Olivia Rafferty found comfort in the vast timescale of geology. “I had this mentorship during [COVID], which was remote with someone in the music industry in England,” the Scottish artist explains. “I was basically told that I’d not done it right, that I’d wasted years of my career not chasing the right opportunities.”
The songwriter, whose breakout EP was featured on BBC Scotland, started reading Timefulness by Marcia Bjornerud, and the book —and the geology within it —helped provide perspective. “The book was pretty much a Trojan horse for geology,” she says. “I found that it was such a comfort for me —the science of geology and the timescale of which everything is happening…It’s okay for things to take a long time. That sense of comfort and wonder is something I wanted to bring to other people.”
She began watching geology lectures in her London flat every morning while sipping a stereotypical cup of British tea. “There’s a teacher in Ellensburg, WA called Nick Zentner who live streamed all his Geology 101 lectures on YouTube during the pandemic, and they were available for anyone to watch,” she recalls. “I stumbled across it and ended up watching one every morning.” She had never considered studying geology in school —she knew early on that she wanted to pursue music —but she was enthralled now.
At the end of the course, she wanted to share what she had learned. She started posting her songwriting process on Substack, where she explained how she wraps emotional feelings and processes into geological metaphors. “I would write about it, and then every couple of weeks, I’d do a demo,” she explains. Many songs in the album are inspired by emotional processes she hopes are universal. “There are some songs which are about going under periods of personal transformation and change. For example, seeing yourself in one place and thinking ‘The grass is greener over there,’ then transforming who you are to get there,” she says.
Rafferty started learning about geology in 2021 and had the beginnings of an album ready a year later. In early 2023, she signed up for a geology walk in London. “We went in the middle of London, from Victoria Station to Westminster Abbey… There are quite a lot of statues, and pubs, and buildings, and things all made out of different kinds of rocks,” she remembers.
The person leading the tour was Professor Ruthie Siddall, a teacher and member of the Geologists Association. At the time, Rafferty wasn’t even sure her small collection of geology-inspired songs would become an album, but she asked Siddall if any organization would fund an album if she made one. “She said the Geologists Association has this fund called the Curry Fund, which basically supports projects which promote public engagement of geology.” Siddall is on the board of those who decide the fund’s recipients, and the group funded Rafferty’s album.
Rafferty completed her album with eight songs and released it in March 2025. She has since had the opportunity to play in several iconic venues for both music and geology. “I was able to play in some really interesting places,” she says. “The Yorkshire Fossil Festival had me twice… I got to play at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, which is a really beautiful building.” More importantly, she has found a new community among geologists. “The geology album was a really great project, because I had the support of this completely new community —the geologists —who were just thrilled,” she says.
What’s next? Rafferty says she still loves geology, but her next album will cover a different topic. “I wanted to explore the relationships with people in our lives who are our friends,” she says. “It’s classic for people to write about romantic relationships and things like that, but I think friendships have so much range in them.” Rafferty adds that the new album will likely be ready in late 2026 or early 2027.
Inside the Songs
Here is what Rafferty had to say about a few of the songs that combine geology and emotional experiences:
“The song Juan de Fuca is about the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate and how it is subsducted underneath the North American plate, causing these massive earthquakes. Even though it focuses on one earthquake that happened in 2001, it is also about a relationship that is slowly disappearing. It’s almost like the process of subduction, and then this emotional aftershock.”
“Fossils is the last track on the album, and it is about the fossils we have in our own lives. When you think about geology, one of the images that comes to mind is the stratigraphic column, where you’ve got all the different chunks of time.. You can tell which chunk of time you are in based on the fossils you might find. I thought about what the stratigraphic column of our life might look like. What sort of physical and personal fossils and relics do we have in each section of our lives?”