Jessie Everill’s bedroom is her recording studio.
From within her four walls, she’s crafted the DIY emo project idialedyournumber, delivering songs that sway between soft melodies and screeching wails with an incredibly charming lo-fi production. She utilizes digital instruments and plugins to create chaos with chiptune waves and ground-shaking glitch effects.
It’s a modern musical project that sounds as if it were buried within a deserted blog, a treasure long forgotten. Lyrically, Idialedyournumber is personal—heartwrenchingly so. It teeters between amateur and professional in production, a result of Everill’s time spent studying as an audio engineer and the years she’s spent as her own producer.
As far as Halifax’s emo scene goes, idialedyournumber has a sound unlike any other, and that has only become clearer with the release of her third publicly available album.
Teenage Widow is an album about change. The sudden shift from youth to adulthood. The relationships that begin, thrive and end as time passes. What you’ve gained from the years you’ve spent, and what you’ve lost.
And while the sound of idialedyournumber stayed relatively similar on Teenage Widow, the project was a risk for Everill.
As long as she’s been making music, Everill has been doing it by herself. She performs with a band for live shows and touring and is certainly active within the local music scene, but when it comes to the craft, she flies solo.
For the first time, Everill turned to professional production.
To the studio
“A few of the songs were older songs I wanted to go over again,” says Everill in a phone interview with The Coast. “I always had an affinity for bedroom production and I thought because I had just graduated music production school, I wanted to have at least one record under my belt that was kind of more professionally done.”
Everill recorded most of the album at LLoyd Recording with producer Richard “LLoyd” Fry. She also worked with live musicians on several tracks, with Dante Kierstead on drums, Sebastien Wu and Zach Rickett playing bass, as well as some additional engineering work from Maury Chesterfield, Braeden Lightfoot, Ellen Murphy-Timbre and Connor Saulnier.
There were a lot of people involved for someone who was used to making music at home by herself.
“There’s something about getting up in the morning and getting ready to go to the studio instead of just making music in your bedroom whenever you feel like it,” she says. “Every part of that process was new to me. Working with other people in general. I’m used to just working by myself.”
Part of the reason she’s kept her production isolated is a fear of judgement.
“I had this big fear that people wouldn’t like my ideas and I didn’t want to subject people to this whole process,” says Everill. “I had just gotten new live members last year. A new drummer and a new guitarist and that really inspired me to use those live drums in an actual record. It was a really great experience, getting together.”
Everill says the live instrumentation allowed the players to improvise fills that otherwise wouldn’t have made it on the record. The partnership with Fry also led to ideas that would have otherwise gone unfounded.
“I always thought, I’m the producer. I would never work with a producer,” says Everill, “but it was so cool, getting to bounce ideas off of each other… it was a really knowledgeable experience. I learned a lot watching his process because I would go to his home studio and watch him mix my songs.”
It’s unique with this heightened production that Everill’s core sound remains true to her previous work under idialedyournumber. It still sways between soft and screeching. It still has that bit-pop sound and glitchy production. The essence of idialedyournumber, sonically, isn’t lost through professional production.
According to Everill, two of the songs on the album are still bedroom recordings, produced entirely by her: the technologically-tampered “Canadian Stationery” and the acoustic solo performance “Say Hello”. Yet, they fit naturally within the tracklist.
Back to the bedroom?
Although she garnered much from the experience of professional recording, it was a costly endeavour. While Everill is thankful she took the chance, right now, she feels more content in her bedroom.
“I really enjoyed the process of making this album (but) I think that I gravitate towards lo-fi more for a reason. I think that suits me a bit more,” she explains.
“I just like the process. If I were to do another professional album or something like that, I feel like it would be under a different name or something.”
This goes back to the personal nature of idialedyournumber. It’s not a project about hit-making, winning over crowds or gaining money, status or popularity.
It’s an emotional release for its creator.
“Music is a hundred percent just a way for me to vent,” she admits. “And I feel like if I am making these productions in my bedroom by myself, then it’s done, I’ve vented it out and it feels good.”
While idialedyournumber has garnered its fair share of fans online for its honest and open brand of indie-flavoured emo—so much so that Everill will be doing a mini-tour tackling Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal this September—it’s also attracted criticism online in the form of album review sites like Rate Your Music and Album of the Year. A rise in popularity online also comes with a few haters along the way, something Everill says she’s struggled with.
“I’m someone who is a very insecure person and that’s the type of thing I vent through my music,” she says. “The fact that my music is being picked up by all these people and people are obviously not responding to it well, then that kind of makes me feel even more insecure.”
But for every critic is a fan that appreciates what Everill is doing.
“The thing I sometimes fail to realize is that the audience (gives) mostly positive feedback,” she says.
For now, Everill is taking a summer break to recoup after the stress of her album release. Afterwards, she’ll continue to make music from her bedroom for her fans who want to listen.
Teenage Widow is available for streaming on major music-sharing platforms.
