Single Art For “Even If It Hurts" featuring Blood Orange
Previously released tracks from the new album, “A Kiss Goodbye” and “Red Light,” came out over the summer. In their track review for “A Kiss Goodbye” Pitchfork wrote “Teicher seems to have fully stepped into her own, brewing up a relaxed bossa nova confection centered on trusting your own intuition."
La Linda is an entry into a rarefied wonderland, a reflection of both her vast inner world and newly charmed surroundings. After years of living in New York City, the singer/songwriter moved to Los Angeles last year, and soon shifted course on her path as an artist. “I felt like I was closing a chapter in my life that was tied up in a lot of negativity, and reconnecting with open space and my own creativity in a way that I hadn’t in a very long time,” she says. “I wanted this whole project to reflect the feeling of stepping into another world that’s almost surreal or fantastical in its beauty.”
In a purposeful departure from her 2017 debut Crawl Space - an album thematically concerned with emotional claustrophobia and confusion - Tei Shi wrote much of La Linda in the yard outside her Elysian Park home: a sun-drenched space lush with rose bushes and berry patches, an herb garden and apple tree. With its title translating to “the beautiful,” La Linda manifests that lushness in its lavishly orchestrated sound, and also finds Tei Shi delivering many of her lyrics in her native tongue of Spanish. “Moving to L.A. made me feel much more connected to my Latin roots and my cultural identity, in a way that feels really loving,” says Tei Shi, who grew up between Colombia and Vancouver, Canada..
In bringing La Linda to life, Tei Shi took on the role of executive producer and assembled a team of producers that includes Dev Hynes (Sky Ferreira, Solange Knowles, FKA twigs), Stint (Santigold, HEALTH, Gallant), Dave Sitek, Noah Breakfast (Christine and the Queens, Carly Rae Jepsen, Ty Dolla $ign), among various others. For Tei Shi, working with such an eclectic lineup of musicians helped to undo a certain creative stagnation. “Part of the motivation to move to L.A. was wanting to be a part of a community of people who were excited to collaborate,” she says. “I felt like I’d gotten to the point where I wasn’t learning as much or picking up new things, so I wanted to work with lots of different people and take in as much as I could from their processes.”
In shaping the complex emotional terrain of La Linda, Tei Shi tapped into the singular narrative voice she first discovered in writing songs at the age of eight and later channeled into the making of Crawl Space. At the same time, she sculpted La Linda’s dynamic sonic palette by mining influence from artists as disparate as German choreographer Pina Bausch and Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. “With Kurosawa, I was so inspired by how each frame is so well-composed that it almost looks like a painting, and how he used these very simple things like rain or a gust of wind to create emotion,” she points out.
As she dreamed up the elaborate landscape of La Linda—a selection of songs nearly multi-sensory in appeal, possessed of their own texture and color and sometimes even a gorgeously florid fragrance—Tei Shi also found abundant inspiration in the natural world. “I think I took nature for granted for a long time, but making this album I was so drawn to the mountains and trees and water—I realized how much nature is another form of art,” says Tei Shi. And in sharing that revelation with so much effervescence, La Linda ultimately leaves the listener with a renewed sense of possibility. “For me this album is about letting go of the past and moving willingly into the future,” Tei Shi says. “I hope it can give people a glimpse of something beautiful, and help them look out into the world in a more loving and intuitive way.”
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