A Q+A With Tiali
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Your journey as an established artist began in 2020 with ‘Stoned Vacation’ followed by ‘Jigsaw’ and ‘Icicles’ in 2022, can you tell me about your journey through these three songs leading up to the EP?
Oh wow, it’s been quite long really. Jigsaw and Icicles are both a part of the EP, so they tie into that, but we’ve just sort of been drip-feeding EP tracks to get more people acquainted with my music before releasing it in full. It’s interesting though that Stoned Vacation comes from a similar place emotionally as the EP, I guess I was stuck in a certain place for a while.
Career-wise though, even though I’ve played for a long time, I found I was a lot greener in the industry than I thought, and learning more about the nuances of that has been a journey in itself. I’m still regularly hassling my manager with lots of questions! Ha
If you could describe your music to someone who hasn’t heard of you before in three words, what would they be?
Raw, Emotive and Climatic
You have your new EP The Pleasure Pit coming out on August 11, this features some existing songs and some new ones to come, can you tell me about the collection of songs and their connection to one another?
They’re very intertwined. I wrote them during a time when I was really searching for something, I had a lot of unhealthy habits that then carried on affecting my relationship. It’s also hard to find contentment when your mental health is suffering, so a lot of songs refer to wanting that growth and change, and feeling like there’s more to life. Some focus more on just certain elements of that, but to me, it’s all an interconnected segment of my life where all of these things kind of feed each other. The odd one out would be What Kind Of Man, that one isn’t as much about this stage of my life or my partner, but more about certain societal issues as a whole.
You previously mentioned that The Pleasure Pit is a place that we go to “ease our pain” until it no longer does... is this the origin from which most of these songs stemmed from?
For sure. I can be an avoidant person, and there were a lot of underlying issues for me that I would sweep under the rug by partying, thinking I’ll just deal with it later, but then it takes days to recover so you’re left with the anxiety and you don’t have the energy to do anything about it. And the more you get into this habit the harder it is to break. Not all of the songs are about this, but I think when I looked back and reflected on my life during the time of writing the EP, it just had this kind of murky shadow across it, and I can see now that a lot of the feelings I had were due to my lifestyle, even if at the time I didn’t see it.
Most of the songs are a slightly varied take on The Pleasure Pit but they all refer to something good that can also potentially cause pain and a pull between dark and light.
With the EP, you have ‘Love, Drugs & Toothpaste’ coming out describing a ‘bad comedown’ - would this be from the high of the place we go to ease our pain like you mentioned describing ‘The Pleasure Pit’?
Yeah, exactly. This song in particular refers to it in a more literal sense, as I wrote it after a big weekend had turned into an argument and an evaluation of my situation at the time. But, you can have a comedown from anything, even the dopamine released by running causes a drop in levels afterwards, so imagine being so wrapped up in love, or consuming so much of a substance…if you keep spiking those levels, they’re gonna drop at some point, your body doesn’t know how to regulate it. And then if you remove the thing altogether, it’s like you don’t know how to find that feeling without it. I think humans can find that in anything. And the best thing about music is that meaning be taken in countless ways, so I like to leave room for interpretation.
Can you give me an insight into the video that accompanies the song and what we can expect?
It’s a bit of a chaotic representation of all the emotions one can go through in this cycle. It’s kind of melancholic but journeys through different moments of having ‘lost it’, so some elements of it are euphoric but also desperate. It’s pretty dark visually, but kind of fun, and trippy in a subtle way,
With an EP under your belt, do you have any live performance/appearance plans? Or are you heading straight into the next project?
I am so keen to get more music out. I feel like I’ve grown a lot as an artist since creating this EP and am itching to express that more. I’ve been writing a lot and am workshopping new songs with my band, so starting to chip away at it. I’ll be booking more shows to finish the year off for sure, but for the moment what we’ve got to look forward to are: “Necromancing and Dancing” at Long Jetty Hotel on 9th Sept, and we’re also supporting Sunsoli at Drifters Wharf on 25th November, which should also be a fun one!
