Karina Rykman on Healthy Ego and Making Art from a Joyful PlaceKarina Rykman on Healthy Ego and Making Art from a Joyful Place
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Bassist Karina Rykman talks about healthy ego, joy-centred creativity, touring highs and crashes, and the risks of getting hooked on the crowd’s reaction to covers instead of her own songs. Her story touches on mentors, self-taught musicianship and a deep commitment to keeping music fun and meaningful.
1:10:41•11 Nov 2026
Karina Rykman on Joy, Ego and Chasing the Woo Without Losing Yourself
Episode Overview
- Healthy self-worth can coexist with low ego: focus on taking the work seriously, not yourself.
- Protecting joy in creativity—such as refusing joy-killing formal lessons—can shape a unique artistic voice.
- Touring brings intense highs and a difficult comedown, with misplaced adrenaline and feelings of disconnection after returning home.
- Gratitude for each step in a career helps counter the endless desire for “more” and reduces discontentment.
- Chasing crowd reactions to familiar covers can become an unhealthy “addiction to the woo”, so building genuine responses to original work matters more.
“Take what you do seriously, not yourself seriously, I think should be put on my tombstone.”
Curious about how others navigate their sobriety journey? This chat with bassist and bandleader Karina Rykman shifts the usual recovery lens away from substances and towards something different: an “addiction” to playing live, protecting joy, and keeping ego in check while chasing a creative life. Karina talks about being self-taught by choice, avoiding traditional lessons because they stripped the fun out of music.
Instead, she became a "self-taught music encyclopedia", obsessed with every style and determined to talk seriously with adults about bands like Led Zeppelin and Radiohead. From interning in the music industry as a teenager to landing a life-changing gig with Marco Benevento, her path is anything but typical. One of the big themes here is ego and self-worth. Karina laughs as she says, "I think I have a very high opinion of myself...
but I think that that is distinct and different from having an ego," then drops the line that sums her up: "Take what you do seriously, not yourself seriously." That attitude runs through everything—from how she sees her career as a series of "holy shit gifts" to her refusal to check ticket counts so the numbers don’t steal the joy.
You’ll also hear her talk honestly about the emotional whiplash of touring: the high of performing and meeting fans for hours at the merch table, and the crash when she gets home and feels like "an extraterrestrial" with misplaced adrenaline and no audience. For anyone in recovery, that push–pull of intensity and emptiness will sound familiar.
There’s humour, a lot of music nerdery, and some sharp wisdom about not getting "addicted to the woo"—the cheap thrill of crowd reactions to familiar cover songs instead of doing the harder work of winning that same response with your own art. If you’ve ever tried to build a life that feels true to you, this conversation might have you asking: are you taking the work seriously, or just taking yourself too seriously?
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