Jim Smith leads a double life. Yes, like a superhero with an alter ego and everything. His superpower is an endless ability to get your booty shaking via deceptively clever ’80s-inspired synth pop with an edge. And until the end of this sentence, at least, most of his coworkers had no idea.
If you’ve never heard of TEEEL, get ready to, and get used to the spelling—the three E’s aren’t a typo. TEEEL is Smith’s music project that would, if he had a couple more people with whom to make music, be called a band. Smith, however, eschews the band idea because bands usually don’t work.
For every Aerosmith that stays together for a many years, there’s a million bands who can’t stay together for one year, he says.
So Smith, a 36-year-old Ewing resident, makes the music himself on actual synthesizers from the age of New Order, Depeche Mode, OMD, and Duran Duran—all of whom are major influences on his work. The music itself comes together in Smith’s studio room, an office painted teal, because he loves that color enough to name his musical persona after it.
The spelling is a bit of branding acumen. Smith’s Clark Kent persona (i.e., his day job) is as a mild-mannered art supervisor at CDM Princeton, a pharma marketing company based in Carnegie Center, and so he is familiar with the concept of building brands through uniqueness.
“Teal is my favorite color,” he says. “And I wanted to own that word in some way.”
His instruments are vintage Korgs and Moogs that he’s bought with the money his music makes him. So far, it’s not his whole life to be a musician, and he really doesn’t want it to be. Yes, he’d take the millions of dollars if offered, but he has no plans to chase a full-time life on the road. He’s perfectly satisfied with his occasional road-trip gig tours around the country with his wife, Dana.
Remember how Smith’s coworkers don’t generally know about his musical side? That’s a purposeful move on his part. A firm believer in keeping your various worlds separate, Smith doesn’t talk about his music or his shows at the office any more than he tells his fans about his day at work. To his coworkers, the long weekends and vacations Smith takes a couple times a year were always just another coworker getting some needed time off.
In July, the Smiths (the couple, not the band) toured the Southwest, seeing Colorado, Utah and Arizona while TEEEL played a series of live shows. Smith gives venues the option of having him just play by himself, which is “more of a DJ kind of experience” or getting him with his longtime friend and frequent collaborator, guitarist Stephen Chladnicek (Pronounced “KLADD nuh check.”)
Smith, who was born in California but grew up in Hamilton, and Chladnicek met as students at Nottingham High School (where he also met Dana). They became fast friends thanks to a shared love of the harder, metal-soaked sounds of the ’80s and ’90s, and played in a metal band called McFly.
Dana wasn’t so into the metal stuff, Smith says, but she supported him and came to his shows anyway. She’s much more into TEEEL’s more mellow brand of pop-inspired music than the aggressive guitar rock of McFly—not the least reason being that Smith today makes his music in the computer, using headphones and patch cables, so he’s not going all Megadeth with the guitars at midnight.
Working on music past midnight is the norm for Smith, by the way. While his wife sleeps quietly a few rooms away, Smith is buried in sonic alternate reality at the Mac he’s had for years.
In 1998, fresh out of high school, Smith spent three months in London, where he met some friends from Amsterdam who helped introduce him to electronic music. After moving back home, he got into writing music of his own and grew increasingly intrigued by his stepfather’s ’80s music collection, eventually putting out a single song on SoundCloud.
The song got a lot of notice, from downloads to praise from bloggers. It also got him a record contract with the label Moongadget Records.
“They emailed me and asked, ‘Do you want to put [the song] on a compilation?’” he says. The responding “yes” turned into TEEEL’s first album, “Amulet,” a trippy, floaty, “kind of a chillwave album” heavy on the mood and emotion.
It also turned into a mess.
“It was the worst experience of my life,” Smith says. Moongadget wanted the album in three months, which essentially compelled him to say “See ya later” to his wife until spring training started. He got little sleep, between his day life and his nights building an album, but he finished on time and delivered the goods.
That was in 2011, and Amulet reached No. 17 on the iTunes electronic music charts. But he just recently received royalty payments and he didn’t care for being so out of control of his creations.
