get out of bed, the blankets feel so heavy, like that kind of thing. It resonated with a lot of people that had depression and they come up and tell me like, “Those lines really resonated with me.” I wasn’t thinking about it that way when I was creating the song.

Telling Stories That Resonate

It’s universal in that way. We have things that we create and then they become like separate from us. It comes from our perspective, but then it becomes separate from us, a separate piece of art that then as affecting other people different ways. How can we tell our stories in a way that they can jump off the page that way and not be so specific that people aren’t going to identify with them because they’re just my story?

I find searching for what about the experiences is universal in natures. I have a really similar story where I wrote a song. In my perspective, it was like my business was not doing well at all. It was like one of those feast or famine seasons. I was really struggling and going through it. I had this experience, it was about a friend of mine that I was really close with and talking about. I zoomed in on the specifics. I talked about a conversation we had around the kitchen counter and saying like, “If you really knew how lost I feel like would you still stay?” It’s the energetics of what we’re going on. I wrote it about a really specific thing, but just general enough.

I posted it randomly, which I don’t normally do. I had a friend of mine reach out and be like, “I’m getting divorced and this is exactly what I needed to hear. This moved me to tears.” I remember like, “I was talking about someone I’m dating.” It was not at all what I’d pictured it even being about. I think when it comes to storytelling, it’s that candor and that honesty and sitting with the hard feelings is the first part. That’s the most uncomfortable part of the process.

I find that is more of the emotional labor of any form of an artistic craft is getting clear on like what hurts, and then being clear about what elements can you play with that are not going to necessarily over-specify this specific scene that you’re trying to describe or the emotion, etc. I think understanding, too, things like certain details those can have a limiting effect on someone’s perspective, but knowing when it’s appropriate to use them to further communicate something and almost drop someone into the scene versus letting those emotions or letting those words of what a feeling feels talk for you in that instance.

It’s like if I were to describe my hospital gown or the type of bed that I was in. That wouldn’t work.

It’s probably not going to land. Heavy blankets or being afraid to say that you’re still hurting, like telling a nurse coming in and having to pretend like you’re fine because you want to get out. You’re tired of feeling like this. It takes such a very intentional process to not just write the song and keep moving but making sure that each line or each verse, if you’re going to get a snapshot, I always think of it as we can’t say everything. We just don’t have enough words or we’d be here for forever.

If you can only give in a memoir, it would be a chapter or a couple of paragraphs in a song, it’s a line or a couple of verses, what are the things that are really going to make this feel like a complete experience, but also leave enough ambiguity where I think the best writing is the writing that ages really well. You can read it, hear it 5 or 10 years ago, and then you listen to it again now and it has a whole different meeting, whether that’s from wordplay or you’re in a different perspective now than you were back then. I think some of the strongest writing is that universal nature and ability to talk to anyone at any given point, even if it’s the same person and it’s ten years later, however long. I think that’s how classics are made.

The strongest writing has the universal ability to talk to anyone at any given point in their life. Share on X

I’m sure there’s songs that I heard in the ‘80s and now I hear them and I hear them so differently. Now I’m a mother or something, so I’m thinking about a different perspective. That’s definitely true. When I think about things that when I was a teenager, the way I think about it, like maybe it was raunchy or maybe it was rebellious or whatever. Now I’m thinking about it from the perspective of being older.

You’re like, “Too much. No. Why was I ever thinking this was a good idea?”

On Being A Ghostwriter

About being a ghostwriter, because I think that really is very similar to being a songwriter in that you’re trying to tell a story and other people are going to experience it. Do you have any checks and balances or whatever to make sure that you’ve taken yourself out of it?

It is an interesting process. There are lots of different ghostwriters. I find people who read either my work or other clients’ work. There’s definitely a certain tone to the way that I write. It’s very candid, it’s very visceral, it’s very direct. You should not come to me if you’re super soft and want flowers. I usually get people who are like, “I have some hot takes. I have some big swings I want to make.” First, that makes it a little easier. The tone, in general, is similar to mine. The thing I think about the universal experience of ghostwriting and I think that’s what creates the nuanced and multi-layered experience similar to what we’ve talked about.

