#67 Rachel Deeb | From a Fired Cubicle Job to Media Director for The Lumineers
Rachel Deeb got fired three months into her first real job. She’d just graduated, just moved to Nashville, just bought a brand-new car. She sat in her closet, called her dad, and told him about the car.
“I remember sitting in my closet crying. And before I called my dad, I thought to myself — I never want to feel this feeling again.”
Her dad told her not to take another job unless she was 100% into it. She was too proud to do nothing, so she went to work at a boxing club instead.
That was the beginning of one of the more exciting media careers the show has featured.
Highlights — What You’ll Learn
How she went from freelance photographer to Media Director for The Lumineers without a clear plan
What the touring photographer’s role actually looks like from the inside — including why she calls it “the loneliest place on top”
Why she drafted a quit email from Germany during her first week with The Lumineers and didn’t send it
What ELEKTRIK Haus Creative does — and the gap in the industry it fills
Why she won’t do coffee meetings and what she thinks people should do instead
What “say yes to everything, lower your ego, and don’t expect anything” actually looks like in practice
The Warehouse at Night
Before ELEKTRIK Haus, before The Lumineers, before Nashville Scene’s Best Photographer three years running — there was a boxing club and a friend who had an idea.
Rachel was working at Title Boxing Club after the cubicle firing, figuring out her next move. Her dad had bought her a camera. She was photographing classes for their Instagram. Then a friend told her she should paint a mural.
“I said, I don’t know how to paint a mural. How do you scale art like that? And we broke into an abandoned warehouse, and I painted for eight hours, and then I went into my shift at Title Boxing with paint all over my arms.”
Her boss asked where she’d been. She told him. He asked if she’d paint something at the club. That was her first paid mural. Eventually he sat her down and said: if you don’t quit, I’m going to fire you, because you’re too good for this job.
She didn’t quit. She negotiated. Paid me $500 a month, she told him, and I’ll still come shoot your classes and work my way into the freelance world. He said yes. She did that for five years.
Her dad’s advice ran underneath all of it:
“You won’t fail if you’re your own boss.”
Saying Yes Before You Know What You’re Saying Yes to
The career built itself out of a recurring sequence: someone asked her to do something, she said yes, she figured it out, it opened a door.
Warner Music called and asked if she could do BTS on set for Morgan Evans. She said absolutely. She went home and Googled what BTS meant — "behind the scenes".
“I went on set and it was just like the best day. I took so many awesome photos. I took video — never edited video before — but one of my friends stayed up to 4am with me and we just edited the video together.”
A connection at Stagecoach led to Carly Pearce, who invited Rachel onto her bus and asked what her goal was. Rachel said she wanted to work with a female artist. Carly asked what she was doing that weekend. She went on tour with Carly for the next three years.
An exhausted yes to helping a friend on a music video shoot led to a last-minute trip to Red Door bar, which led to meeting the person who flew her to Michigan the next day to shoot Maren Morris’s show. Once Maren posted a photo with Rachel’s tag:
“It was like, game over.”
The Loneliest Place on Top
Rachel has a phrase for what it feels like to be a touring photographer: the loneliest place on top.
“You’re not really in the band and you’re not really in the crew and you’re not really in production. So it is a really weird middle ground of what rules you have or what time you need to be at the venue. It’s really just up to you.”
She’s always there two hours before the band because the professionalism matters, even when no one’s tracking it. After the show, she runs to the nearest shower before the crew tears down the stage — one of the few perks of the role — and then locks in at the desk until three or four in the morning editing. Stadium show to stadium show to stadium show.
She also talks about what makes the role genuinely hard: the intimacy of being close to the artist without being in the band, the way repetition erodes what used to be magic. She went to Red Rocks for the first time and freaked out. Second time was good. By the third, she didn’t really care anymore. That’s when she knew something had shifted.
The Email She Didn’t Send
In January of 2023, The Lumineers’ manager called. Rachel had already told everyone she was done touring. She said yes to one seven-week Europe run. She told their manager not to even pitch the next run.
She got to Europe and had one of the worst first weeks of her touring career. Nobody seemed to know who she was or why she was there. Country music is casual about a lot of things that The Lumineers’ camp is not — she showed up to shoot in pink Converse and got a very clear read on where the line was.
She drafted an email saying she was going to fly home from Germany.
Before she sent it, she made herself a deal.
