volume rising series

Written and composed by Anna Talyn

About Volume Rising

• Instagram
• YouTube
• TikTok

• About Series
• About Origins
• About Exit
• Making of
• Deep Dive

Volume Rising follows a group of young musicians as their lives collide through sound, movement, and the need to be heard. It begins with one girl claiming a name and a voice of her own, and grows into the story of a band learning how to survive each other, their pasts, and the noise of the world. Across first shows, first tours, and the quiet moments in between, the series traces how connection forms, fractures, and rebuilds when music becomes the only place that feels honest.Step inside the story and discover the Volume Rising universe.

Volume Rising Series

A double trilogy of three novels and three albums, written side by side. A shared universe about voice, survival, and found family.

Volume Rising Series Media

Books: Print and eBook coming soon

• Amazon

Streaming Albums

Games and Quizzes

• Gamepad

• Apple Music
• Spotify
• YouTube Music
• Tidal

Volume Never Dies Book 1

Volume Never Dies begins the trilogy in motion. Exit and her band are forming, relationships are shifting, and the future is close but undefined. This book lays the emotional groundwork for the series, focusing on staying, noticing, and learning how to move forward without certainty.

• Back

Volume Never Ends Book 2

Volume Never Ends sits in the middle of the trilogy, where momentum meets weight.The band is moving forward, but balance is harder to hold. Relationships deepen, supports shift, and Exit begins to feel the cost of relying on what once felt stable. This book lives in uncertainty, loss, and recalibration, asking what remains when familiar anchors disappear.This is the heart of the through.
Not collapse.
Adjustment.

• Back

Volume Never Fades Book 3

Volume Never Fades closes the trilogy with presence rather than resolution.Exit and the band arrive at a fuller understanding of what they are building and what they must let go of. Voice becomes steadier. Boundaries hold. The future is no longer something to chase, but something to stand inside.This book is not an ending.
It is a choice to remain.

• Back

Volume Never Lies Album 1

Volume Never Lies lives at the beginning of expression.These are songs written to cope, to test confidence, and to stay present while everything is still forming. Some tracks brush up against people and moments in the story. Many don’t. They exist because Exit needed somewhere to put what couldn’t stay quiet.This album is about borrowing warmth.
About learning how sound can hold you.
Even briefly.

• Back

Volume Never Dies Album 2

The second Volume Rising album digs into the cost of staying loud after the first rush of becoming real. Written in the emotional aftermath of the Interrupt Tour, these songs carry the band through pressure, recovery, creative tension, and the fragile work of still choosing each other. It is darker, sharper, and more cinematic than Volume Never Lies, but it keeps the same pulse at its center: found family, survival, and a voice that refuses to disappear.

• Back

Volume Never Fades Album 3

Volume Never Fades closes the trilogy with presence rather than resolution.Exit and the band arrive at a fuller understanding of what they are building and what they must let go of. Voice becomes steadier. Boundaries hold. The future is no longer something to chase, but something to stand inside.This book is not an ending.
It is a choice to remain.

• Back

Exit Lane
Songs From The Volume Rising Universe

Exit Lane is a universe-spanning album that brings together songs from across the Volume Rising world. It includes tracks from Volume Rising, Glass Signal, Kickstand Prophets, and contributions from Leo and Dev, alongside revisited material from the Origins EP.Rather than following a single narrative, the album moves through detours, resistance, and reflection, expanding the universe sideways instead of forward.

• Back

About the Volume Rising UniverseVolume Rising is a shared universe told in two parallel forms.
A trilogy of novels and a trilogy of albums. A double trilogy connected by voice, partially by plot.The novels follow Exit and her band as they grow into themselves, into each other, and into a future they do not fully understand yet.The albums are something else.They are the songs Exit writes as an artist. As the story unfolds. Not as narration. Not as summary. They exist the way real songs do. As a place to cope, to channel, to explore what cannot always be said out loud.The music is not a direct soundtrack.
It is her art.Some songs intersect directly with the story. A relationship. A feeling. A moment in time. Others are not tied to specific experiences at all. They move through ideas, humor, tension, survival, and the ordinary weight of being human. Together, they offer a fuller picture of who Exit is beyond the page.How the books and albums connectThe novels show Exit living her life. Relationships. Boundaries. Band dynamics. Growth.The albums show how she processes life. Writing songs to understand herself, the world around her, and feelings that do not belong to one moment or one story.Some tracks reflect people or moments from the books.
Many do not. Because art is not autobiography, even when it is personal.What makes Volume Rising differentThis is a true double trilogy.
Three novels and three albums developed side by side, each deepening the universe without repeating it.Trauma is present, but not named.
The focus is on living in the after, not explaining the before.Characters are shaped by choices, boundaries, relationships, and attraction. Not categories.Restraint matters here.
There are no magical solutions. No dramatic cures. Growth comes through time, honesty, and accumulation.The emotional setting is ordinary life. Bedrooms. Parking lots. Radios. Quiet moments. Because that is where most life happens.The heart of the universeVolume Rising is about the through.The long middle.
The part where life keeps going, voice keeps forming, and art becomes a way to stay.It trusts the reader and listener to feel what is not spelled out.
It allows music to be messy, exploratory, and human.
It believes that finding your voice does not always mean being louder.Sometimes it means finally standing.