So much of my work is not just taking what the client is saying and the story that they’re trying to tell and telling it their behalf, but also making sure my role is the ghostwriter to make sure I’m infusing as much of that universal experience into it as I can. Whether that’s someone’s telling me about, I was writing for a client. She does more financial services like coaching, consulting, teaching on financial literacy. Not every person that’s in her program is going to have huge portfolio and tons of money and bankrolling and all of those things.

 

There are so many different layers of perspective. Making sure I say her part of the story, but include other examples or small, little golden nuggets so that no matter who’s reading the piece, it still resonates with them. Based on that example, “I have tons of money and I’m just trying to make more, or maybe I’m a little bit earlier on in my wealth journey and I’m still trying to learn maybe basic budget stuff or I’m just starting to learn about robo-investing or anything else.”

It’s so much about making sure not to just portray the story as, “First this happened, then this happened.” It’s also layering in that more psychological experience and the universality of what the people that are going to be in your community or in your inner circle, or your customers or in your audience, if you’re a musician. Making sure that everyone in that room or virtual room, if it’s online, everyone is going to get something to take away from them. That’s my general school of thought.

Whether it’s an email or a piece of content or a song or whatever else poem I want to make sure that everyone, no matter their experience that they’re having, there’s always something in it for everyone, regardless of the perfect ideal audience member. Maybe they’re a little bit outside of the edge, but there’s some bit of wisdom. There’s some bit of self-acknowledgment, empowerment, and acknowledging of their feelings. There’s always something that someone can gain from whatever I’m writing.

I think that has to be there. Thinking back to my one-woman show that I did, and there were a lot of stories there leading into the songs, and like I said, when I talked about being in the hospital, there are people in the audience who have been in the hospital. They’re really getting it. However, there are plenty of people that haven’t been, but they can really identify for some other reason. Somehow, it has to be universal enough that you don’t lose everybody. People aren’t just like, “I’m tuning this part out.”

That Seems like a really hard line to walk, maybe. When I think about my one-woman show, I’m thinking about how I was using the stories to sell the song in a way, to lead into the song to get them to hook them in and be like, “Now you’re really going to want to listen to the song.” I find that when they did that, then they’d be back at the merch table going, “Where can I get that song? They’re connected with it.” Let’s talk about like how artists can use story on the stage. Do you have any tips for them?

Using Stories On The Stage

Totally. The best one, this is something that I teach as well, just in my regular day to day, and it’s probably the most true for musicians. One of the “highest converting,” which still counts if you’re going to a merch table, that’s a conversion, it’s the same thing. One of the first ones that I teach is called the origin story. I think in songwriting, in particular, it’s the fastest entry point for musician to be able to say, “Here’s where I was at when I wrote this song.” The trick here, and this is a learned skill, so you’ve got to practice it, but it can become muscle memory at this point. I’ve been doing it slowly. If you were to listen back, I do it when I speak now, but you can say that origin story, but the quickest trick to having that moment of like, “They’re talking to me.”

Everyone thinks, “I was talking to these people,” and it’s this very broad audience. The faster you can switch to saying you and just switch that into your vocabulary, that is going to be the thing where it feels like it’s a one-to-one conversation, whether you’re standing in front of a room of 20 people or 2000 people or however many. For example, just to get practical, and tangible with it, if I had a song, we’ll do the hospital one because that’s probably the easiest. “My name is Kendall. You might not know this about me, but a few years ago, I was in the hospital for a really long time. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like that, but for m,e it felt like X, Y, Z. Maybe for you, it felt like A, B, C.”

The faster you can switch into incorporating some of your story, but switching the language so that it includes you, it’s the fastest entry point of people. Also, being able to spread, again, that universal experience. You could say, “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the hospital or maybe you’ve had a family member that’s been there, or maybe you just felt like you couldn’t get out of bed one day.” One of the other tricks that I love to do in my own writing is I’ll say like, “I wrote this for you,” mic drop, start the song. You could do something like that. I always find using those examples and infusing, suggesting this was the direct experience, but here’s a couple of, again, those gray area things.

Just saying, “I wrote this for you,” is one of the best ways. In the artistic trade and craft, it’s all about releasing the piece of art to resonate in the way that it’s going to with the people. It’s an ego thing. “it’s our story. I want to hold it close. It’s our song. We want to hold it close.” It’s whatever. There is this moment where the moment you release it to this higher power, whatever you want to call it, away from the source material, it allows people to really translate it and apply it to their own lives.

