A Quick Chat with El Tee

“I Still Sing About You” is such a raw and intimate track. You’ve said it’s your favourite on the EP and also the one that took the longest to write—what was it about this song that made it so challenging to finish?
There are several reasons this song took so long. First, I found some of the chord progressions and melody ideas early on and loved them so much that I was afraid I’d ruin it. I kept trying to write it to match the potential I felt it had, which made it hard to finish. Another reason is more logistic, a practice-based roadblock: I left the song alone for too long before coming back to it. There’s a kind of magic that happens when you first discover an idea. It’s time sensitive. Whether it’s a song or any creative endeavour, there’s this moment when you find an idea where it’s fresh and alive, and if you don’t act on it, that energy fades. It’s not that the idea disappears completely—it’s still there—but it’s like the scent of a perfume: the more time passes, the weaker it becomes. It’s still there, but it’s not as bold as it was when it was first found.

There’s a powerful line in the song—“I hate it how you made me feel kind and safe and cool.” Can you talk about the moment that lyric came to you and how it shaped the theme of the entire EP?
This lyric was written, naturally, following the previous lyric (“you hate it when I’m crying, but also love it when I do”). The “kind and safe and cool” lyric continued the sentiment that you can love something inherently bad, or hate something inherently good. The person I’m writing about hated it when I cried because they cared for me, but they also loved it because they thought it was beautiful and sweet. In a similar way, I hated how they made me feel these positive things, because the very fact they did made it bittersweet. It felt good at the time, but now that it’s over, it also makes me feel bad. It was both something beautiful and something painful at the same time.

You explore the idea that relationships don’t create our best qualities—they just reflect them. Was that a perspective you came to over time, or did writing this EP help solidify that realisation for you?
I think it’s a perspective I’ve always known, but became aware of consciously when I articulated this idea in the lyric “I hate it how you made me feel kind and safe and cool.” What I was feeling was resentment that this person made me feel good about myself, made me feel like I was a great person because of how they adored me or how they made me feel. But over time, I realised it wasn’t that I was those things because of them—it was that they saw me for who I truly was and that I just saw my qualities reflected back to me. I think this was when I realised the importance of disentangling self-worth from the external. It was also then that I became aware of how much the EP explores the enmeshed relationship between self and others.

This song, and the EP as a whole, really dive into emotional duality—longing and closure, love and regret. How do you navigate those contradictions when writing so honestly?
I don’t see them as contradictions so much as the reality of emotional experience. Emotions don’t exist on a single gradient; they’re not just one shade or colour at a time, but often many. Take grief, for example—it can be both dark and quiet, but also loud or translucent. It can also be warm, bright, colourful, slow, and fast. The human experience, and our emotions, are rarely just one thing; more often, they’re many things at once. In this EP, I wrote a lot about feeling different things simultaneously, often expressing it through metaphors of duality or opposites. I was curious about that, and I still find it fascinating to explore, both as a songwriter and as a regular human navigating life.

You’ve had a huge response to your debut album Everything Is Fine. How does Kind Safe Cool build on what you created with that record? Do you feel like your sound or perspective has evolved?
My debut album, “Everything Is Fine”, was just that—a debut of some of the first songs I’d ever written. Since then, I’ve gained more freedom in my writing and production. I’ve also learned a lot about myself and the kind of songs I want to create. Even since writing the songs for “Kind Safe Cool”, I’ve continued to grow, and my songwriting has evolved. Growth and development, not just in the medium or mode of your creative practice, are such an important part of creating. Recently, I’ve been taking songwriting workshops with the renowned School of Song, with teachers like Adrianne Lenker and Brian Eno, which has expanded my practice exponentially. I can’t recommend enough putting yourself in situations where you’re learning, being challenged, and stepping outside your usual practice. For me, this could be a songwriting workshop, visiting a new place, learning something new, reading, or meeting new people.

You mention literally screaming in the car in contrast to how your voice used to soothe someone—there’s such a cinematic quality to that moment. Do you visualise your songs as scenes when you’re writing them?
In “I Still Sing About You” and on other songs on the EP, I was interested in writing to elicit more visual, up-close perspectives. I did something similar on the title track of my debut, "Everything Is Fine", describing a road trip through Aotearoa. With the "screaming" lyric, I wanted to paint a vivid picture. The image of someone rolling the windows up and screaming in their car is both visual and visceral, and it communicates something emotionally—the agony, the pain, the release. It was also a real experience I had. I felt it would be powerful to write about it literally instead of figuratively.