Jeni Magaña (Mitski / Lady Lamb) returns to Atwood Magazine to guide us through her recent trilogy of solo titles, or, the ‘Ten Months of Teeth.’
Stream: ‘Bad News’ – Magana
In the ten month period of March 2024 to January 2025, acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Jeni Magaña issued three solo releases as Magana, a series of titles that she calls “the Teeth Trilogy.”
This was a journey that began March 21st, 2024, when the Teeth album was premiered by Atwood Magazine.
In her “Ten Months of Teeth” essay, Jeni returns to Atwood Magazine to guide us through each title, selecting some of her personal highlights from the “witchy rock” LP Teeth, the ambient multimedia project DREAMS, and most recently, the “cozy core winter pop” of the Bad News EP.
Ten Months of Teeth
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Teeth (March 2024)
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Teeth – “Garden”
We start in a garden. It’s the beginning of spring, and the tale of someone at the very beginning of change. The seeds have already been planted, and this is the story of someone wrestling with the idea that maintaining one’s health (mental and physical) takes perpetual upkeep.
You can’t just plant new ideas, wipe your hands and walk away. It’s fun to start here because it’s the beginning of the album Teeth, but also because the album releases in these 10 months are cyclical so we’re going to end right before this point. It’s also good to point out that I wrote most of these songs during lockdown in 2020, and I was literally just sitting in my front yard staring at my garden most mornings. I guess boredom can be art too.
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Teeth – “Break Free”
“Break Free” is about change lyrically, but also the sonic exploration speaks to me and I think it’s a cool example of the place I was in at the time. I was writing songs on a guitar like I always had, but I was also using whatever synths I had available to create sounds that were entirely new to me. This is one of the first songs that I remember writing as a short instrumental and then deciding it could actually be cool with lyrics. This was an entirely different way of approaching songwriting for me and made the whole process start to feel fresh and new.
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Teeth – “Mary Anne”
“Mary Anne” is a nod to the fact that I’ll always be a songwriter first. I was in the middle of finding these new (to me) sounds and then this song came out mostly all at once on a strumming acoustic guitar. I recorded this track on a tape machine I was playing with. I was also recording video on my phone, totally just messing around and thinking maybe I’d put it on Instagram.
And halfway through singing it hit me that it’s about my mom and all these things I am writing about are things I really feel and I started to tear up a little bit. The sigh at the end is because it was hitting me how much I was feeling. I thought I’d ruined the take because my voice catches and warbles a little.
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Teeth – “xxo”
To close out the Teeth era, here’s one of those instrumentals. It was fun and new to play with creating emotions without *telling* you the emotions. It sort of called to my orchestral background. I’m happy a few of these made it onto the record. A lot of these were actually started because I was composing for a commercial, which I didn’t get, and I started getting really interested in the sounds of it.
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DREAMS (October 2024)
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DREAMS – “Dreaming”
Next era is DREAMS. This was a fall record, and it was a step back from all the changing and exploring happening in Teeth. I think of this album as a comfortable evening with yourself. It’s a little bit introspective, mostly because the “lyrics” in this album are all my literal dreams. I sometimes wonder if someone who analyses dreams has heard it and now knows more about me than I know about myself. But it’s also peaceful and quiet and not trying to go anywhere.
Teeth felt big and energetic, and I needed a quieter release next. This song in particular is, I think, showcasing how I wanted to take some of the elements I was exploring in Teeth instrumentals and put all that in its own spotlight.
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Bad News (January 2024)
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Bad News – “Half to Death”
Bad News is the winter release. It’s a series of vignettes of people’s lives as they realize that change needs to come. I think of it as planting the seeds before spring (i.e., Teeth). “Half to Death” is a chronological story of a very bad night. Honestly, there’s a lot of myself in all of these songs, and after this song is when I started going to therapy.
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Bad News – “I’m Not Doing Anything”
This song is a great way to end because it feels so directly linked to the beginning. This song is literally about not doing anything, but in a way that feels like maybe the person is realizing there needs to be some change. I think in the movie of these albums, this person would be sitting on the couch doing nothing and then the camera would follow them outside as they sat and did nothing and started watching their Garden.
On a personal note, this song was also written during covid, after some friends were trying to get me to play some online games with them but I was too depressed to participate. I think that neatly sums up the vibe: Alone, inside, depressed about depression. And it’s a nice parallel, because then in my real life I started lockdown in this place and I eventually moved to being curious about it and myself and the world, and then made all of these songs that I get to put out into the world. Everything is a cycle!
The ‘Teeth’ trilogy is available now:
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:: stream/purchase Teeth here ::
:: stream/purchase DREAMS here ::
:: stream/purchase Bad News here ::
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:: connect with Magana here ::
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Stream: ‘Bad News’ – Magana
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