On Fibbing To 'Rookie' Magazine And Eating Froot Loops From The Box

"It's always a bit of a weird thing with Teeth & Tongue," Jess Cornelius muses, "'cause people are always like, 'Is it solo or is it a band?' And, you know, there's press photos with the band and there's press photos of just me and it's just a really strange situation; it's kind of ever-evolving." Sitting in an airy Brunswick cafe, Cornelius wears a snug-looking houndstooth jacket and cradles a cup of chai tea (with soy) in her hands. There's a hair elastic around her right wrist. "We did just recently replace the keyboardist-slash-backing singer," Cornelius adds, before clarifying that Teeth & Tongue have been a four-piece for two years now. "Damian [Sullivan] the bass player's been playing with us for three years and Marc [Regueiro-McKelvie]'s been playing with me since 2011 so, you know, it's essentially longer than that for a lot of the members."

"You're the only one who can fix it, but someone else can help you identify that a part's not working."

For Teeth & Tongue's latest Give Up On Your Health album, Cornelius acknowledges, "The band were incredible, they were a much bigger part of the arrangement process than they ever have been before… They had a huge influence, I think, on the way the album sounds." Before Cornelius took the songs to the band, she "had a bit of a songwriting workshop thing going on with Laura Jean". "We met when we were both studying writing together… we both did the RMIT Professional Writing & Editing course," she explains. The pair would "bring each other songs" since Jean was "writing at the same time". On songwriting, Cornelius observes, "You're the only one who can fix it, but someone else can help you identify that a part's not working."

After being accepted for a NES Artist Residency, Cornelius spent some time in Iceland hoping to work up some material for her latest album. "It didn't necessarily produce the kinds of songs that I wanted to be doing for the next record, so it was interesting," she admits. Although Cornelius "didn't have all [her] normal resources", she did "get access to the church… so there was all these, like, really bad piano ballads that came out," she laughs. The motivation behind securing a residency for Cornelius was to see what would happen if she focused entirely on music "for two months", although her initial urge was "to go somewhere warm". "I was like, 'I wanna go to Turkey or something and sit by the Mediterranean Sea and write songs'."

Dianne is a standout album track, and Cornelius commends, "Laura actually had a big part [in] that, she helped me with that one". This song's music video sees the band dancing around crazily in a bedroom and Cornelius confesses, "I felt really weird talking about it in interviews. I did this kinda interview with Rookie magazine in the US when they premiered the video... They were asking all about it and I think I ended up saying something like we'd had heaps of sugar, 'cause I didn't wanna say that I was really drunk. It was, like, 11 o'clock and I was wasted — I wasn't wasted, but I had [to] be all jumping around. I was like, 'I can't say that'." So does Cornelius ordinarily eat Fruit Loops straight from the box as depicted in said video? "Sometimes," she chuckles.