• Back

The Origins of Volume Rising
_{Volume Rising did not start as a series. It started as a journal.}The earliest version paired lyrics with prompts. I was thinking about how music unlocks memory and emotion faster than almost anything else, how a song can drop you back into a moment you did not know you were still carrying. The prompts were an invitation for the reader to step into the emotional space of each song and respond to it themselves.When I looked at the lyrics together, I realized they were not isolated pieces. They formed an album. More than that, they formed a story. That became the Origins EP.From there, the questions shifted. Who is the voice inside these songs. Who is the person singing them. Songs like Exit 7 Is a Trap felt too specific to be abstract. I wanted to know who that person was and where she came from.That question became the main character, Exit.I wrote a graphic novel around the themes of the EP, building Exit’s origin story. Her first crush and first heartbreak. How she chose her name. How she survives trauma and learns to cope through movement, music, and silence. I wrote and produced her story up to her first performance with a band.Once she had a first show, I needed to know what came next. How she finds her voice over time. How she grows. How healing actually looks when it is not clean or linear. The world expanded quickly. A band formed. A tour followed. That meant a novel, and a new album for that band to tour with.Those became the next books and music albums in the series, following the band through their first tour, their fractures, and their reconnections. By the time I reached Book 3, the story did not feel finished. Not because it needed more plot, but because I did not want to let the characters go yet. That book exists so we could live in the volume a little longer.I wrote all three books in half a year and released them within the same year so readers would not have to wait years between installments. I wanted the experience to feel continuous, the way music does.My writing evolved alongside the characters. Writing as Exit allowed me to reach emotional spaces I never would have otherwise. I cried while writing some scenes. I missed the characters between books. By the end of Book 3, I felt I had honored them well enough to set the story down.Volume Rising grew because it needed to.
I followed it where it led.

• Back

Exit
_{An introduction to a voice finding room to exist}Exit came to me as a name before she was anything else.She chose it quietly, at a moment when staying felt harder than leaving. Not because she wanted to disappear, and not as a threat. She chose it because she needed proof that she had a say. That there was a door. That she could decide when to step through it, or when to stay put.The name was not about escape. It was about agency. It was the first place she told the truth about herself, even before she knew what that truth would cost. Finding the name is the beginning of finding her voice. Not all at once. Not cleanly. Just enough to start.Exit grew up learning how to be careful. She was a skateboard kid, the kind who stayed out because home was not safe or steady, because motion was better than stillness. She learned how to fall without making a sound. How to keep moving. How to ride until the noise in her head evened out. She still skateboards now. Not because she is running, but because movement reminds her she is here.She writes lyrics on whatever is nearby. Receipts. Notebooks. Cereal boxes. She names her guitar and her board because naming things makes them survivable. She notices rooms, silences, the way sound lands in a body. She is funny in a sideways way. Dry. Observant. Tired in the way people get when they have lived through things they do not feel the need to explain.Being with Exit feels like sitting next to someone who understands the cost of speaking and does not rush you into it.The story opens in a narrow window of time, when the band is just forming and everything is fragile and unproven. It follows them through the early stretch of becoming, writing and recording a few albums, loading into small rooms, going on tour, learning how to perform without turning themselves into something they do not recognize.There is some rock and roll here, but it is the grounded kind. Vans. Venues. Soundchecks. Exhaustion. The strange quiet after a set. The important things happen offstage as often as they do under lights.The band is Volume Rising, an alternative band held together by feel as much as sound.Dev plays bass and sings backup vocals, building the architecture of the songs, quiet and exact, holding melody like they are holding breath, making space where others do not know they need it yet.Leo is lead guitar and sound, shaping texture and steadiness, the kind of presence that makes a room safer just by paying attention.Jax is drums, timing, humor, the pulse that keeps things moving when they get heavy, calling bullshit when it matters and keeping everyone breathing through it.Together, they are learning how to be a family. Not the fixed kind, and not the perfect kind. The chosen kind. The kind that forms slowly, through trust, missteps, repair, shared silence, and deciding to stay anyway.Acceptance here is not loud. It shows up in who waits, who listens, who makes room when someone else cannot speak.What binds them is not ambition. It is showing up. Practice rooms. Long drives. Bad days that do not turn into big scenes. Someone going still and the others not trying to fix it. Songs that hurt differently each time they are played. Learning how to take up space together without apology.There is love in this story, the quiet kind, the kind that grows out of attention and patience. Sometimes it looks like romance. Sometimes it looks like friendship that goes deeper than expected. Sometimes it is just someone staying close without asking for anything back. None of it is framed as rescue. It is connection, imperfect and real.Exit is written in first person because she is meant to feel like companionship, not performance. She is not explaining herself or narrating at you. She is with you. She trusts you to notice what she notices. To hear what is not said. To sit in the pauses.There is pain here, but it is not pointed at or named. Healing does not arrive all at once. It shows up in fragments. In breath. In staying. In choosing silence instead of being silenced.
This story does not rush toward answers. It fades instead of ending.If you spend time with Exit, if you ride along, listen closely, maybe play the songs in the car and turn the volume up just enough, you will not be handed conclusions.
But you might leave knowing how to stay a little better.

