“I wear a cowboy hat,” laughs Utah County-based singer-songwriter Timmy the Teeth. “A lot of times people think I’m country because of the clothes I wear. I wouldn’t say I’m country, but we have a little twang in our songs. I guess I’m just a singer of songs. What comes out, comes out.”
by christie marcy
Photos by natalie simpson
What comes out is often third-person narratives that Timmy pulls from his own experiences. “I worked the graveyard shift at Stouffer’s back in the day. You know, like those microwave meals,” he says. “It was a pretty lonely existence even though there was someone to the right of you, someone to the left of you and someone across from you, but you’re just there doing your thing. And I don’t know if I was drawing on the horrible time I had there working on the assembly line, but I just wrote a song about a girl peeling potatoes on an assembly line and she didn’t know why. She just wanted to get out of her current situation.”
“I just write about what I feel or what happens in my life,” Teeth continues. “I fear that I’ll become stagnant and I won’t have anything to write about. It’s scary to become complacent or to become comfortable.”
When he’s not fronting his own musical act, Teeth is playing the drums for another local-singer-songwriter, Joshua James. In fact, he uses the same back-up band as James for his own gigs. “We’ve traveled all over the world together and there’s a brotherhood and a connection that comes with playing music with someone,” Teeth says, “There’s a language that happens in music when you’re performing with people. We just have a connection. It just kind of happened,” Teeth says of the band-share.
“There’s a really cool thing going on here locally. I’d say it’s pretty world-class.”
Check out Salt Lake magazine’s new online feature, Small Lake City Concerts. There you’ll find exclusive video of Timmy singing his original song, “I Don’t Know What I Would Do Without You,” and covering John Prine’s “All the Best.”
Timmy the Teeth’s third studio album Ain’t that Bad is available on iTunes now.
