by Giliann Karon (@lethalrejection)
Jeni Magaña aka Magana has endless creative tricks up her sleeve. The LA-based photographer and multi-instrumentalist lets nature and spirituality guide her delicate storytelling. Despite finding inspiration in the ethereal and fleeting, her simple lyrics don’t require laborious dissection. She begins opener “Garden” with hopeful and self-actualizing mantras: “I will fill the holes in my heart/Someday I will know/I will plant those seeds tomorrow/Watch my garden grow.”
On Teeth, she gingerly universalizes her pandemic lockdown restlessness and forced self-reckoning. In a press release, she explains she wanted this album to feel like “earth and space at the same time.” Airy synths perk up her anguish, while matter-of-fact lyrics bring her back down to the mortal plane. I caught up with her on Zoom while she was on Mitski’s The Land is Inhospitable tour to discuss her arsenal of skills and find out just exactly what a Worm Moon is.
Giliann Karon: Tell me a little bit about your musical upbringing, and how you started playing.
Jeni Magaña: I started playing piano when I was a little kid. My family ran two fruit stands during the summers. They were kind of in the middle of nowhere off the freeway. So I was very bored, and I started taking piano lessons at the church down the road from one of the fruit stands. I still have that piano.
Then I started picking up other instruments as opportunities presented themselves. I played clarinet in middle school because my sister had one. I played upright bass in high school because I wasn’t good enough at clarinet for the orchestra but I wanted to skip PE. Eventually, I realized guitar is only a couple more strings. All that knowledge resulted in me playing guitar, bass, and piano.
GK: You’re best known for playing bass for Mitski and Lady Lamb. What have you learned by playing in a band that’s helped develop your solo work?
JM: I’m so lucky I get to play for a bunch of people that I admire because I can look at what they do and try to copy. But a really valuable lesson is just trusting your own musical instincts and leaning into your own autonomy, because that’s what makes your project more unique.
GK: How do you separate your solo work from your work as a backing bassist?
JM: It’s kind of easy because when I’m playing bass, I’m playing a supporting role. For the most part, the songs already exist. Even if I’m writing a bassline for somebody, it’s still very much an idea that someone else has generated or participated in.
I think why I started my solo work – there were a bunch of leftover ideas that came out of that kind of stuff that you don't get to use when you're putting yourself into somebody else's project.
GK: What sides of yourself, lyrically and sonically, do you display on Teeth that you might’ve held back from in previous projects?
JM: I definitely didn’t lean into any synth stuff until this album because I didn't know how to play it. I didn't understand how it all worked. I played bass with Mitski and some other bands, which was my intro to that world.
Teeth was me growing into that side, playing with starkness, and not always trying to be metaphorical with my lyrics, which is a lot of the craft of songwriting. That was something I was really aiming for on this record.
GK: Something that really stuck out about your record is how vulnerable and how universal it is. Don't get me wrong. I love a good metaphor, but it's also nice to take in the lyrics as they are.
JM: That’s exactly what I want. I write with other people too, for my job and for fun. I love coming up with lines that represent other things, but this album was just me being like “Nope, this is it. This is what it is,” as a contrast to the other work I was doing.
GK: You released Teeth on March 25th, which coincided with the Worm Moon peak illumination. I know nothing about that. Can you explain what it is and why it's so important to you?
JM: Not a lot of people think about moon phases. I try to pay attention to them because it’s a good excuse for me to create a ritual, kinda like New Year’s Eve, but in smaller, more attainable chunks.
The new moon is a good time to set intentions for that period of time. The full moon is hopefully the manifestation of that, the letting go of some things. The warm moon is the full moon that happens in the spring. It brings up the new spring equinox, when worms come up from the ground and we start gardens. It felt especially appropriate because the first song on the record is called “Garden” and I wanted the record to have feelings of growth and newness. Spring does a really good job of that.
I had a tarot reading on my birthday. They were telling me I’m going to release something around the time of the full moon. They meant emotions or something, but I took that as a sign to release a record. So this is me finishing the culmination of all those years that I worked on this and letting it go.
GK: Wow, I really love all that. The ethereal sound of your record really feels like you’re shedding something.
JM: Exactly, it’s like new skin.
GK: You recorded Teeth in LA during the pandemic. What unique challenges did you encounter during the recording process and did that at all influence anything in post-production?