Saying “I wrote this for you” is one of the best ways an artist trades their craft. It's all about releasing the piece of art to resonate with the people. Share on X

“I wrote this for you. This song is for you,” however you want to want to use it. You can’t use it for every song at every show. You sparingly use it on the real tear-jerkers or really your best ones that you really feel resonate like that. I find that artistic release is one of the things, whether it’s on the stage or maybe just even in the writing process, and detaching from the meaning is also a really big part of the trade and the writing process.

I think it’s permission for the audience because I do think sometimes, we, as artists, write songs as therapy, and then it can feel like this private moment on stage where the audience are like, “I don’t know if we should be listening to this.” Do you know what I mean?

It’s like a diary with the audience.

Using Storytelling To Market And Sell Music

Just giving them, “Here, I’m handing this to you. Use it as you will,” kind of thing. This is The Profitable Musician, so we definitely need to talk about story as a way to help us make money. I know you work with a lot of people in marketing and you talk about there are only five stories that you need to tell to be able to sell anything. I want you to talk about that.

It just comes from years of being in different levels of digital marketing. I’ve worked for really big brands with almost 1 million followers. I’ve written for really small brands as well. I find that the trick to selling, it’s so true with artists. For me, the starving artist narrative was you can’t make money as a writer. For a musician, it’s you can’t make money as a musician. We’ve all seen the buskers. Their guitar cases open at the bottom of a subway and, “You’re never going to make it.” It’s this big grind. There’s this very collective narrative, the starving artist narrative that says if you’re an artist, you’re not going to make a lot of money.

That’s the decision that you make. So much of my work is about helping artists. Not just writers, not just musicians, but people that have artistic souls and spirits, really figure out how to make money doing the thing that is the most authentic to you, that you’ve likely also been doing since you were very young. It’s something so natural to you, you can’t imagine doing anything else. I find that storytelling, there comes this moment with this starving artist thing. There’s like this weird ego battle internally where you’re like, “I have to sell, but it’s art, but I have to sell to make it work. And I got to feed myself and feed my cats. What are we going to do here?” I find that storytelling for people who are sensitive, they are artistic.

Maybe authenticity is really important to you and integrity is really important to you. I find that storytelling is the easiest way to really soften the idea of selling. It doesn’t have to just be this greasy used car salesman who’s going to like push and push. You can let your story be the thing that allows you to sell without feeling like you’re selling. I have five stories that I typically recommend. They may resonate. There’s maybe one that I think might get a little weird for musicians, but the first one we already talked about, which is the origin story. How did this song come to be? Why did you become a songwriter or a musician? Take us back to a time when you were really little. Maybe you had a certain mentor when you were growing up, who was really impactful for you.

Maybe talk about a time you totally flopped on the stage and it changed your perspective on how you approach your music or your craft. The first one is the origin story. There’s one called A Day in the Life. This one is more about your ideal customer or your audience member. It depends for the musician, if it’s for the audience, or maybe you’re trying to sell your song to a record label or whoever else. The day in the life is really talking through for the other person.

If they were to have it their way and they had all of the success in the world, what would a day in that life look like? There’s the opposite of like, “What would a day in the life look like if you keep living the way you’re living? You don’t have everything solved. You still have these pain points and these things going on. There’s that one. The other one is more around hot takes and unpopular opinions. These are the things that are a little more spicy. They’ll really differentiate you from other artists.

It’s like leaning into your brand.

Leaning into your brand, really leaning into what matters to you. I’ll use the country music industry, for example. There are certain artists who are a little bit more liberal, maybe a little bit more putting drag queens on stage than other people in the industry. I’ll say that. Really letting that become your brand and what you’re known for. Other things being just your past experience as well, whether it’s a personal hospital stay or loss of someone, or becoming a new parent or whatever else.

The last one is in the marketing space, it’s usually your client testimonials or people that you’ve worked with who’ve really enjoyed your experience. For a musician, this could look like maybe play a private gig, like maybe you’re someone who does weddings or something like that. Telling the story of maybe some of your clients or customers who you’ve worked with who had a really special day or maybe wrote a custom song for them. Maybe you really went out of your way to make the music perfect and really worked with them to create the perfect ambiance using the music.

