By Jen Ho, Contributor

Meet Tetchy

On March 5th 2020 at Our Wicked Lady, eager attendees, including myself, closely gathered around the blinding neon space to experience the 4-piece group’s anticipated live performance of their newly-released debut EP “Hounds”. 

I staggered to the front next to the camera man (so sorry, whoever you are), fresh off a full day in bed with Taco Bell, donning black clothes from the dirty pile, and unaware of the fact that this would be my last live show before the city-wide shutdown.

Vocalist/lead guitarist Maggie Denning began: “Think I’m ready to let this go.” 

Within the first 16 bars, Tetchy swiftly plunged their hands right into the muck where I was buried and pried me right out by the scalp, as they thrashed off every last particle of self-hating filth off my soul. Both band and audience proceeded to swell and fall through the quiet, unyielding, and meditative chaos together. The chemistry is infectious. It’s no wonder the group launched right into the heart of NYC’s live scene with ease in just 1 year since its inception. The moment they started, nothing else mattered. 

One year later, I had the chance to catch up with Maggie (vocalist & leader guitarist of Tetchy) over the phone, during which she shared her experience with long-term COVID, stories about her parents meeting in a disco band and her father’s role in her life, and, of course, music and what’s to come next. 

First of all I am so sorry to hear about your long-term COVID symptoms, which I saw on Instagram. How long has it been since the symptoms first started, and how have you been dealing with it?

I first felt sick towards the end of March 2020, on the night of our first big livestream show hosted by Booked by Grandma (our favorite bookers btw!!) after live shows shut down. I remember how we made our songs as good as we can for Instagram recording, and then I quickly started feeling really achy and fatigued, and got a fever. I was like, ‘Oh no, well, here we go, during a LIVE STREAM.’

Those initial symptoms lasted for about a week and a half, which was totally manageable, so I just kept going. I was in the middle of my last semester of undergrad wrapping up my senior thesis. After the week and a half began the shortness of breath. It kept coming at the exact same time every day, and lasted all night. It never got worse, but it also never got better. I had shortness of breath along with the fatigue and aches every single day until about late May 2020. Things started to get a little better after that. I’d have good days with good breathing. A good week. Even a good straight month, and thought, ‘Oh it's actually over now!’ But then it’d follow with a really bad day. Bad week. Even a bad straight month.

The main thing is the breathing. When you can't really breathe, you can’t fully do anything like sing or play guitar. So it sucks having to press pause all the time. But it’s definitely been a big lesson on what self care and boundaries look like as it pertains to your health.

That's kind of been the past year... Not to mention the brain fog! If I forget names or trip over words during this interview, we’re blaming covid. 

Yes, we’ll do that! It must be especially frustrating as a creator because it’s already so hard to stay inspired and motivated over this past year. To have a good day filled with productivity, and then have symptoms come up out of nowhere… You have no choice but to choose self care.

Yes. It's really demoralizing, because then it's hard to find any sort of traction. But! The experience also had me wondering, well, if healing is nonlinear, then maybe art is the same way? Why do we have to feel pressured to embark on a constant, urgent, straight trajectory with music? I am absolutely guilty of this way of thinking (my bandmates will back this too). But we’ve got goals! We've got short-term goals, mid-term goals, long term goals. Goals out the ass. 

But that mindset doesn’t allow oneself to actually listen to what's going on inside. I’ve realized that from this past year. If our branding and social media marketing goals can’t really lend to anything but a rigid one-way artist path, then what are we doing? I think people are really waking up to that this year. I see a lot of people saying, “I'm back. Hi, I haven't posted for a while but I've been doing this”. I think that's great. People are taking the time to figure out what they need to be doing right now before conforming to what should be. 

Bottom line: We all need to cut ourselves some pretty serious slack right now. This is a massive adjustment. It takes time, reflection and external life distractions to get through and settle into the fact that, no, we aren't going to live shows. We aren't seeing those precious acquaintances we love and respect so much. I think about that a lot. We’ve been writing about it too. 

Are there self rejuvenating rituals that you try comitting to due to long term COVID, or, on the other hand, self destructive rituals because well fuck it, everything sucks? 

Oooh, definitely both. For self-rejuvenating, one thing that I’ve settled into within myself was being way more proactive about my socialization, so bringing those friend threads and text message chains back to life, trying to check in. One of my favorite things to do now is leave a voice note to someone, and just let them know that I’m thinking about them. It just reminds even me that my friends, sweeties, and loves are out there, even if they're not in this city. 

My other favorite thing is taking a couple of minutes on one of my meditation apps or anything that can help me focus on my body and breath. Every day for a long time, I did even just 10 minutes of yoga and meditation. I really centered on the idea that the virus was no longer in my body, some positive psychology shit. 

