Teeth & Tongue, the project of New Zealand-born singer-songwriter Jess Cornelius, has been filling the world with melancholy pop gems for over half a decade.
Though it’s been two years since their last effort Grids, Cornelius is about to unleash a new album, Give Up On Your Health, with lead single ‘Dianne’ already creating waves.
Despite the fact that Teeth & Tongue’s combination of radio-ready melodies and dark, melancholy lyrical content is still evident across the new record, Cornelius says the writing process that brought it into the world was markedly different from the approach behind her other albums. “This album was a lot more collaborative,” she says. “We recorded it more like a band.
“On the last two records I programmed all the drums tracks first, which made the arrangements a little bit more rigid and simple. This time I’ve been working with the full band and we arranged the songs as a group. That was a really fun process. Because the studio’s not soundproofed, we couldn’t do proper band rehearsals so I bought some headphones for all of us and our rehearsals were like a silent disco in this pokey little room”.
Prior to recording, Cornelius spent time at the Nes artist’s residency in Iceland. Though it’s tempting to assume that the experience directly affected Give Up,as far as Cornelius is concerned, Iceland altered the record in distinctly subtle ways.
“Well it’s interesting,” she says. “What it did do was make me realise what kind of album I didn’t want to make. The objective was to go there to write an album, and I normally don’t write in big blocks like that. I normally write songs over a long period of time in-between doing everything else in my life, so this was a very intense process.
“I really forced myself to write every day, and I don’t necessarily think that produced the best songs but it meant that I got a lot of stuff out of my system,” Cornelius continues. “It was so isolated that there wasn’t a lot to write about except for my own emotional journey and my own neurotic thought processes. Being stuck in this isolated place with nothing to do at night means you just have a lot of time to think, so of course the songs I wrote there were very internally focused. There were a lot of strange songs. I think I wrote one about non-recyclable coffee cups.”
For Cornelius, writing a song often requires a series of artistic left turns: the finished project rarely ever resembles like the sonic sketch that kicks the whole process off. “‘Dianne’ was a much more garage-y guitar song for a while,” she explains. “But I like taking a song and doing a bunch of different things with it.”
Though ‘Dianne’ might seem positively effervescent on the surface, Cornelius argues that the song is underpinned with anger, driven by a duality that matches the beautiful with the broken. “I wanted this album to be an enjoyable listen and not be too dark, but ‘Dianne’ came from a bit of an angry place. I wasn’t intentionally trying to create that sort of division: it just happened naturally. But I think that’s where the high energy comes from. Actually, it’s frustration probably more than anger.”
A lot of Give Up touches on real moments from Cornelius’ life: from elements plucked from her real-world surrounds. But the autobiographical nature of the record did come with its own concerns and Cornelius found herself worried that her friends and family would notice themselves in the record. “It’s kept me awake at night!” she laughs. “I had to just let it go. Some of it’s about my family and people I know, so I was worried about how they would react.
“You just hope that people will understand that it’s just a moment and that you only feel that way maybe for a day and that’s the day you write that song, but it’s not necessarily that black and white. People’s feelings change all the time so it is quite hard owning that.”
Cornelius has previously gone on record as saying that throughout the process of making the album she acted “careless[ly] with her own sanity”. Is that perhaps what the title of the album hints at? Does songwriting take its toll on Cornelius’ health and well-being?
“I’m probably a bit overly sensitive in a lot of ways, but it’s not the songwriting itself that [takes its toll]. I find that part is the most fun. I think most people are the same: that’s why you keep writing. You keep saying you’re never going to write another record and then you write a song that you really want people to hear and of course that turns into doing another record. It’s in the mixing [that] it starts to get a little traumatic because you’re facing the reality of what you’ll be ending up with.
Cornelius laughs. “Making a record is like planning a wedding,” she says. “You want everything to be perfect. You have such high expectations. But it’s not going to be perfect, it’s never going to be perfect. It doesn’t go the way you planned. Ever!”
Teeth & Tongue’sGive Up On Your Health is out through Dot Dash/Remote Control on Friday September 2.