Using those client stories as the thing that also showcases what you’re doing and what other people see as valuable versus you having to stand on your soapbox being like, “I matter. I’m valuable. Buy my stuff.” I find sometimes it’s easier to use other people’s words when describing you than sometimes trying to sit and figure out, “How do I sell myself?” How do I make this something that is profitable versus sitting and trying to sell yourself?

I had one that I used to tell when I was a senior in high school. I was on tour with our church choir and we went to sing at a marine base, and I had a solo. At the end of the show, and there’s all these guys in the audience making noise and I’m up there just by myself, trying to sing over all these people. As soon as I sang like three notes, the entire room hushed. I’m like, “That’s cool.” That’s the power of music and stuff. You can tell something like that, or I could tell a story about I got to sing Dodger Stadium, sing the national anthem. That’s like cred building. It’s not me saying, “Look at how awesome I am.”

It’s the same in marketing as well. I find whether it’s like using a specific experience that someone else has had when working with you or your perspective of having, I’ll say, like a pinch me moment. They can be really big things or they can be really small things, but those are really great entry points. They not only connect with people, but they share your credibility and your authority as well. You don’t want to be the person that’s like, “Here’s all of my trophies. Please let me tell you the play by play for every single one.” No one would care.

 

However, the moment you introduce a story, even if you are a little bit humble bragging, it’s not, “Okay, we’re going to come through here,” and they’re going to be that person. No one really wants somebody that’s braggy, but somebody I think who is humble and can subtly sell is a lot smarter of a sales strategy in my opinion.

I’ve always struggled with the desire and pain point one because it doesn’t quite line up. I’ve tried for years to try to figure out how can we make this work for musicians? It doesn’t quite fit unless you’re doing something where you’re teaching or you’ve got a course or doing even maybe custom songs or something like that and show how awesome it would be if they had this song for their wedding anniversary or something like that. That’s been one that’s been hard for me to translate from regular marketing, but all the other ones absolutely translate for musicians.

I would say the one thing that is interesting, it depends on the room, but one thing with the pain point marketing, at least for musicians, something that comes up, I always try and think about your unique value proposition. For musicians, it’s so fascinating, but there are a lot of monetary and non-monetary assets. You’re still a business. You’re just a different style of business.

There are other assets, like if you are in a certain market for a specific venue, if I were an Austin musician and I have a customer base, AKA, an audience that exists in Austin, that is something that I do bring to the table. If I’m going to maybe a venue that doesn’t typically sell out, or if I have a pretty loyal fan base, those pain points, if I were to pitch myself to play a specific venue, that is something that I could say, “On a Tuesday night, it’s hard for you to sell a show, but because I have my core of people, I bring a certain of audience. It’s not just your marketing that I’m relying on. It’s also the audience that I’ve built.”

I think musicians, it’s still a business and there’s so many valuable assets that you can be creating in the background, especially if you’re a local musician or there’s some locality to what you’re doing, whether it’s doing wedding stuff or maybe you are playing just smaller venues in a city. There’s a lot you can do with building up your own assets, whether that’s your audience in your city or having some level of value in one of the many ways that that exists. I think it brings the empowerment back to you versus having to rely on the venue or other marketing channels. It’s much better to be like, “When I play a show, 100 people show up versus whatever you guys are going to come with.”

Building Connections Through Marketing Stories

We’re marketing on all sides. We have to market to get the gig, but we’re at the gig, we’re marketing to the fans to make them more fans. We want to buy stuff and make them super fans and all that stuff. Marketing is all around us for sure, but maybe you can help draw the through line for audience from the way we use story in marketing to how that actually helps sell things. There’s a lot of versions of sell. Sell could be someone becomes a super fan and then they’re going to support you for years to come. Sell could be they bought something from the merch table. It could mean they hired you for another gig. There are so many ways that we sell.

What I would say, at least in that context, the way I would think about selling is it’s basically someone who has bought into the business of you, whatever the revenue stream is. The way I think about this, it’s the same thing I approach even in my business as a ghostwriter. I get people who maybe buy a really small entry offer. For a musician, maybe that’s a T-shirt, or maybe that’s just a ticket. Something small. It’s the lifetime value of your customer. They’re much more likely to come back a second time, or once they buy the first CD or single, they’re going to come back and probably get the second one, especially if they get on your email list or some other channel where you’re continuously keeping them in the loop. If it’s social media, the same thing.

