Coming from the state of Maryland is the Brazilian-American artist, Teeyago. Occupying himself with songwriting and producing his whole life, he has recently taken steps to officially release his songs to the world. With all these fresh releases comes his latest single, “Safada”. This song exhibits Teeyago’s ability to write pop. Teeyago incorporates elements of jazz, funk, Brazilian, and EDM into it as well. Each unique element in “Safada” complements the other sounds. This causes the song to shine at different parts; this approach to songwriting is intriguing and successful.
"Safada” begins with an interesting piano chord pattern. This arrangement reminds us of a Brazilian-type ballad. This ballad patterning gives this song a part A and B, which keeps listeners interest longer than by using just one loop. As the drums begin, the song fuses into a beautiful pop-Brazilian track. The bass instrumental does an excellent job of occupying space and keeping movement steady throughout “Safada”. Teeyago chooses to do a compelling vocal chop within the chorus. This technique is reminiscent of EDM music but without all the background lunacy. Again, Teeyago finds another way to tastefully fuse another brand to “Safada”. Usually, mixing a lot of different types of music into one can become cluttered. But in “Safada”, Teeyago expertly fuses four genres into one while keeping a great vibe intact.
Listen to "Safada” here.
Hey Teeyago! Welcome to BuzzMusic, we are very proud to be representing you and your latest track “Safada”. You have been creating music for quite some time, but just recently started releasing it. A lot of artists and producers have trouble finalizing projects because there is always something that can be better in a song. Is there any difficulty for you to come to peace with the finalization of a song? Or can you release them right away with no problem?
I definitely struggle to feel comfortable with the finalization of a song. Throughout the process of making a song, I am constantly making changes to it over the course of several months until I get it to a place I am more or less satisfied with. I generally know a song is ready when I get tired of listening to it and overanalyzing every little detail. At that point, I realize I might as well just release it and move on to the next track in order to keep my creativity flowing (otherwise I’ll always be searching for some sort of unattainable perfection and never get anything done).
Checking out your Soundcloud, you have a lot of great and different tracks/eps. Do you have a plan to release a debut album or ep that showcases a lot of different sides of you, or would you rather focus on a genre and release a project like that?
Yeah, so my Soundcloud has a few older projects that I quietly released just to get more confident with producing and recording my own tracks. I tend to consider After Hours (my first EP on Spotify/Apple Music) as the start of my discography. I don’t know that I would release a whole album anytime soon though, to be honest. I feel like albums with 15+ songs can really lose an audiences’ attention, especially nowadays with the advent of short-form content.
I really do love making cohesive projects though which is why I tend to always drop projects with 5-7ish songs. It’s long enough to tell a story but short enough to listen on a quick 30min drive. Plus, it allows me to make more projects within a shorter period of time. I would still love to release an album one day but right now I’m waiting until the timing is right.
As far as genre goes, I really like playing with different styles. I’d say my music is somewhere within pop-rap, but I like mixing elements of specific styles of music (Bossa Nova, R&B, etc.) with my own pop-rap style.
A lot of your instrumentals have real acoustic sounding instruments with synthesized elements to it. Do you have any part of playing those instruments in your songs? If so, how many instruments do you play?
Most of my songs start with me finding and flipping an acoustic loop of some sort. From there, I use a lot of synthetic instruments to fill up the rest of the track. I grew up playing piano and drums which ended up being all I needed to learn how to produce instrumentals. I can simply plug in my keyboard, sample a sound and play it out on the keys. One of my earlier tracks, Nada, has a saxophone solo which was created entirely synthetically by me playing a saxophone sample off of my keyboard.
With such an impressive discography within a short amount of time, do you have any plans to play live shows?
I’d love to play some live shows but part of me wants to wait. One of the things I think is really cool about live shows is the ability to provide cool visuals to a crowd (you see this a lot in EDM shows especially). I’d love to give that dynamic experience to an audience but know that I’m not realistically at that place yet. I want to do things right so as my music grows and I have the resources to create something spectacular, I’ll definitely be playing a lot of live shows. But for now I’m focusing more on creating and providing as much new music as I can.
What can we expect to see next from Teeyago?
More music! I have a 5-7 track project I am finishing up that I plan on releasing in the near future and some videos I plan to shoot as well. There’s a lot of cool stuff that I can’t wait to share!