American Teeth

Photo by Jack Lue

THE DAYS AND NIGHTS OF AMERICAN TEETH

Interview by Ken Morton - Photos by Jack Lue

American Teeth is the sonic alter ego of Elijah Noll, who collaborates alongside producer Colin Brittain (All Time

Low, A Day To Remember, ONE OK ROCK, Papa Roach)

and this meeting of the minds has resulted in quite a journey into the realm of pop punk and beyond. Hailing from Portland, Maine but currently based in Los Angeles, American Teeth recently signed to Fearless Records and plan to release his debut album later this year. With singles such as Fix You and One Of These Days already making a lasting impression on all types of music fans, American Teeth is slated to open the Aftershock Music Festival in Sacramento and has other live shows in the works as well. Highwire Daze recently interviewed Elijah Noll to find out a whole lot more about the up and coming American Teeth and their absolutely exhilarating, imaginative songs! Read on…

Introduce yourself, tell me what you do in American Teeth and how long you’ve been doing this project.

I am the singer, writer, co-producer of American Teeth. I started the project – we’re coming up on two years in June actually. So, it’s a fairly new project that came out of a session that I had with my now frequent collaborator Colin Brittain – who’s a great producer. We had a session with Munky from KORN actually – that was kind of put together and we really ended up hitting it off, the two of us, and started writing songs for fun – and that’s kind of how it all started.

How did you wind up signing with Fearless Records?

That was after a couple of different meetings – Colin and I together ended up going around meeting a couple of different record labels – Fearless was one of them. Colin actually knew Andy Serrao the President of the label – so we ended up popping in there after one of our meetings in the area out here in LA.

What has it been like to write and release new music for American Teeth in the middle of a pandemic and all this social unrest in the world?

It’s definitely helped fuel my creativity and the creation

process around that. As far as releasing, it’s been interesting because it’s really kind of this thing where you’re putting it out and you don’t get to go play it live like you usually would. Like you’re just putting it out there. I’m focusing more on getting the songs out and really making sure that I’m creating visuals that match the story I’m trying to tell or the vibe that I want people to feel. And I’ve been getting into TikTok too which has been an interesting journey.

Let’s talk about your new song One Of These Days and what inspired the lyrics for you.

That song is essentially about acceptance honestly. It’s about waking up and just feeling terrible right off the bat. A lot of times when I’m feeling down or I’m going through a bad day, I’ll try to deny that that’s happening, or try to convince myself “It’s fine. I’ll be fine…” and just push through. But I found recently with some trial and error that sometimes often when you just accept that you’re having a shitty day, and allow yourself to feel that, you can move past it quicker. It’s really kind of the meaning behind the whole thing – let go and accept that you’re having a shitty day – and by doing that, most of the time you’ll be able to move forward that way.

Metal Babe Mondays!

raghousemedia.com

Metal Babe Mayhem

Tell me about the new single Fix You and what was the inspiration behind that song.

Fix You came out of an end of a relationship last August that had a lot of ups and downs and was a bit of a roller coaster. It kind of depicts that back and forth, on and off, and good and bad. Colin had actually been working on a track with Alex Gaskarth and they had had it for a while – and Colin sent it to me. And one night I was really having a tough time and I just sat down and wrote a bunch of lyrics over it and ended up bringing it to him – we ended up finishing it up and that’s kind of how it all came together. It felt really in the moment.

You also released a new song with it called E-Girl. Tell me a little about that one.

E-Girl was actually written about a year before that – and that came out of a co-write of myself, Colin Britain and my other friend Colin Dieden – whose Little Hurt is his other project. We were doing a co-write and we set out to write something that had an in-your-face punk attitude and we had a super fun time fucking around and keeping it simple. Electric guitar, real drums – we wanted to make it feel like garage band style – short, fast. At the time, I guess it was coming off of my tour in 2019 with Dreamers, so I was very much in the headspace of writing music for live shows – so that I could imagine the energy of what this would bring to a live show. And that soon enough will be there.

Your producer Colin Brittain – he’s worked with bands such as All Time Low, Papa Roach, 5 Seconds Of Summer – the list is crazy! What is it like working with him?

It’s really fun – we have a good thing. He’s so incredible. His track record shows how talented he is. I think that when you bring both of our talents together, we have something that I feel is really unique – and we just have so much fun creating together.

What are you looking forward to the most about Aftershock?

Hopefully meeting some of the other acts backstage, but mostly just getting on a stage for the first time in a while – and on a festival stage for the first time. Over the last year or so during quarantine, the pandemic and everything, I have gained a bit of a fan base and starting communicating with a lot of the fans online, so I get the sense by talking to them that I’m going to see a lot of new faces. So that’s going to be cool to be able to play for people who have now been following me for the past year of these releases where we haven’t been able to go out and play the shows. It’s going to be the first big show back.

And do you have any messages for people who are reading this right now?

Yeah. Trust your intuition. I know it feels out of the blue, but I’ve had a lot of times where I was afraid I was making the wrong decisions – and lately I’ve been paying attention to how I feel about the decisions before I make them, and things have been getting a lot better since I started doing that. So trust your intuition. It feels out of the blue, but it’s the thing at the top of my mind right now.