I want to emphasize that everyone's healing through COVID and long COVID is different. What works for me does not necessarily work for everybody else. I’m still dealing with long covid, and haven't healed yet, but I found that taking time everyday to dedicate myself to listening has been instrumental. 

Anyway, that works for me and my kind of rush rush hustle, hustle, linear linear. So self destructive! What was that again??

I think I framed it as self destructive rituals, but really any kind of ‘fuck it i’m letting go’. For example, I think there was a two or three month period when I had Taco Bell for 2 or 3 times a week… Which…Yeah... Anyway! Anything, really. I can bring up Taco Bell so quickly because I may have sort of had it a few days ago.

Oh man, well I do want to say that I have taken to ordering the kids meal from my favorite burger place in my neighborhood. I'm looking for that big cheap meal, and it’s $8, and the burger’s the same size! You can't beat that! So that’s what I do, from Burger Your Way in Crown Heights

… But don't tell them I’m not a child! I remember the first couple times I did it, I anxiously asked my roommate “Do you think they're going to know??!! Will they know I’m not a child, nor do I have a child??” 

I don’t know if this is even self-destructive too, but the apartment has been super into Derry Girls. It’s just amazing. I also started Twin Peaks for the first time, and I am just loving every second of it. 

Ahhhh, I am so excited for your Twin Peaks journey! 

I love it. It’s hilarious. And it’s so weird. I am always sitting there wondering what is going to happen next.

It's also been really interesting and a little hard to watch, because it's reminding me so much of my dad. My dad was a cinematographer, and he would make these kinds of movies. I mean, they weren’t really crime/investigative, but he made horror movies, so there was that part of it. And this style of filmmaking was just absolutely his jam. So I feel like I'm watching it with him. 

My dad was really cool. He and my mom also met in a disco band. Random, but I feel like I gotta say this in an interview. I have to. 

!!! Did they just both happen to accept a disco gig or...??  

Oh yeah, so I think the process for getting into a cover band was a bit different back then. There seemed to be more of an official audition process. So they both ended up auditioning for, and getting into this band! I don't think either of them was the band leader, but of course they became integral members, and they ended up in a couple more bands together. Think Hungry Like The Wolf and a lot of I'm Coming Out. 

I really love disco because of it. I'm such an advocate for disco. That whole genre is my jam. It’s my karaoke genre of choice.

My mom had these high waisted see through plastic pants, this jumpsuit and everything. 

I cannot fathom, maybe because I have first generation Asian parents. My parents wearing any kind of high-waisted, flashy disco outfit would be wild. So personally it’s amazing hearing about your parents growing up, being musicians, playing in disco bands, meeting each other, and just having these killer outfits.

Honestly, it's really cool to me too. And they were both definitely behind the fact that I am pursuing music. I can’t lie, it's a great position to be in, to be so supported by your parents through and through.

Before my dad died, he would always lament that I was not born in a different era. He seemed to think that in another era, I would have been able to totally support myself fully just singing. With the current music industry, it’s really not a great way to support yourself 

Your dad was in the intro of “The World”, right? 

Yeah. That birthday voicemail was from my last birthday he was alive for. He died very suddenly in 2018 from a heart attack. It happened a couple of months, actually, maybe weeks after I wrote that song. I sent the song to him, and he had a strong reaction to it. He said that ‘The World’ really spoke to people in his time of life and mine as well. And it was interesting how all these really nice things he said about it just clicked. 

I realized this song that was written out of my own emotional place was really me inhabiting the emotional place of my dad. Because as you continue growing older, and things continue to be hard and really painful for some reason, it just feels like you can't do anything to resolve the pain. You start to get tired. You also start to find that it's not strictly depression and solemness. You realize there's also peace in this exhaustion. Eventually, there's this sense of acceptance; just accepting your own smallness in this whole unknown world.  

Yeah. I remember listening to it, and thinking about how everyone has a family member, loved one, mentor, just someone who came into our lives, even briefly, and made an impact right when it feels like everyone and everything is trying to set us up for failure. So the song also felt sweet in a lot of ways.

I like how ‘The World’ rounded out your EP with a very hopeful vibe. The whole EP was so dynamic, but ‘The World’ being in the end really calmed me down. 

That's very sweet, I really appreciate it. That song was also recorded in our own studio. The rest was recorded at Sonelab in Massachusetts with Justin Pizzoferrato, which was an incredible experience. We had so much fun. 

We wanted to do ‘The World’ in our own space though, because we wanted a more stripped down feel. We also knew we wanted to do something with my dad's voice in it, so it just all just came together.

It means so much that everyone has really connected with it. Most of all, it really meant, for lack of a better phrase, *the world* that my dad really loved that song, that I had a song written before he passed away, that I knew that he loved. It was another way to be close to him.

