tofusmell – the recording project from Winnipeg, by way of Orlando, musician and singer Rae Chen’s debut full-length, All My Time, is now available worldwide on CD and all digital platforms from the illustrious Hardly Art.
All My Time showcases Chen’s signature precision in vulnerable, clear-eyed songwriting, with a larger, lusher, and more fleshed-out scale of production than we’ve seen from him before. Here, Chen poetically distills the uncomfortable complications of learning to release expectation from outcome, and in turn live contentedly in life’s constant, confusing uncertainty. It’s not necessarily an apathetic resignation strung through the songs of All My Time, but rather a hopeful insistence that impermanence, and the toiling mystery it brings, is its own kind of steady salve.
Following the release of his 2023 EP Humor, Chen spent a few months touring intermittently with Leith Ross before making the daring decision to move from his home state of Florida to Winnipeg, Canada. Once there, he finished writing the songs that would become All My Time and began recording. While Chen has primarily worked solo in the past – writing, producing, and recording his music himself – he brought in a collection of new collaborators to help build the songs of All My Time. Six of the songs were co-produced and recorded with Keiran Placatka in Winnipeg, and then developed throughout the months following Chen’s move. New friends, Chen found the production process with Placatka to be surprisingly intuitive and creatively inspiring. For the two of them, it wasn’t just the instrumental arrangements that felt important to the songmaking, but also the emotional atmosphere those arrangements conjured. Interspersed with Placatka’s contributions are four songs produced and recorded with Paul Larson in Los Angeles, each with an energetic, dynamic live-band sound inspired by the folk-rock of the early aughts.
Tofusmell has confirmed an album release show on Saturday, May 16th at The Handsome Daughter in Winnipeg, Canada. More dates to follow.