CHAOS THEORY
Calgary's Terez stares down a time of personal post-pandemic tumult on new EP
In the video for Terez's LUV2H8, there is an unsettling scene of campy horror that seems a nod to Stephen King's Carrie with a dash of Barbie esthetics thrown in.
Terez, the Calgary-born singer-songwriter, spends most of the video being terrorized by classmates, which climaxes with her being slimed with a pail of hotpink goop.
While it plays out like a surreal neon-coloured nightmare, it is actually based on a real incident at Calgary's Cowboys when Terez was 18.
“It was probably the first time I was at a bar,” says Terez. “This girl came up to me and poured a drink over my head. I kind of knew her, but I didn't have any problem with her. I didn't know why that was happening. I go to the bathroom and I'm drying off and having a little cry and I looked down at my phone and I saw some texts and missed calls from people who weren't there. And I looked at one of the texts and it said, `I saw what happened online, are you OK?' I realized that somebody intentionally set that up for somebody to take a video and put it online. That was really brutal. At the time, it felt like the yuckiest thing ever.”
This distressing moment may not seem the likeliest fodder for LUV2H8, a song that was initially released as a relatively straightahead pop single back in the summer but has since been given a slightly angrier pop-punk overhaul for her new EP, Chaos Era. Terez produced both tracks, but admits the EP version seems more authentic to her.
The song seems to be about bullying in general, but the sliming scene in the video is a direct reference to the Cowboys incident and a way of “taking ownership of it.”
“It's like `Dude, you cannot stop me. I am a moving train and I am going to live an incredible life,'” says Terez. “`That's really crummy, what you did, but I'm still going.'”
It's perhaps not surprising that the song was given an empowerment boost for the EP, which is full of songs Terez says were largely fuelled by a post-pandemic period of chaos and tumult that required “lots of therapy.” Now in her mid-20s, the artist has become a seasoned writer and producer. She sharpened her skills during the pandemic by studying music production and, as always, writing a prodigious number of tunes. But the tracks chosen for the Chaos Era represent what the artist describes as the most chaotic time in her life. Terez does not go into details about the circumstances that made the two years since she released her 2021 EP, Sad Girl Summer, but it involved the death of friends. While LUV2H8 is about bullying, there are also songs that suggest toxic relationships. Some of them, such as the playful Ruin My Life, which seems to be about how becoming overly enamoured with a potential partner can lead to less-than-sound judgment, or the charging grunge-lite anthem All of My Exes are Dead, seems to have a tongue-in-cheek feel. The catchy opener Ugh Boy — actually, the original title involves an F-bomb in place of the word Ugh, but Terez released a cleaned-up version for radio — came from a Nashville songwriting session and she had hoped to give it to another artist. She decided to keep it for herself when she found no takers.
“It's intended to be very sexually liberating for women, of not always going the relationship route,” Terez says. “It's OK to just date and be young and see what you like and see what you do and set boundaries.”
Writing the R&b-leaning title track, which also seems to deal with empowerment, was cathartic.
“I wrote that song not thinking it was going to go out in the world, but it was just what I needed at that moment to pump myself up,” she says. “It was like `It's OK, you're a little chaotic right now. You're having this moment, but this moment will pass and everything will be OK.'”
The songs were also recorded in a relatively haphazard way. Terez has spent the last couple of years travelling, but would often take portable recording gear wherever she went. So, the songs were written and, in some cases, recorded in Amsterdam, Mexico, Nashville and throughout Canada.
Terez continues to write songs for other artists — she has co-written with Phil Barton, Edmonton's Alee and 100 gecs's Dylan Brady — and is dabbling in writing for K-pop performers. After fast-tracking through high school and graduating a year early, she got her start at the age of 18 as a country singer-songwriter performing under her full name Terez Goulet.
She reckons, over the years, she has written more than 500 songs.
Terez, who is of Métis heritage, recently participated in the 2023 Indigenous Song Camp, which was put on by the SOCAN Foundation and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame in Toronto. She is also participating in Music Publishers Canada's Women in the Studio National Accelerator 2023, which focuses on developing the careers of women, gender fluid, nonbinary and gender non-conforming participants.
As Chaos Era yet again proves, songwriting has been a reliable way for Terez to process whatever is going through her life.
“I got into music when I was a kid and I didn't even know that's what I was doing at the time,” Terez says. “I don't even think I knew I was writing songs. I was just making things up and being creative. Being a kid, I was using music to be an outlet to work through whatever was going on through my life and that still rings true today, I think. I feel most comfortable working through emotions while writing songs. I write songs all the time, probably every day. Maybe it's not a full song, but I'm constantly writing. It's funny; sometimes friends will see me go off into a corner and pull my phone out and I'll be singing into my phone or writing down lyric ideas. It's really constant.”
Being a kid, I was using music to be an outlet to work through whatever was going on through my life and that still rings true today, I think.