FEATURE:
Spotlight
PHOTO CREDIT: Chelsea Balan
Tommy Lefroy
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BUILDING from the incredible…
PHOTO CREDIT: Chelsea Balan
Flight Risk EP of 2021, Tommy Lefroy had a storming 2022. There is so much promise and hope for thus year. A duo who have been tipped for success and riches this year, everyone needs to go and check them out. I am actually going to go back to an interview from last year, before hopping back to 2021, then coming back to last year - before finishing on an interview from this year. I wanted to start with Tongue Tied, as they sort of introduced the transatlantic duo; speaking with them around the time of the single release for Dog Eat Dog. It couldn’t have been easy for the duo to build and record music during the pandemic (2020-2020), and sort of rebuild and adapt coming out of it:
“Composed of singer-songwriters Tessa Mouzourakis and Wynter Bethel, Tommy Lefroy found its footing as a quarantine project turned success story. The duo initially met in Nashville in 2017 working as songwriters for others, and when COVID hit, they found themselves split between London and LA with nothing to do. Instead of sitting complacent within the world’s isolation, Tessa and Wynter found themselves writing and producing music over zoom, eventually finding themselves releasing their debut EP Flight Risk in November of 2021 and putting Tommy Lefroy on the map as an emerging artist to watch out for. Now that they’ve reveled in their own exploration of love, loss, and exploring their new artistry, Tommy Lefroy is back with their newest single “Dog Eat Dog”, out today. I got the chance to catch up with Tessa and Wynter pre-release to chat about “Dog Eat Dog” and the new era of Tommy Lefroy.
Creating music in the same city is a new experience for the COVID-created Tommy Lefroy, who previous to “Dog Eat Dog” had created almost all of their music virtually over zoom. Having the ability to be in the same place has granted Mouzourakis and Bethel a variety of benefits in their creation process, between the ability to bounce ideas more readily off each other, collaborate in real time, or even just be in the same time zone, but their unique DIY beginnings still affect their process even now.
“Writing is such a big part of how we process our experiences, so with Tommy, it's been just a pretty safe space to bring that first instinct stream of consciousness of what we're going through, how things feel, or what we want to say. On this next project, we've challenged ourselves even more to let go with our writing. We would literally just sit at my kitchen table in LA and just write a stream of consciousness for like 30 minutes and then go back and pick out what we like from it. I think we needed that type of release because of everything that's happened. We have an audience which we're so grateful for, and we wanted to make sure that we didn't overthink these songs because we are overthinkers. It’s really important to us that the writing for the project just stays this sort of protected thing, this safe space that we can return to that isn't affected as much by expectations, whether it be our own, or the team, or the fans. It really is important that there's just a purity to it, so that's what we've tried to keep and protect.” - Wynter Bethel of Tommy Lefroy, for Tongue Tied Magazine”.
“I think so much of the process of making Flight Risk was very apprehensive. We had to work through a lot of insecurity and imposter syndrome to just prove to ourselves that we could do it at all. With the year that we've had and the trajectory that the music has taken, everything has completely blown our minds. Now we're no longer fighting as many of those roadblocks of if we even have a right to tell a story, because there is an audience and people are excited to see what we have to say. We’re able to tell our stories without that entry barrier, but now our lives are totally different. When we wrote a lot of the songs of Flight Risk, we weren't living in the same city, but now we've had a lot more shared experiences. So much is informing this next season, and I I think it feels a little bit more grown up. It's more reflective and more, we say, taking accountability because yeah, there's a difference between an early experience of heartbreak versus looking back on a situation two years later and processing it. Looking back, what did you gain from that heartbreak that you're taking forward with you into the next step and the next relationships? We're kind of growing up and figuring out as we go, and all of the music is reflective of that.” - Wynter Bethel of Tommy Lefroy, for Tongue Tied Magazine
“The biggest feeling I have looking at this upcoming body of work is it feels a little bit more empowered. I think we're just really coming into ourselves in being Tommy through this process. And I think these songs are reflecting that sort of ownership we're taking. I like to say it's kind of like taking back the narrative in a sense. It's like. Someone actually on the Discord server we have was asking me a question about the meaning behind the lyric “hopeless wordsmith” from “The Cause”. Looking at this new song, I'd like to think this era is a little less hopeless, a little more wordsmith.” - Tessa Mouzourakis of Tommy Lefroy, for Tongue Tied Magazine”.
I have focused a lot on solo artists for the Spotlight series, so I wanted to correct that by speaking about a duo. You get that closeness and connection, in addition to focus. Bands can be quite unwieldy or seem a little disconnected at time. Solo artists have to burden everything themselves and are naturally limited when it comes to vocals and songwriting. A duo offers that perfect blend that you can hear with Tommy Lefroy. They are definitely going to endure and be around for a very long time. I do want to hop back to 2021, as Guitar Girl Mag wanted to know about the single, Vampires, but we got to discover some background and influences of the amazing duo (whose name derives from Jane Austen, whose former lover was the infamous, original ‘fu*kboy’, Thomas Lefroy):
“What inspired your new song, “Vampires?”
