INTERVIEW: tiffi on latest single 'California': "People have been making music for millions of years, there's no right way to do it. As long as you enjoy it & other people enjoy it, who cares?"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Minori Ueda
Australian singer-songwriter-producer tiffi has been releasing music since 2017, but it wasn’t until last year that she first recorded her beguiling music in a studio. Proving the term ‘bedroom pop’ can sit side by side with an incredibly successful career, her debut single ‘Peppermint Smiles’ has accumulated over 13 million global streams to date and her music inhabits a space between indie, pop and rock with multiple other influences in between.
She has recently released the single ‘California’, which expertly melds pop and rock. Starting with an insistent beat and a discrete electric guitar, alongside tiffi’s gorgeous vocals and melodies, it lends a dance pop feel to the song before ramping up the guitars and rock vibes in the chorus. Lyrically it is a story of revenge and love gone wrong, as tiffi sings of flying to her former lover’s city and showing them exactly what they are missing.
“'california' is about the horrifying realities of internet relationships,” she says. “I grew up online, and it messed me up for a long time. This is a petty song about an imaginary situation where I visit a past lover's city on tour as a famous singer, and I’m sticking it to them.”
tiffi has also released the video for ‘California’, filmed in inner Sydney and directed by Danny Draxx.
“tiffi came to me with this great idea that she wanted to be in a luscious over-the-top dress in a run-down city environment that starkly contrasted Tiff’s outfit - I loved it,” Draxx says. “Come the night of the shoot, actually shooting the concept in public was a significant challenge at first. We had to do many rehearsals to get the timing just right, people were unpredictable, and a show at the Enmore Theatre right across from us even let out mid-way through shooting which resulted in us having to stop until the crowd cleared; but thanks to our amazing and dedicated crew and extras we pulled through and Tiffi nailed this video in 5 takes.”
tiffi is a very special artist who creates music that never fails to connect with you immediately. Combining multiple genres but beholden to none, with smart, emotive, connective lyrics, her songs have a universal appeal without ever losing their uniqueness. A singer that certainly has the potential to become a major star, we recently sat down with tiffi to chat more about the creation of ‘California’ and her career to date.
Hi tiffi, so lovely to speak to you. Can I just say, what you're doing is incredible. We at Women In Pop were immediate fans of your work. It's absolutely gorgeous. I know you've been at it forever, but I want to start with your recent single ‘California’. I love every single thing about this song, the sentiment, the delivery, the melody, the composition, everything. Talk to me about this track.
Oh thank you so much! Actually, I wrote this track a long time ago, like 2020 or 2021 or something. During COVID I was stuck at home, I was stuck online, I was really bored so I ended up talking to a lot of people on the internet and I got myself in some trouble. You know what I mean? The American boys, they’re dangerous! So it's a song about internet relationships. I grew up mostly on the internet, a lot of my friendships and relationships have been online. Even the person that I made the song with. he found me on SoundCloud when I was 13. It's been ages and that's my most established music working relationship, and we've never met before! So I have a lot of experiences with being really far away from people, and having that yearning, longing feeling of wanting to be close to somebody when I'm so far away from them. I wrote this song really quickly, it was like 15 minutes. City Girl, my online producer helped me produce it and it was really fast. It was really quick, and it was very cathartic.
I love it. I'm really interested about your collaboration with City Girl because it it works so well as a whole. Lyrically, there's such fire plus there's fun to it, but with the instrumentals and the melody, it's like you're calling an army down the street with you. How did you guys go about creating that? It all just works so well. Sorry, that was really convoluted. I'm just very excited about the song.
I wrote the whole song on the guitar, I was just playing it acoustically. And I sent them a little voice memo, it sounded really bad! I sent it off to City Girl and they were like ‘I reckon it should sound pop punk, a bit angry’. They sent it back to me and I was like, this is perfect, but it's not quite edgy enough. So I asked one of my friends, he’s from the UK and very into garage punk and all that cool, edgy stuff, if he wanted to add some guitars, and he said he loved it. So three of us collaborated it and it was really fun, it was really easy. It was more me listening and being like, ‘this is what I want it to sound like’. I was telling them ‘I want it to sound a bit shit!’. I wanted it to sound like you're walking down the street, and you hear a girl band practising in their garage and it’s very messy sounding and very silly. That's what I wanted it to sound like.
I love that. Now, you are a self taught, multi instrumentalist, and even just hearing the way you're describing things and the way you want things to sound, there's something that's so lovely in your very no nonsense description. Do you think that could have been moved out of you if you had gone a traditional route of following the rules at music school?