It also just happened to be a song that we played at his “celebration of life”. We threw one heck of a party at his memorial. The disco band got back together playing hits, there was dancing, and we made a montage of a lot of films he made.

So in a way, the EP was written before your dad’s untimely passing, unrelated feelings before you knew it’d happen, and the next project is after it happened? 

Yeah, the EP was written just before my dad passed away suddenly. Since then, I've written a lot of songs centered around a lot of themes working through grief and loss, and shedding light on that healing process. There will also be some similar kind of ‘Fascist’-esque moments of anger. Expect some more raging, screaming, sobbing, wacky goodness. Maybe some weird fun elements we’d discovered along the way too. 

It’s going to be our first full length. No dates to share yet, but it’s planned to be revealed slowly later this spring and early summer. 

I’m so excited! Yes, I remember you guys kicking off Tetchy like it was yesterday, with the release of ‘Fascist’. Fast forward to 2 years later, the song feels so relevant to what’s happened in the past year. Where were you when the song was conceptualized? Was there a specific place in time that triggered this song? 

I started writing ‘Fascist’ on a train. I had basically written almost the whole song before even sitting down to guitar, instruments, and everything with the band. 

I wrote this song out of feeling really alone in a social situation. It felt like there was some harmful and toxic-leaning behavior just running rampant in this friend group. And it felt like I was the only one addressing it, so I was starting to lose my mind. Overtime, I started to realize that it just wasn't going to work for me to continue fighting this fight. That's more-or-less the birthplace of the song. 

The song itself is really about that exact moment in these moments when you are just ready to let it fly. It’s about feeling gaslit and “devil’s advocate-d” one too many times. It's about putting a name to what's going on that’s hard to convey calmly. Sometimes you have to call someone out in their face and say those words: ‘What you are saying is furthering white supremacy. Your words are in line with fascist thinking’, while everyone else is watching from the sidelines and sitting on the fence. Moments like these invite a lot of heat. You end up being the bad guy for saying what's actually going on and that it isn't okay. So you end up being perceived as the conflict loving bitch, and it becomes a cycle. 

You've tried to do the work so many times at this point. And the fight is yours alone. It's not fair, and you’re sick of it. So you're just done. You're off in a flying flaming fury, before going off to better things. 

Oh yeah, you're at your breaking point, but they continue to TEST you until…‘the snap’.

Yeah, absolutely. And anyone can do this. Anyone can make you snap when they play devil's advocate, pretend that they have a unique angle, and/or make you feel your experiences aren't equal. You know what I mean? Often, this someone doesn't understand the hierarchy of experiences in the moment. They get the privilege of looking at both sides of it, and weighing the logic, theory, and whatever else the fuck they want to weigh. In actuality, you've experienced it first-handedly. And having to advocate yourself at every turn is a shitty feeling.

How did you come up with Tetchy? How was this project conceptualized?

I thought waaaay more people knew the word Tetchy. It happened to be a word I knew from maybe watching a lot of British television shows, so I thought it’s a very normal word. So then I was surprised by the rest of my American DIY counterparts, who were like ‘no, what is this.’

I was thinking about the word “touchy”, like when someone is moody and sensitive. And that's when we just kind of started rolling with Tetchy. Turns out it would end up requiring more explaining than we thought! But that was short lived. I think people accepted it as they do for many unfamiliar, silly, and funny names.

As far as conceptualization, well, let me just tell you the downright dirty truth. I just really wanted to be in a fucking rock band. I was seeing all my favorite women rockers and queer rockers just like shredding it up. And I was like, ‘wait I want to do that.’ 

I remember being at a show, when a friend of mine made kind of an off-color comment. We snuck into Courtney Barnett’s set at Rough Trade, and I got so close to the stage. It was just a magical show. 

While we were watching, I was like ‘I want to rock’, and he replied ‘You can't rock that hard.’ He was totally joking, and you know, sometimes friends make bad jokes. It was honestly totally fine, but I just took that into my body, and I was like, ‘What do you mean I can't rock?!?!’ 

So from that moment on, I made it my mission to rock that hard. I think it turned out really well, a couple years later. 

Yeah, I mean, you definitely showed him.

It was honestly so funny, and he also doesn't remember saying it to me at all!

Any final comments, thoughts, feelings, noises for our sweet TFR readers? 

We’re very excited for the full length, for which we’re, at the very least, going to have some over-the-internet socializing, music playing, and just general hangouts on social media. But hopefully some actual live shows as soon as it’s safe to do that, so stay tuned!

And please remember to wear your mask, and avoid risky behavior even when you get that vaccine! With all this in mind, remember that long covid is very much a real thing. You're not just preventing death by COVID, you're preventing chronic illness by COVID and really shitty months and years. Those are my thoughts, please, thank you bye, WOOH!