W – My roommate and I walked to the grocery on Halloween morning of 2019, in LA. He was actually nursing a cold and bought garlic. I think I bought a Reese’s. I was having a hard season and was so grateful for him that morning. He was navigating a challenging relationship at the time and was really down about himself. I recorded a voice memo in my phone later that day, literally in the walk-in fridge of my day job, “You can fall in love a thousand times, I just want for you to love your life”
I brought the idea to Tessa a couple of weeks after when she was visiting in LA, and we were writing at our friend Justin Lucas’s quaint garage studio in Venice Beach. We knew we needed to write a song for our friends, as they have shaped us so much as people. We had so often seen them through situations where they doubted themselves, but we never once did. The second verse came from conversations with a couple of our best friends, about big life transitions and recoveries from losses.
What’s your songwriting process? Melody first, or lyrics?
Most often, both come at the same time. When we write for Tommy, we usually start with a verse one of us has or a title that feels relevant to what we’ve been experiencing lately. We write a lot of poems, and we love to reference other writers, history, and myths in our lyrics. We usually start with a concept and then really dig into it.
What do you hope your fans/listeners take away with them when they listen to your music?
T – I want them to feel heard. It’s so special when people reach out and say they resonate with something we wrote.
W – Definitely. Want to offer a bit of relief and solidarity haha.
T – That’s also one of my favorite parts of performing – watching people sing the lyrics back to us, and with just as much conviction haha.
W – Totally. I hope the music can provide listeners a space to feel their feelings fully. Producing the music ourselves allows us to cultivate that space, to build a world that a listener could spend time in. If these songs can be the soundtrack to a thoughtful time in just one person’s life, I’ll feel like we’ve succeeded haha. Writing-wise, this project has become such a safe space for us, to tell our stories both bluntly and cheekily. I hope people feel the humor in it because that is such a coping mechanism for us. It allows us to talk about some really heavy experiences while also laughing at ourselves a bit.
How did you get started in music? What’s the backstory there?
W – My parents and my dad especially are huge fans of music. One of my first coherent memories is listening to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumors.’ I’ve always been coming up with little stories and I started doing musical theater when I was 5. My sister was an artist and a songwriter, and I grew up watching her. I started my first band in the 8th grade and played with the same few friends throughout high school. We toured around Michigan in a GMC van. Then I got a degree in music business, in Nashville where Tessa and I met.
T – I’m not sure how or why I fell into music, neither of my parents were especially musical, but I’ve been obsessed ever since I was a kid. I was always writing, I loved making up poems and stories, and started keeping a notebook of songs I’d “written” when I was 8. I taught myself to play guitar when I was 12 (Taylor Swift’s ‘Teardrops On My Guitar’ was the first song I learned) and spent the rest of my teenage years gigging around my hometown of Vancouver, BC. Eventually, I landed in Nashville.
What kind of guitar do you play?
T – I play a black HSS American Fender Strat.
W – I play a white fender jaguar. It’s an American Reissue from like 2016. I replaced the pick guard with a pearl one”.
Before coming relatively up to date, I actually want to squeeze in an interview NME. Chronologically, this came in 2022, before the release of Dog Eat Dog. The duo were speaking about their latest track, The Cause. I was interested to know more about that track, in addition to how their name came about:
“NME: Your band name Tommy Lefroy comes from Jane Austen’s love interest. Why did you settle on that name?
Wynter: “It started as a joke. A friend of mine was genuinely joking and said you should call it Tommy Lefroy. We were contemplating it for a while, but that was the name that we kept coming back to.”
Tessa: “I love Jane Austen and I love that era, but the other thing I loved about the name is that it’s a boy’s name: it’s like our own nom de plume. A lot of female writers from that era were initially published under boy’s names, like the Brontes and George Elliot. There’s a history there, so it felt like a nod to that as well. The Austen era was such a man’s world and she was giving a voice to the experiences of women. She’s also an author who was quite radical within the constraints of the time. She wrote strong female characters who were just living their lives, and that’s what we’re trying to do as well.”
‘The Cause’ is a criticism of the men you have dated with “god complexes and liberal arts degrees“. Is songwriting in this humorous tone a way to process the hurt of your past relationships?
Tessa: “Totally. Our sense of humour is very similar. It’s quite self-deprecating. We know that we have similar tastes to these men that we’ve dated. We don’t want to pretend like we also haven’t read Jack Kerouac because we have. We also listen to Elliott Smith. I personally deal with a lot of grief and sadness through humour.”
