Jess Cornelius is always changing into something else, something new.
An artist in motion, she moved from her native New Zealand to Australia, before lettering soaking up West Coast elements in the United States.
Her work as Teeth & Tongue earned widespread acclaim, growing from a solo project into a full band.
Last year’s solo album saw Jess strip her sound right down, and it gains a full UK release on May 14th.
The innovation isn’t over, however, with the songwriter deciding to reimagine her album cut ‘Body Memory’.
The newly re-drafted ‘Body Memory (Peach Fuzz Version)’ is a dreamy, somnambulist cut, something that emerged from her own whims, and explorative urges.
She describes: “I’d started playing the song for myself in a totally different way – on echoey guitar instead of keys, with a dreamy, melancholic mood, and wanted to record it as a sort of ‘part two’. It’s like a new cover of my own song, I guess.”
“When I started recording the demo I ended up capturing all these distant sounds that got all distorted in the process: a nail gun, a baby, police sirens, which I kept in for the final recording. I added harpsichord, synth and drums, and Jarvis Taveniere added bass during the mixing. The rolling toms and shaker in the outro added this new little groove and moved the mood again. To me this almost feels like a new song; ‘I was my own woman once’ is now less defiant and more reflective, maybe even yearning.”
We’re able to share the full video for ‘Body Memory (Peach Fuzz Version)’, shot in the Sequoia National Forest in northern California.
Jess comments: “I had the idea for the visual for a while – this hyper-artificial neon outfit against a lush forest backdrop. I made the dress the night before the shoot, using some high-visibility fabric I’d been given years ago. But when we got out to the forest, about half of the trees were dead – killed off by drought and bark beetles exacerbated by rising temperatures. The video inadvertently became a sort of environmental lament – about a different kind of loss and love.”
Tune in now.
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