Tiffany Johnson: An Old Soul with Teenage Angst in “Over Emotional”
Tiffany Johnson is no stranger to blurring the lines between teenage angst while tapping into her old soul self through her grace and intuitive storytelling. At the very core of her writing, Johnson communicates stories that represent her emotional intimacy and what she’s going through at the moment.
Johnson debuted her sophomore EP last fall following her self-titled EP back in 2021. The artist takes on a new light owning her emotions in full and being vulnerable like never before. The EP titled Over Emotional highlights the rollercoaster of feelings that come with finishing high school and leaving a hometown. Combining sounds of humble acoustic guitar with distorted electric and soft pop synths, Over Emotional pushes the boundaries of genre. From upbeat teenage angst bops to insightful singer-songwriter ballads, Johnson covers the multi-faceted human experience.
Her songwriting blends pop, country and alternative influences to create a unique sound. Describing herself as “an old soul with teenage angst” her storytelling and lyricism stretch far beyond her years. Her music has been featured on Spotify’s “Fresh Finds,” “Fresh Finds Pop,” “Fresh Finds Indie” and “New Music Nashville” playlists as well as Early Rising’s “One to Watch.” Johnson continues to push the boundaries with her artistry in Over Emotional. The artist’s sophomore EP is seven individual stories that all weave together to highlight the past year of her life. The EP leads off with an upbeat driving track titled “Anybody Else,” followed by “Warning Label” and lead title track “Over Emotional.”
“I feel like in the creative process, I told myself that I'm going to write these songs as if nobody's going to hear them and I'm going to say whatever I want to say. I gave myself the freedom when writing it to just be completely honest,” Johnson says.
The latter half of the EP digs into Johnson’s more raw emotions, including the heart wrenching song “Nothing Else I Can Do” and sweet, soft love song “All 4 U.” The last two tracks, “Brooklyn” and “Medicine” share perspectives of fear, anxiety, self doubt and loneliness. These tracks are an invitation to feel everything – to be over emotional. The lead single and most popular song off the EP, “Warning Label” is accompanied by a high-energy music video featuring a scene referencing the song’s lyrics with Johnson surrounded by caution tape, as well as an intense accumulation of emotions and female rage as she lights a car on fire.
“Warning Label represents female angst and anger, representing many of the feelings that come with a one sided relationship,” Johnson says. “Sometimes I feel like anger and spite are uncomfortable to talk about and that’s why I love writing tongue-in-cheek songs that capture those fiery emotions.”
“Warning Label” is followed by more of the A-side tracks “Anybody Else” and “Over Emotional” which refer to topics of teenage struggles, jealousy and self image.
“When I wrote ‘Anybody Else,’ I was in such a state of frustration with the way my life revolved around other people's validation,” Johnson says. “I think growing up in a generation raised with the internet caused me and my peers to constantly associate self-worth with internet applause. I've always been fascinated by the art of presenting yourself to an audience and how it coincides with the core of who you truly are as a person.”
[UNPUBLISHED]: Thank you for sitting down and talking to Unpublished Magazine. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with your music, how would you describe your sound to someone who hasn’t heard it before?
[TIFFANY]: A lot of times I say my music is for people who feel like they're old souls, but also have a teenage angst; it's a mix of those two things. At the core of my writing, it's singer-songwriter, and I want to communicate stories in the best way I can represent exactly what I'm going through and I like to play around with production. Sometimes it's more pop, sometimes it's more alternative, sometimes it's singer-songwriter.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What inspires your artistic style and persona?
[TIFFANY]: I'm a huge fan of Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac. I feel like I take so many references from the 70s. I also grew up listening to Taylor Swift. I try to take inspiration from the world around me.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How did you break into the music industry? Can you give us a background to how you started making the music that you do?
[TIFFANY]: I've been coming to Nashville – I live here now – since I was 13 years old. I am originally from South Dakota, and that's where I learned to do music. My dad was in a band growing up and he taught me to play guitar. He taught me how to read a crowd and be on a stage, and that was where I got my musical start. I basically played every open mic, cafe and coffee shop that I could. I was eight years old when I learned to play guitar and I started performing at the same age, and so it was just always something that I knew that I wanted to do and something that I loved. I begged my parents for years to take me to Nashville and when I was 13, they started taking me to songwriter camps and festivals and wherever I could go to meet other people. I ended up graduating high school and moving here.
[UNPUBLISHED]: I would love to talk about your EP, Over Emotional. It showcases so much artistic growth and maturity. What was the inspiration behind the EP?
[TIFFANY]: I write about anytime anything happens to me, and I felt like especially in this EP, I feel like songs are like photographs to me. They're like a Polaroid. I wanted to take a Polaroid of each aspect of the past year. It was my junior and senior year of high school, and I felt like they were like very coming of age movies. I have so many emotions all the time and especially in high school, I just felt so overwhelmed. The only way I could process that was by writing through it. I wanted to capture different emotions that I felt really strongly about in the EP.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Why did you choose to title the work Over Emotional?
[TIFFANY]: I feel like I'm the kind of person who just feels things. I'm a Scorpio and I feel things so strongly and I feel like I overshare, over love, over care, but I’m also overdramatic. A lot of these songs are things that I felt overly emotional about and that's how that came about.
[UNPUBLISHED]: I would love to know more about the creative process. How did you go through this experience and how did it affect the process of creating your music? Has Over Emotional helped you express feelings and let off some steam?