Wynter: “We need humour. Life is so heavy. For us, humour has been a really foundational aspect of survival. With this project, even the name started as a joke. We are serious people, but, also, we laugh at ourselves all the time. When you get your heart broken it is funny, especially when you consider the person who broke your heart. They have so much power and you’re looking at them like, how did this happen? What is this sorcery?”
Having divided your time between London and LA, how do you deal with not letting the pressure of living in big cities affect you as artists?
Tessa: “My experience of London has been very positive, because I feel like there’s a lot of community here looking to help and lift each other up. People are really interested in the music: if they like what you’re doing, they will talk to you and you can get their respect.”
Wynter: “Compared to other cities we’ve been in, London, for us, is less of a music city because I have friends here who don’t work in music. In other places I’ve lived, everyone I knew was also working in music, and that’s when it can get a little hard. Finding good, grounded people has been so helpful in remembering that there’s so much more than this. At the end of the day, we care very much about the project, but we’re also just making silly little songs.”
When you played at The Lexington recently, the crowd were singing the songs back to you word-for-word. How did that feel?
Tessa: “Surreal. The first time the crowd screamed the lyrics I was completely taken aback. I felt like I was in a fever dream.”
Wynter: “It feels like you can’t believe it’s happening. I have to try really hard to stay in it and focus on playing. Like, ‘Don’t cry!’. It’s really special. It makes me realise it’s bigger than us. The songs are so important to us, and we never could’ve imagined that they would also have so much importance to others. The songs have a life outside of us now. We say that we’re just writing silly songs, but people are listening to us and we want to be there for them”.
I will finish off by highlighting section of a great new interview from The Forty-Five. A big hope for this year, Tommy Lefroy are growing with every song release. They put out the single, Worst Case Kid, recently, and it is another gem from a duo should be known by all. I would love to see them live this year, so I will keep an eye on their social media sites to see where they are heading off to. I suspect there will be an E.P. later this year. Maybe an album:
“You guys got together after Tessa posted a boygenius cover online. What was it about their music that resonated with you?
Wynter: We saw them live on the same tour. For me it was a pivotal moment because I grew up playing in bands with boys. No one outright told me that I was less entitled to making rock music as a woman, but there was always this subversive feeling that it would be harder because there were more barriers to entry. Seeing boygenius solidified this idea of women not only making raw and emotional rock music, but also being individual songwriters with awesome things going on in their own rights coming together to make this supergroup. We were both writing for other artists at the time, so we wanted to have this project that was a culmination of that whilst continuing to be individual writers and producers.
Tessa: It was also an emblem of friendship in the industry. They came together as friends and that was a huge part of their story that I found inspiring.
What do you guys think of the “sad girl” trope? Do you find it reductive at all?
Wynter: I love the sad girl trope, but I can see how it might be reductive, especially since we both struggle with our mental health. We don’t want to diminish it by playing into a reductive stereotype, but it’s been an interesting era of music. I think those key artists in the genre have opened a lot of doors for us to make the kind of music we make.
Tessa: There’s a special community there as well, of people finding company in that sadness. If you do too much of anything it feels overdone, but it’s integral to our experience so it feels true to us.
Wnyter: From my experience, it’s often up to women to start conversations. Our generation is moving towards having open conversations about mental health, and I think the sad girl trope is just women leading the conversation as they usually would.
There’s a lack of female producers in the industry in general. Do you have any advice for women starting out that might lack confidence because of how male-dominated it is?
Wynter: Don’t be afraid to start. Growing up, all my guy friends were audio nerds and I had this subversive feeling it was something for them and not for me. I was hesitant to start because I felt like I had to do it well. But you have to start, because you have to be a bad producer before you can be a good producer. One of the hardest things about making this project was that we’d spend days pouring over these songs and they’d still sound like shit, but we just had to keep going. Some of the best advice I was given was that “your skillset might not always align with your tastes, so you have to work up to it”. Have patience with yourself throughout the journey.
Where do you see Tommy Lefroy’s place in the pop landscape, and what are your goals for 2023?
Tessa: For next year we’re hoping to play more shows in the States. We’re doing a support tour for Samia, who we’re huge fans of, so that’s a real full-circle moment. Hopefully writing more songs and releasing more music too.
Wynter: It’s funny, we never intended Tommy to feel like a pop project. It’s fun to be friends with and collaborate with pop artists whilst staying on the fringes of it. We want to exist in the indie landscape because we love the community so much. People are cooler and more lowkey – we can meet a fan and have a real conversation because there’s not hype in the same way.
Tessa: We’ve found an amazing community with the music so far. Everyone we’ve been meeting after shows have been so thoughtful and kind. It’s been one of my favourite parts of the tour”.
A terrific duo who I absolutely love and know will be a huge act to watch through this year, Tessa Mouzourakis and Wynter Bethel’s Tommy Lefroy is amazing! Go and follow them and check the music out. Such a brilliant act who are going to be with us for many years, I am really interested to see…
WHAT comes next.
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