JM: The pandemic was the biggest and most obvious factor in recording. During a lockdown, you can’t really work with other people, so that really shaped the record, since I had always worked with others. This was actually awesome because I got to give myself all this time. I realized that I haven't been leaning on my own autonomy.
Not having a choice means that I learned a lot about recording myself, and I gave myself a lot more time to experiment and to consider things for more time than other people would have let me, especially if I was renting a recording studio, which gave the album a sort of meditative vibe.
I shouldn’t say I worked on the album entirely by myself because my husband plays drums and reinterpreted some of the drum lines. At the end, it was super helpful to pull in him, who had never heard it in its entirety, to select the tracks.
GK: Most of your songs on Teeth are demo tracks. How did you breathe new life into them?
JM: A lot of them actually stayed in demo form. I added higher quality vocals on some of them. Luckily, lots of tracks were recorded well enough that they could actually stay in the final form. I hadn’t listened to a lot of them between finishing them and beginning the release process, which was fun. When I went back, it felt like somebody else made it. Maybe I made choices then I wouldn't have made now, but that rawness makes me feel inspired.
The sessions are named insane things like “piano jam 1” and “clarinet time.” There are so many random muted tracks where I tried things, realized they didn’t work, and started over. It’s chaos.
GK: How much time was there between the recording process and the album release?
JM: Years! I started recording in 2020 because I had nothing else to do. By the time I went back on tour at the end of 2021, the album was finished. There was a good year where it just sat, waiting to be released.
GK: That really speaks to the lasting power of your lyrics, because I think everyone always either is shedding something or has something to shed.
JM: Especially after this period of time. There's just weird ways that you didn't realize that you were traumatized by the Covid lockdown period.
GK: You call your album “witchy rock”. What does that mean to you and why was it the best vessel for capturing these ideas of freedom, submission, and isolation?
JM: I love Halloween. I love Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, that kind of stuff. I think that’s still a little bit spooky, but it's not Halloween. It's dark in a different way. To me, that’s “witchy rock.” It’s more mystical than evil. I really couldn't think of anything else. Plus, my husband calls me his “witchy wife.”
GK: “Witchy Rock” makes me think of Stevie Nicks and Florence Welch, who both have a mystical, ethereal vibe.
JM: Totally. Barefoot, long-haired, with incantations.
GK: Your relationship to nature is a huge influence on this album, which you said wanted to sound like earth and space at the same time, and it totally does. It's very vast, airy, and spacious. How does your photography background inform the world-building, narrative structure, and larger aesthetic choices on your album?
JM: I tend to mix all of the things that I do together in my mind. So when I think of music, I still think of it visually. When I'm trying to explain the record to people, I often end up invoking images because I have an easier time saying those things out loud. For example, when I’m talking about a path in the woods that's misty or dusky, I think that's because I spent so much time visually processing things as a photographer.
I spent a lot of time walking around my neighborhood during the lockdown because there was nothing else to do. There were so many yards that were overgrown and unkempt with its own little tiny mystical world happening there. I was really starting to pay attention to that stuff and bring my camera out. There were flowers everywhere all the time in LA.
GK: I always find it super interesting when artists put an interlude on their album. What was the decision behind “xxo”?
JM: I love talking about this because I think it's so cool that I didn't make the decision to put any of these songs on here. I made a lot of short instrumental interludes because I don’t always have the right words to encompass the feeling I’m trying to express. Sometimes lyrics will set you free because they'll paint a really specific picture, but sometimes it can be limiting.
I had a lot of instrumental tracks in a big file titled “demos.” Mike Desanto, who is in a band with my husband, came and visited us. I sent him the folder and he chose the songs that spoke to him, which was really cool because I hadn’t talked to anyone about them and sorta lost perspective.
He ultimately chose the sequence of the songs and left notes on why he put them in that order. “xxo” is a break from the specificity of the lyrics and gives you time for introspection. I don’t know why he put it on there, but I think that's why.
GK: What song are you most excited to perform live?
JM: I’ve started playing “Afraid of Everybody” and “Girl in Chains” live. I’m most excited to figure out how to work “Beside You” into the set.
GK: What do you hope your listeners will take away from this album?
JM: You mentioned something earlier about universal emotions, and I think my main goal is for somebody to listen to the music and not feel alone, and to think, “oh yeah, me too.” I hope somebody finds company in it.
Teeth is out now via Audio Antihero and Colored Pencils.