• Back

The Making Of_{Volume Rising was built in layers, often in motion.}Most of it was written on my phone. For the first half of the project, I did not have a laptop. Scenes were drafted in notes apps, on couches, between obligations, wherever there was a moment to catch a line before it disappeared. I didn’t wait for ideal conditions. I worked with what I had.All of the novel text was written by me, fully human in concept, voice, and execution. The same is true of the lyrics. Every song began on the page, written line by line, shaped through revision the way any piece of writing is. The voice came first. Everything else followed.As the story grew, so did the scope. I handled the writing, editing, layout, graphic design, and book cover design myself. I learned copyright and registration processes as I went. I researched printers, prepared files, managed revisions, and made decisions usually split across entire teams.At the same time, I was teaching myself how to be a songwriter. That part mattered. Exit grows as a songwriter over the course of the series, so I let myself grow alongside her. I wrote over fifty in-universe songs, starting from lyrics, fragments, or a single hook, then slowly shaping them into full tracks. The early songs are rougher. The later ones are more confident. That evolution is intentional.The music was built piece by piece. I am a lyricist first, and a producer by necessity. I shaped the sound through experimentation, revision, and listening closely to what each song needed. Digital tools, including AI-assisted audio tools, made it possible to bring the music to life at the scale this story required. Without them, the sound simply would not exist in this form.Each track moved through multiple tools and passes. In total, there were thousands of versions created to arrive at the songs that now exist on streaming platforms. Nothing was one-click. Nothing was automatic.I also handled graphic design for the albums, lyric preparation, mixing decisions, copyrighting, distribution setup, and metadata. I learned how different tools spoke to each other, and how to make them work together so the story could live across sound, text, and image.It took about a year to build Volume Rising across books, music, and visual design. I worked on every part of it, often at the same time, often without knowing exactly how I would solve the next problem. I learned by doing. I adjusted. I kept going.This work was made alongside real life, not separate from it. While building Volume Rising, I was also parenting, caregiving, working a full-time job, navigating medical realities, and moving through major life changes, including getting engaged. Like most lives, it was not one thing at a time. The project grew in the middle of all of it. Volume Rising became more than a creative endeavor for me. It became a place to return to, a way to stay oriented, and a reason to keep moving forward when life felt crowded or heavy. It held me while I was holding everything else.I let the characters lead the story the whole way. The plot grew organically, guided by who they were and what they needed, not by a predetermined arc. This is how the Volume Rising universe was built. These pages belong to the characters who live inside them. I’m grateful you’re here to meet them.

• Back

• Home

• Which Character Are You
• Find Your Song
• Gig Rush Game
• The Vault

• Back

• Back

• Back

• Back

Audio Deep Dives exploring the universe of Volume Rising. This is where you come after you've finished the series and want to dive deeper. Audio Deep Dives were created using notebooklm.Caution: Major Spoilers Ahead!

• Back