A conversation with Adriana Balic

Musician Adriana Balic shares the most important mindset and self-care lessons she learned while on tour with P!NK’s Beautiful Trauma World Tour.

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“Knowing that doing nothing is actually doing something… it’s taken me a long time to get to that place to acknowledge that it’s important”

“I think it comes down to being thankful, gratitude, in the moment, and present for all of it,”

“We got to make the best of this time and do what you love.”

Musician Adriana Balic joins us today to talk about what she learned about self-care while on tour with P!NK in her Beautiful Trauma World Tour, her core philosophy when it comes to being a creative, happy person, and the surprising turns her journey as an artist has taken.

Adriana toured with P!NK previously in 2003, but left in 2008 when she became pregnant so she could be present for her son's formative years. Then, in 2017, circumstances aligned for her to return to working with P!NK.

“This experience of being out on the road as a mother, a wife, and having been at home for nine years previous to that, it was such a different experience,” she says. “It has done a lot of things for me personally, one—given me the space to focus on me again.”

Part of what’s challenging about self-care, she says, is making a mindset shift. While on tour, her job was to get up on stage at the end of the day and give her all during the performance. But in order to support that effort at the end of the day, she had to lay the foundation at the beginning of the day—starting with sleep, getting enough exercise, drinking a lot of water, and scheduling downtime.

“Knowing that doing nothing is actually doing something… it’s taken me a long time to get to that place to acknowledge that it’s important,” she says.

That self care philosophy extends to maintaining her energy and positive outlook on life. 

“I’m not always positive. I have my moments just like every other human,” Adriana says. “I’m really... trying to keep my mind open in the sense of the reasons why people say or do or choose or are the way they are... and understand that everyone’s on their own path.”

She says that in this regard, her mindset comes down to trusting that her work matters, and that somehow, whatever she’s struggling with or worrying about will all work out.

“I think it comes down to being thankful, gratitude, in the moment, and present for all of it,” she says. “We got to make the best of this time and… do what you love.”

Adriana was born to immigrant parents in Vancouver, Canada, and says that even though her parents were amazing, fabulous people, that she was still a little overprotected. So when she decided to move first to Boston, and then again to L.A. to get into the contemporary music scene, it felt like a huge risk.

But without taking risks and jumping into the unknown, she wouldn’t have gotten to where she is today.

“If you would have asked me at the age of 25 when I left Vancouver... like do you think you could be on tour with P!NK touring the world and playing for stadiums, I’d be like phhhhh, that’d be cool, but I doubt it,” she says.

But building the kind of artistic life you want is totally possible, she says. It’s about positioning yourself to be where the opportunities are and then taking advantage of them, but also being creative and making your own opportunities.

“It takes doing things that are not expected of you. And it takes doing things differently from the norm, especially as artists,” she says.

Frédéric Elkaïm

Contemporary art expert and artist coach

Rahima Gambo

Photographer and conceptual artist