My Weekend with A South Jersey Underground Artist

       Friday, I arrived at Detox Studios in the town of Tom’s River to meet with South Jersey artist Teenonami, upon my arrival he greeted me and immediately introduced me to his associates, Tony Lit, the founder of Detox Studios, and fellow South Jersey artist, Lil Figgy.  The three of them had the entirety of Detox Studios booked for their session, which was about 4 hours, and made no waste of their time.  Immediately upon entering the studio I was greeted by a plant grow-tent that had been retrofitted to be a recording booth, covered in padding and other sound-absorbing materials to ensure that the acoustics inside the booth were ideal for recording: no echo, and no reverb.  After making my way past the booth the next immediate structure I took note of was the engineering desk, stacked with top-of-the-line Yamaha studio reference monitors, an iMac loaded with Pro Tools, amps, and other recording evices that most would associate with the environment of a recording studio.

            After getting myself settled in, I simply began to observe their process.  First, their routine begins with examining their collective vault of unfinished songs from either their last session or sessions prior.  Next, once they find a song with an “open” (referring to an open section of an uncomplete song) they reopen the project files from that recording session and begin to continue from where they last left off.  They begin extensively listening to the track and once a concept of a flow enters his mind, Teenonami enters the booth and puts on the reference headphones inside, then he starts by mumbling the building blocks for what he hears in his head, as the cadence for the next verse. The exact words he will rap haven’t entirely entered his thoughts yet, but his focus remains on how the highs and lows of his vocals should fluctuate to match the tempo of the track.  Once he locks that rhythm down, he begins rapping singular bars, locking in the exact flow he practiced only moments earlier but this time introducing comprehensible syllables that eventually take the shape of a catchy, yet meaningful song.  In the instances where Teenonami would encounter writers block, he would consult his engineer and producer, Tony Lit, to help with ideas for lyrics to keep the session moving.  Tony and Teenonami have been working together for quite some time now and have this unspoken synergy when working together.  

Most people would assume that when a song is being made, they are recorded in one go, start to finish with all the lyrics figured out, then an engineer steps in afterwards to make all the adjustments in post-production editing.  However, in the instance of Teenonami and Tony, it’s quite the opposite reality.  They choose to break it down and chip away at the song 4 bars, or measures, at a time, and by doing this it allows Teenonami to fine tune what lyrics he feels fit best for that specific section. Rather than focusing on the song as a whole, breaking it down into 4 measures at a time allows it to be more digestible from a creative standpoint, it allows him to look back at what he said before and analyze if these next 4 bars are going to make sense in succession.  From an outside perspective, one would look at this task as long and repetitive, but for Teenonami this approach has proven fruitful and effective. 

When I finally sat down with him to ask some questions about his process, I asked him how he approaches writers block in the studio, its something that is inevitable and even the best creatives encounter it, his response was that he has to “take a step back and then go a day or two and leave it sitting, and then we listen to it again” after having a fresh set of ears they decide whether to keep working on the song or save it for another day.  When it comes to their relationship as engineer and artist Tony note that “we go back and forth with each other… if he don’t like it, I don’t like it, and if I don’t like it, he don’t like it… when we come together the chemistry’s there.”  

For Teenonami, energy is everything, what he records on any given day ties into how he’s feeling, if there’s a song that requires high energy for the recording, he will only work on it if he’s feeling energetic, if he’s sad or frustrated he will use that energy to make a song along those parameters.  In most cases however, Teenonami arrives to the studio energetic, when asked to describe his music he responded with “Have you ever went to sleep and woke up in the morning and you were like ‘damn, I don’t feel like getting up’?  If you played my songs, you’d probably do a back flip off the bed.” 

With songs like I’m Him, Murder Junkie, & Anniversary, any listener would agree that Teenonami music is high energy and should be played in the company of others that are also energetic.  What is also interesting to note is that at this point in his career, Teenonami has yet to drop a debut album, rather he choses to focus on releasing singles.  By doing so Teenonami has built a strong following of over forty-thousand followers on Instagram, keeping fans engaged and wanting more music.  Even with a decently large following, Teenonami choses to go against the grain of other creatives in his field and sticks with his philosophy, “if I drop a single I can push that single and put something behind it rather than drop a project, I wanted to build my self to a certain point [in my career] so I can drop a project, a lot of artists drop album without having a solid fan base and what is the purpose of that? Who’s going to listen to it?  Now if I drop a song, it gets thousands of views, I’ve built a name where if I do drop an album, people will tune into it.”  At this point Teenonami now has his sights pointed at his debut album Popular Outcast which has no current release date, leaving many fans on the edge of their seats as for what is to come next in Teenonami’s ever-evolving career.