I don't have any sort of experience of music. I don't read sheet music, I can't read guitar tabs, I don't know anything to be honest when it really comes to music theory. All that I know is that I have a good ear and I'm just very creative in that way. The way that I organise music in my brain is a lot different than I know a lot of classical or trained musicians do. There's pros and cons to both, I've definitely worked with and met a lot of trained classical musicians who know it all and can really be like, ‘this will work, or this won't work’. But for me, it's kind of fun. You get to explore, there are no rules or boundaries, you can just do whatever you want. What I've noticed is with people who have learned it in a certain way, they're really confined by certain things like, ‘you shouldn't do that, because XYZ’. To me, it's just like, who cares? If it sounds good to me, then it will sound good to somebody else, I'll just do whatever the hell I want. I feel I get to be much more creative that way.
Can I ask you, I imagine there would be a lot of trepidation going into those writing rooms and working with other artists going ‘I just taught myself’. But you seem to come at it with such honesty and confidence. Do you ever feel a bit nervous about going into those collaboration processes, because you've always worked independently, you started out in your bedroom, your friends are online.
For sure, I had never made a song in person with another person until last year. And I've been making music for a very, very long time. I've always been independent in that way, and so when I come into those sessions with people who know so much more than me, I do have a bit of impostor syndrome, where I'm like I don't really know what I'm doing, I'm kind of a fake musician. But honestly, if you really think about it, people have been organising music, making music, sharing music, using music as a form of communication for millions and millions of years. A lot of people don't organise music in sheet music, in that Western way of organising music. So many cultures and people have done it so many different ways for millions of years, there's no one right way to organise it or say that this is the correct way to do it or say that this is the way that you're supposed to learn it. It really is different for everybody. And I feel like it's not right to say that there's one correct way to do it or say that one person knows more than another person because a creative process is a creative process. A lot of writers don't go to school, a lot of filmmakers don't go to film school, you can do it whatever way you want. As long as it comes out, and you enjoy it and other people enjoy it, then who cares?
Absolutely. What I love about your music is it's so deeply personal, but at the same time in being so personal it's so relatable to the listener. You're delivering these stories, these sentiments that we're used to hearing with a lot more guitars or a lot heavier bassline, but you're always paired the music to beautifully compliment this softness despite how aggressive the sentiment behind it is. What kind of music led you in listening to create the kind of style that you're creating now?
I went through lots and lots of phases as a as a child and a teen. My biggest pop songwriting influence has always been Taylor Swift. I love her so so much, I could never let her go. But also as a teen I listened to a lot of Blink 182, a lot of All Time Low they're my favourite bands, I love them. I listened to Kpop when I was a kid, my parents were really into Westlife, I really liked Westlife, they’re such a good band! So many random influences. I was really into Owl City, that electronic sound. And then the first time I watched the 10 Things I Hate About You movie, I was introduced to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts and I was like, ‘wow, this is incredible, my god a girl band who don't care, so cool’. So there's a lot of pop influences, but a lot of punk influences as well. I listened to a lot of punk music, I think I was an angry teenager, that's what it was! There's also a lot of music I listened to that influences my ideology, but not really the way the music sounds like, like Kanye West and MF Doom.
I think that's gorgeous, and again, it seems to come from a place, like your songs do, of you’ve got nothing to hide. You've ripped off any veil of ‘I need to be cool here’, and in doing so, you've become perpetually cool, which is amazing. You also make very beautiful music videos, has that always been something that has gone part and parcel with your music, the visual aspect?
Honestly, I sometimes tell people that if I could go back and do it all again, I wouldn't have put my face on anything. Because I feel a lot of pressure, I have to look a certain way and I get very hung up on that. But in terms of visuals, whenever I listen to music, I definitely see a music video in my head. That was what I had with ‘California’, it was really exciting. The only thing was I was like I wish it wasn't me doing it, I wish it was someone else! Sometimes it's just really stressful for me because I look back and I don't like the way I look or whatever. I'm very hard on myself, but after a while you look back and you're like, ‘Oh, actually I did all right. I was like making a big fuss over nothing!’
Believe me, it is beautiful! ‘California’, first single from a forthcoming project out later this year. Is there anything you can tell us about that?
Of course! Each track of the project is like a little pastiche of my different experiences when I was coming into the dating scene. When I was growing up, and during high school and stuff, I was very sheltered. I didn't date anyone, I didn’t talk to anyone. I just studied, I just went home, I didn't do anything. And then when I graduated, I had a bit of a moment where I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I don't know what's happening. I'm a young person now, I've never drunk alcohol, like what's going on?’ So then I had a little bit of a rebellious phase, I guess. So it's a lot of little moments from when I was first starting to date people and talk to people, and it was a really big learning curve. I made a lot of mistakes and did a lot of silly stuff, but it's fun and I look back on it really fondly.
‘California’ is out now via One Day. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things tiffi you can follow her on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter.
