Indie-Pop Princess Tessa Violet Drops Bad Ideas

Photo courtesy of the Tessa Violet Facebook page

With internet platforms, specifically YouTube, growing in size and continuously pumping out new artists, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. 29-year-old artist Tessa Violet provides a fresh approach to songwriting, and has combated this issue by delivering an array of relatable, danceable, electronic singles prior to the release of her long-awaited Bad Ideas. 

On social media, Violet has expressed the importance of listening to the album in chronological order at least once to get the full intended experience. The opening track, “Prelude”, leads us into the record by the hand, with Violet wearing her heart on her sleeve immideately. The lyrics revolve around insecurity in relationships, and blaming oneself for experiencing feelings too intensely.  She then drops us off at the beginning of our musical journey with the line, “You think I’d know better by now,” brilliantly introducing the theme of Bad Ideas- having crazy impulses, the most intense level of feelings both high and low, and indulging oneself in the worst of ideas. The rest of the 10 tracks on the album alternate between very electronic sounds and heavy beats to melancholic, dusty acoustic pieces. Her hit single, “Crush,” that went viral due to an engaging music video which currently boasts over 50 million YouTube views,  explores the battle between the complexity and simplicity of liking someone- of wanting so desperately to be someone’s crush. Violet’s proudly obsessive behavior provides for rhythms and lyrics that are shameless in themselves. 

There’s a sort of unique power in owning up to one’s feelings of basking in the discomfort and awkwardness, and Violet celebrates these moments, amplifying universal emotions in a way that’s usually not explored by many artists. In the titular track, Violet delivers one of the best bridge/pre-chorus combos in my book, unapologetically begging her lover to text her, come on over, and kiss her. She ends her rant with the phrase, “Yikes.” Genius. 

Similarly, on “Bored”, she takes us through the very real issue of being so ridiculously bored. Scrolling meaninglessly through the night, trying to find purpose, not following through on projects, craving attention. We’ve all been there. We can all find solace in Violet’s crescendoing shouts and desperate drumming: “Just hoping I’ll find purpose in these pictures on my phone, I’m so bored!”

Along with enough quality dance hits to get us through the rest of our lives, Violet gives us two extremely heartfelt and raw moments, capturing the lowest of feelings through both the melancholic tone of her acoustic guitar, and the poetry of her lyrics. “Words Ain’t Enough” is surrounded with deep harmonies, and gives some hard-hitting imagery in statements of longing,  “Cut myself into pieces easy to chew. Carve me up into someone you’d like to choose til I’m only pieces of you.” The first time I heard these lines, I felt a physical ache in my chest, visualizing every word and feeling the transmission directly from the artist. 

The closing track, “Interlude III,” originally released nearly two years ago on Violet’s YouTube channel, draws the curtain on the record in a hopeless reflection on the consequences of her “bad ideas.” In yet another pang to the heart, she describes the desire for a new, different outlook on life. After experiencing a long period of hurting and isolation, she yearns for a timeline in which she’s rid of the loneliness, denial, helplessness, and faking-fine. 

I’ve seen Violet live twice now, and every time, she seems to have a particular energy that’s unlike most artists. She never fails to engage her audience and isn’t afraid to interrupt her own songs to share funny anecdotes or interact with her band. While singing the second single off the album, “Bad Ideas,” Violet laughed at the line “I want to kiss you standing up,” and as she strummed her guitar, let the audience know that she wrote this because the guy she was dating at the time was in fact, very tall, leading to some awkward kissing positions. 

As of November 4, 2019, Bad Ideas, has now been streamed over 100,000 times. Violet celebrated the accomplishment via livestream, where she performed the entire tracklist acoustically on ukulele.