For his second album the following year, Smith went indie, starting his own label, Synthemesc Records, and putting out a more aggressive electronica opus titled “University Heights.” The Atlas-level workload that came with doing the marketing, making, distributing and everything else was absolutely worth it, he says.
The odds are good you’ve heard music from University Heights on TV. The song “Crystal Lake” is frequently used on ESPN’s Sports Center. And then there’s “Marx On My Heart,” which was used by Nike Jordan for a special on YouTube about NBA star Carmelo Anthony.
University Heights is not the only source of TEEEL music for film and video producers. The makers of the movie “The Gift” used Smith’s “Indie Pop Groove” from a licensed music album in the movie, though the track wasn’t specifically made for the movie.
“I recently created a sample pack, “TEEEL Presents Retro Wave” for the company LoopMasters,” Smith says. Most recently, I’ve created music for the company Canon for 13-part mini series called ‘The Connection.’”
Also, if you’re appropriately nerdsome, you would have heard some TEEEL music on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Star Talk” radio broadcast.
TEEEL’s third outing was 2014’s “Hydrostatic,” a dreamier collection of music that would play well live, Smith says. He decided to give a label (Mush Records) another shot, and put together an album thick with solid hooks and mooning vocals.
He didn’t like doing the label thing any more than the first time he did it, leading him to conclude that it’s not any one label, it’s the industry that’s hard to deal with.
He also concluded that he’s never doing a label other than his own again. In fact, he calls the workings of the music industry “the worst thing in the world” and just wants to be in control of his own passion and creativity and help other electronic artists be able to make their own music without having to deal with the nightmare of standard industry contracts.
Synthemesc Records oversees 36 albums, as of this writing. Smith says he splits money 50/50 with his artists and sends them quarterly royalty checks—no waiting until a certain amount of money is earned and no hidden fees. It’s just simpler that way, he says. And nicer to boot.
“I think a lot of my success [comes from the fact] that I’m human, I’m not too big for anybody,” Smith says. “Good things happen just from being a real person.”
Smith’s success in terms of popularity is rather far-reaching. TEEEL has quite a following in different parts of the world. Europeans like TEEEL’s sound, and Smith is popular among electronic music aficionados is Austin, Texas, a hub for the genre.
But if you haven’t seen TEEEL around Mercer County all that much, that’s also purposeful. Smith says he doesn’t want TEEEL to become a local band, he’d rather have the music get out there in the world — and, it helps keep his musical world separate from his working world that way.
Teel’s latest album, “Montage Scene,” followed the sample pack for LoopMasters. The album, released this year, is an electrowave collection heavy on ’80s bubblegum pop (or “cheese,” as he calls it) and dance, but with a more aggressive attitude.
Just don’t get lulled into thinking TEEEL is some retro throwback for when you need to remember your gelled mullet and parachute pants. Smith actually manages quite a coup with his music—to be inspired by the new wave and electropop sounds of the early half of the ’80s without turning the sound into pastiche. It’s not a product of the ’80s; more of a nod to the foundation of electronic music that politely shakes the genre’s hand in gratitude then and sets off on its own life path.
The idea on Montage Scene was to push the music out of his comfort zone, which fits in with what Smith keeps trying to do—try new things without alienating his audience, which he admits is a major challenge.
“How do you make something that’s original, that’s you, but is new?” he asks.
“I struggle with that a lot. Is it weird? Is it weird in a good way? Is it weird in a bad way? I don’t want to keep making the same album.”
Smith is back to work at CDM since returning to Ewing in mid-July. The tour was, of course, terrific and exhausting, he says, but life calls. Then again, he doesn’t have any problems with that.
“I have a really great life, I’m happy,” he says. “I get to go home and create something I love.”
But there’s no word yet on what will happen when his secret identity gets out.
Teeel opens for Jimkata on Saturday, Aug. 13, as part of the Levitt AMP Trenton Music Series. The show is at 7:30 p.m. at 201 Barrack St. in Trenton. Go to concerts.levittamp.org/trenton for more information. You can find TEEEL online at TeelMusic.com and at Bandcamp, Facebook, SoundCloud, Instagram, Twitter, Last.fm, MySpace and on Spotify.
,