 

What I find is not that we don’t want to be selling all the time, but you get micro-purchases over time. Everyone wants the super fan status, of course. That’s the most lucrative. Even in my business, the same thing is true, but there is a buyer journey or a customer journey that exists. You may not get super raving fans the very first night that someone sees you or the very first time that they listen to your single or your song or however else they find you.

Maybe they see a video of yours on Tiktok or Instagram, but getting them into your world, I call it in my business, my cinematic universe. I bring them into my world and I share more over time using those stories, whether it’s the story about why you created a song, or maybe it’s why you designed the T-shirt in a certain way, or maybe you have a certain logo for your band. Anything like this is really important because the more that you’re telling those stories, you’re not just some random person that they found. They were at the venue at the right time, or they saw a random video one day and then that was it.

I find that the thing that really creates audience retention, which then mirrors customer retention, is the storytelling. Maybe the first time they ever see a story from you or the twentieth time they see a story, they’re like, “That was an interesting thing.” Maybe they don’t necessarily buy automatically and right then, but they’re going to remember you. It’s less about converting in the moment, as scary as that sounds. We all want to make money as soon as possible.

We all want to make money as soon as possible, but you have to keep in mind you’re building a brand. You also have to play the long game. Share on X

You have to also keep in mind, you’re building a brand. You also have to play the long game. It’s the same thing we hear in hooks and in stories and those earworms. It’s the same idea. It’s just with stories and with sales, those things that people keep thinking about with like, “That person said that one story.” You’ll be remembered and that is the thing that creates not just conversion, but to me, retention, which is the most important thing to building a brand.

You could have someone buy all your stuff and then yes, you get all the conversions, but it’s likely if you’re a musician, you want them to buy the first album and then buy the second one and the third one and the fourth one and come to every show that you’ve got. That’s what I find why the storytelling is so important is that retention aspect.

That was basically just a masterclass in marketing. I love it. This is my jam as well.

I’m like, “I’m going to nerd out.”

No, I love it. That’s exactly what we’re here for. If they want to hear more of this nerding out on marketing from you, where can they find you online?

Connect With Kendall

I write a newsletter every week, which is called Wallflower Fridays. It’s basically a newsletter that’s all about how to monetize your audience by telling more stories that sell. It’s really similar if you’re looking for, again, origin stories and examples from my own life. I’ll talk about clients, but I talk about a lot of these sales and marketing topics that you didn’t go to business school or you’re looking for a little bit more of a modern take on how to sell.

The way I write it in my services guide, it’s not the traditional pretty fly for White guy sales topics that we’ve all heard and maybe not so much loved. If you’re someone who’s really looking for authenticity and integrity when you’re selling, that is what I write about every week. That newsletter is called Wildfire Fridays. Just imagine me being a little wallflower, absorbing everything I’m seeing and then I write about it. It’s always about sales, marketing and monetizing. You can go to wallflowerfridays.com and sign up there.

Definitely not bro marketing.

It could not be more opposite of bro marketing. It’s not even anti-bro marketing like bro isn’t even in the title. We just don’t even associate.

You guys go check out Wallflower Fridays. It’s hard to say it, so is The Profitable Musician. I get that.

The F’s and the Ls, it’s a mouthful.

Wallflower Fridays, check that out, you guys. Thank you so much, Kendall. This has been so good and it was exactly what I was hoping for to really just get musicians to understand how important story is, how important to weave it into everything that you do and have it become second nature. As you said, just even thinking and using the word you and having it become second nature is going to be such a great way to connect with your audience. You guys, take everything that you said to heart and try to implement that in what you’re doing with your fans.

 

Important Links

• The Candid Collective
• Wallflower Fridays
• Kendall Cherry on Instagram

 

About Kendall Cherry

Kendall Cherry is the founder and executive ghostwriter of The Candid Collective—a one-woman content ghostwriting agency that delivers world-class storytelling that sells your products and services.

She’s on a mission to create a world that’s more candid and kind. Kendall has written for $100M+ startups, email empires with 750,000 subscribers, and thought leaders with 7 million followers.

Kendall also writes about the art and craft of telling stories that sell in her weekly newsletter, Wallflower Fridays.