“I’m here for a reason. I’ve been hired here for a reason. They might not know that, but I know that. And I’m going to go into this show tomorrow and I’m going to make a badass video for them, and I’m going to deliver and be like — this is who I am and why I’m here.”
The next day the lead singer found her and told her the video was amazing and he couldn’t wait to see more of her work. She deleted the email.
That was three years ago. She’s still there.
“Every year they give me more and more of what I need and want to succeed in that camp. And I feel very, very lucky.”
The Career No One Told Her to Ask For
She started with The Lumineers doing photo and video. She never asked for a desk in year one — she didn’t know she could. Edited on concrete in hallways and catering rooms. Then she asked for a desk. Then she asked for a dedicated videographer when the stadium shows got too big to cover alone.
“I think that’s also okay to ask for help when you know where it applies. If I didn’t ask for a videographer, I’d be doing double duty till 4am every night.”
When she brought the ask, she framed it as elevating the show — here’s what I can produce for you if I’m only doing one thing instead of two. Try it for a couple of shows and tell me how you feel. They said yes. And then they promoted her to Media Director, gave her the social accounts, and she went from tour photographer to the person managing a global creative team across a two-year cycle.
“That’s a position I never thought I would be able to get to just from being a tour photographer. You can level up in that way. It was possible.”
ELEKTRIK Haus Creative
The agency was always happening informally. For years Rachel had been pairing creatives with tours, fielding calls from managers who needed someone in a city they didn’t have a contact in. She formalized it when the Lumineers stadium run made it clear she needed infrastructure.
The problem ELEKTRIK Haus fills is specific: managers speak one language, creatives speak another, and the translation gets lost in between. A manager asks for an iPhone reel and a photographer quotes them a full production budget because the ask sounded bigger than it was.
“I’m like, okay, what do you actually need? And then I can communicate that to the photographer or videographer and be like, hey, they just need this, and they’re like, cool.”
Because she’s been on both sides — she’s the person getting hired, and she’s the person doing the hiring — she can calibrate in a way most agents can’t.
The vibe matching is just as important as the skill matching. She’s direct about why: touring is living with someone. One of her stories involves a guy who didn’t get a gig because he coughed too much on a Zoom call. You need the right human, not just the right portfolio.
Why She Won’t Do Coffee Meetings
Rachel’s take on networking is the most controversial thing she says in this episode — and also probably the most useful.
She doesn’t do coffee meetings. She won’t respond if someone asks. Not because she’s unkind, but because she learned years ago what they actually produce: an hour of her time and someone who leaves the meeting not knowing what to do next.
Her advice: don’t ask for coffee. Ask to help.
“If someone asks me, hey, can I assist you on your next shoot — I will have more of a percentage of responding and being like, actually, yeah, I have a shoot on Wednesday, can you be there at 10am?”
She tells the story of a student who emailed asking for an internship meeting. Rachel didn’t respond. A month later she needed a hard drive delivered urgently. She found the email, texted the girl, asked if she could run it over. The girl skipped class and showed up immediately. Rachel had her on set the rest of the day. She interned with her for four months and eventually shot The Lumineers at Bridgestone.
“Think of how you can provide something for someone. That’s building trust.”
The corollary is as important as the principle: when you ask for coffee, you are taking. You are the only one with something to gain from that meeting. The person you’re asking is running a business and protecting their time. If you come in as someone who gives first, that dynamic changes entirely.
The Beer Pong Table
One more story, because it’s too good to skip.
A friend asked if Rachel would paint a jacket for Carrie Underwood’s Vegas residency — the jacket she’d wear every night. She had three days. She and her roommate, also a painter, pulled all-nighters in shifts in her basement on a beer pong table with a jacket worth more than she wanted to think about sitting on top of it.
She delivered it. Posted about it. Moved on to the next gig without really pausing to take it in.
Two years later, she and that friend finally went to Vegas to see the show.
“We were in the crowd and she comes out in the jacket and we just were like — oh my God, we did that on the beer pong table. I literally have chills. And Carrie Underwood is rocking it on stage.”
There were little girls in the crowd in hand-painted jackets they’d made themselves to match Carrie’s.
That’s the whole job, in one moment. Someone trusted her with something she’d never done before. She said yes and figured it out. Two years later, standing in a crowd, she finally felt it.
“Say yes to everything, lower your ego, and don’t expect anything from anybody.”
