Melbourne-via-NZ alt-pop outfit Teeth & Tongue have just released their fourth album, Give Up On Your Health.
Of the album, songwriter Jess Cornelius tells us, “In the past I’ve written personal material, but this album is more about observation. I was reading essays by American poet Eileen Myles and she has this stream-of-consciousness style, no filter.” Jess has detailed each track for us below, revealing some fascinating tidbits about the process.
Give Up On Your Health was released Friday via Dot Dash / Remote Control, and having spent 2015 touring with the likes of Courtney Barnett, Teeth & Tongue will now be taking the album on the road throughout Australia (dates below), kicking things off this week at BIGSOUND.
Give Up On Your Health
I think I’d just started playing around with arpeggiated synth lines when I wrote this, and I fell in love with that relentless, driving aspect they bring to a song, and how the notes move around the beat and syncopate depending on when you hit the key. I think this was actually written using a tacky pre-set drumbeat on my very un-trendy non-vintage keyboard. The drum beat was super repetitive and I like that sort of thing.
The lyrics took a bit of time to come together and I guess it’s a bit more abstract than some of the others. It’s essentially about that idea of ‘staying on form’; maintaining a position or status or level of achievement. You know, if famous actors disappear and stop making movies, people just assume they’ve failed and they turn up on those ‘Where are they now’ segments. But what if they’ve just decided they’d prefer to run a milk bar or deliver pamphlets instead? Might happen. I was also referring to the the lengths we’ll go to to maintain that level… it can be pretty destructive. Hence the title.
Do Harm
Argh, this one is hard to write about. It’s probably one of the most directly personal songs I’ve ever released, and as I was writing it I knew I didn’t want to shy away from that directness – I didn’t want to make it vague and ambiguous. I lost a bit of sleep over this one, actually.
On a broader level though, it’s about what hate and bitterness can do to you if you carry it around for too long. And it’s also about taking responsibility. Eventually, we all have to decide whether we’re willing to let somebody else fuck up our lives for us.
Small Towns
This was the first song I wrote while on the residency in Iceland, and the only one of that whole batch that actually made it onto the album. I had limited instruments there- I was really just working off a tiny midi controller and some really bad midi instrument plugins, so that why it ended up with all these fizzy trance synths and things. I made the drum beat on some crappy bundled software that I’d never used before, so I didn’t really know what I was doing. And that’s always good for pushing you into new areas.
I’d just arrived in this crazy snowdrift of a town, and it was dark most of the time and when it was daylight there was usually a blizzard. There wasn’t anything to do but write, and I was jetlagged anyway, so I started this crazy routine of getting up at 5am and doing stretches in the living room (cos you couldn’t really walk for exercise) and then going to the studio in the pitch black so I could make noise while no one else was there. I loved the routine, and I felt like maybe I could do it forever. “Who needs pubs and romance and gigs and parties and a social life and relationships?” I thought. But I was wrong. I went nuts in about three weeks.
When We Met
This is a love song. Or maybe a lust song. You know, when you fall for someone and you just want to stare at their face and listen to them talk. Even if they’re just talking about their favourite brand of kitty litter or how they used to like peanuts but now they don’t.
Cupcake Revisited
Obviously this is a re-working of a song we put out a few years ago. The original version was just a stand-alone single and it didn’t have a home so we wanted to put it on the new album, but we knew it just wouldn’t work sonically with the rest of the record.
We played around with a lot of ideas in the lead up to the recording, but nothing was really working. It still had this sort of hoe-down country feel to it. It wasn’t till we were halfway through recording the album that I had a bit of a sleep-induced epiphany (that’s probably too strong a word for it) and rushed into the studio the next day and made everyone drop what they were doing so we could have a crack. The band (all being much better musicians than me) made the idea work properly and two hours later we had a new song. It was a bit of a trip.
Your Ghost Is the Hardest to Kill
I sang the start of this song into my phone while locked in a Tokyo bathroom. I was on holiday but I couldn’t enjoy it because I was stuck in a weird cycle of regret about the past. Pretty morbid.
I wanted this song to have an intense trance bass wop-wop-wop-wop thing happening – I don’t know, I had a particular sound in my mind…and what we came up with as a band was a kind of electronic-blues-soul thing. It was so fun to arrange, and it’s fun to play live, because the time signature switches around a bit and gets a bit proggy which is not something we do much of normally.
Dianne
Dianne started life as more of a garagey guitar song, but after we’d demoed it it just seemed too separate from the other tracks. Damian (bassist) had the idea of replacing the bass with synths and then we took out some of the guitars and re-worked it.
When I was working on the organ part I was really inspired by Eddie Raynor’s keyboard playing on Split Enz’s ‘I See Red’. I watched the music video for it over and over again, and just mashed the keyboard maniacally until the right notes came out.
Callback
There’s a bit of a yacht rock vibe to this. Originally I wrote it on a guitar that had been tuned to open G minor, giving it this laid-back, melancholy Hawaiian vibe. But when we played it live I either had to retune the whole guitar or bring two guitars to every show. At the time of writing I’ve just learned to play it in standard E tuning, and it’s a revelation. I don’t know why it took me so long.
If you were going to tell a story about the song then I guess the story would be about a person who’s in love with some music industry player and the person is worried that the music industry player will get caught up in the hollow world of moving and shaking and money making and sexy people and forget what the important things in life are. Or maybe it’s just about love and jealousy, like most yacht rock songs.
Are You Satisfied?
I had the melody in my head for this before I picked up an instrument, and the first instrument I happened to pick up was Logic Drummer (shhhh). So you can thank that program for the trappy drum beat. And I think I was listening to a lot of The Weeknd at the time.
When Haima Marriot (co-producer) came on board we had to do a lot of work on it – I think it gave Haima a headache. We took stuff out, put it in, chopped it up, moved it around. The bass line took about 3 separate sessions to get right. Actually, it gave me a headache too. But it was fun and in the end we got it where we wanted it. I’m particularly fond of the harpsichord solo– it could be my proudest moment on record. Just don’t ask me to play it live.
Turn, Turn, Turn.
We recorded this track ages ago, before we started working on the album properly, and it ended up influencing everything that came later. I wrote the first half of it on guitar, but then transferred it to arpeggiated synth at band practice one day. James and Damian started doing all this funky shit to it, which was totally fine by me, ‘cause I love a good clave. And then Marc played that guitar riff and that sort of informed the rest of the song.
It took a while to come together – we’d get stuck and then I’d go away and play it on guitar again to figure out what needed to happen next. But it was still very collaborative. At one point we didn’t have a proper ending so we’d just segue into the Beach Boys’ ‘Kokomo’, which can never be a bad vibe.
We wanted to put it out as a stand-alone single last year, because at that point we were so far from recording another album. But Steve from Remote Control was like – ‘We love the song but we want an album to go with it,’ and so I said ‘OK sure’ and then I was like ‘Uh Oh’.
It didn’t really change the way I wrote songs, it just helped determine which songs we persevered with and how we arranged them. We had quite a clear idea of the sound we wanted, and that was a good thing, because I wrote a lot of kooky piano ballads in Iceland about recycling and euthanasia, and all of that ended up on the cutting room floor. Steve told me that if I ever make that album it’s going straight to Bandcamp.
