Music Review // Tenise Marie "Off The Record"

 

As someone who writes about music I've always found the double meaning in the phrase "Off The Record".   If you are telling something to a journalist you don't want to see in print, you would tell them it is "Off The Record".   At the same time, as a musician, you can remark how a song is "Off The Record", simply meaning it is a part of a collection of other songs.   For Tenise Marie, this song feels like a confession.  Even though we are hearing these statements within the song itself, the title implies that we aren't to go off talking about them.  

With these soft, delicate acoustics to start things off, there is a slow pace at first.  This will eventually kick in to feel like a musician who is on that border of rock and pop.  There aren't a lot of them these days and when I try to think of a name the first for comparison which comes to mind is Paula Cole.  This just shows though that in a music scene which can feel broader than ever before, some of the specific sounds I've heard before just aren't being kept up with and so Tenise Marie definitely is filling an important void.

Perhaps the most important part of this song though are the lyrics and just seeing how personal they get.  There are the lines: "I was lost for words / I tossed and turned", which as a writer I never want to admit to being at a loss for words.  But then there are also: "It was hard to breathe / My scars were deep", which most times it isn't really appropriate to talk to other people about their scars because it feels more private than anything else.

I suppose the point of this song in ways, referring to the title, isn't so much that these are things not to be printed in a newspaper article but rather that these are things which the author feels they need to get off of their chest but doesn't want to talk about them further.  And I feel like we've all felt that way before- and it's completely valid- when we have things we want to say or just address because we feel we need to, but we don't take follow up questions and don't want others bringing them up.