[TIFFANY]: I feel like in the creative process, I told myself that I'm going to write these songs as if nobody's going to hear them and I'm going to say whatever I want to say. I gave myself the freedom when writing it to just be completely honest, which I feel like was one of the first times that I was like, ‘okay, we're just gonna say what we want to say and see what happens.’ The creative process for each song was really different. “Warning Label” specifically, that was one of the songs I wrote just before I moved to Nashville and I was sitting on my floor and there were boxes all over me. I was in between moving to Nashville and here. That one sticks out to me because I feel like so much of this EP was written between moving and that went into a lot of the songs too.
[UNPUBLISHED]: What was the hardest song to write, either lyrically or emotionally?
[TIFFANY]: “Medicine,” which I put as the bonus track, and I wasn't even sure I was gonna release it. I did nothing that whole day and I was just moping around, being sad, which are the worst days but sometimes make for the best songs. I wrote it about feeling like there was only one person I wanted to call and one person that could help fix all my problems. They were also the person that I couldn't call and couldn't hit up, but I wrote that as like what would I say to them if I could call them?
[UNPUBLISHED]: What is your favorite song off the EP anand do you have a specific lyric or message that stands out to you the most?
[TIFFANY]: I love “Over Emotional” just because it's fun and I love writing choruses. That song has a chorus that I really love, and I really love the line that says, ‘I knew from the start that this is just how you leave.’ I just feel like it wrapped up a lot of what I was feeling on the EP. I also really love “Nothing Else I Can Do.” There's the last two verses of it. The lyrics are ‘Maybe you love to be in a different life / But even your second thoughts have to think twice.’ I remember when I wrote that lyric, I was acutely describing what I was feeling at the moment. I love that song too because it's fun to perform. I feel like it really tells the story of if I'm not with this person in this life, I hope it works out in another. I feel like that song just really captured a feeling of wishing that you could be with somebody, but knowing that sometimes even if you're in love with them it doesn't work.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Is there a story or experience amongst the recent releases you put out that you gravitate towards the most and feel like it perfectly encapsulates your creative growth and maturity?
[TIFFANY]: I feel like “Brooklyn” is a good example of that because that song doesn't have a chorus. And for the longest time – especially living in Nashville – you write songs and you have a structure that you cannot stray from at all. “Brooklyn” wasn’t written from my own perspective. It’s from the perspective of somebody else. The rest of the EP is from my perspective.
That perspective is if somebody else back home watched me move and watched me form this new life, like what would they be thinking? It was cool for me to get to write in something that wasn't fictional, or something that wasn't from my own personal experience. It was a full circle moment because I entered it in the American Songwriter contest, and I didn’t think that song would get picked since it doesn’t follow normal structure. It ended up as one of the finalists songs and it gave me a lot of creative freedom and proof that you can break the rules.
[UNPUBLISHED]: I would love to know the inspiration behind the “Over Emotional” song.
[TIFFANY]: I actually wrote that a year ago today, like exactly a year ago today. It started with me being called over emotional and how I feel like I go through things emotionally. I feel like a lot of times if you're the person breaking up with somebody, you almost get a head start on the grieving process because you know that you're gonna break up with them, like you've already gone through it. I always wanted to write a song about that. I just started spitting out words and then I remembered that idea and it was the perfect song for it. That was basically the process of that. I called my producer the same day and told him we need to finish this song.
[UNPUBLISHED]: “Warning Label” depicts releasing a lot of emotions and rage. What was the inspiration behind the song?
[TIFFANY]: I actually feel like sometimes when I'm going through things – I also like to use movies or TV shows to help further my creative process – so I was going through a time when I felt like I wasn't good enough for somebody and no matter what I did, it wasn't right for them and it wasn't enough. I had also watched Lady Bird a couple days before, and I was thinking of the character Kyle and how mean he is to her and she was trying to give him all of her love. She likes him and he’s lying to her and being such a player, so then I started messing around with my guitar and I was humming a chorus. I would save so much time if the men that were gonna play me had a big red, flashing sign that was like, ‘hey, this guy is gonna screw you over.’ The music video was my favorite thing I've ever done ever.
[UNPUBLISHED]: “Warning Label” also has an accompanying music video. What was the inspiration and how was your experience filming it?
[TIFFANY]: I have Pinterest boards for days, like anytime I make a song even when I'm in the middle of writing songs, like I'm so visual that I make a Pinterest board while I'm writing a song. I like to create a world around what I'm writing. It just helps me to feel like a movie in my head. I felt like this is a perfect video for feminine rage. I got to creative direct it and pick out all the sets and costumes and it was so fun. I really wanted to burn a car and found a place full of junk cars and set them on fire in this field.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Your music is extremely vulnerable and empowering. What is a message that you hope your listeners can take away from it?
[TIFFANY]: I hope people can feel understood and not alone in what they're going through. I genuinely write songs to make a friend for myself, so if they can do that for me, I hope they can do that for somebody else too.
[UNPUBLISHED]: Have you taken any risks, either personally or creatively, and experimented more with Over Emotional since your debut release?
[TIFFANY]: I would say for sure my debut release was a lot more like singer-songwriter, country influenced, almost like it had some of the aspects of a lot more show production. I knew for Over Emotional, I wanted to go a lot more pop and I love experimenting with production. In this EP, I really let myself try things and if I hated it, I said ‘okay, let's not do that,’ but if I liked it, it felt really liberating.
[UNPUBLISHED]: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the upcoming year look like for you that you would love to share with Unpublished?
[TIFFANY]: I’m feeling really good. Over Emotional is my favorite work that I've ever put out. To wrap up the EP, we're doing a feature with another band here in Nashville, and we're doing a remix of Over Emotional, so I'm excited for that to be released and to finish that up. I have been writing and recording almost every single day this past year and I'm super excited to play more shows, releasing more new music and continuing to experiment and change creatively.
