Multifaceted Musician Te’Jani Becomes the ‘Life of the Party’

Te’Jani pulls you into his latest single “This is Why I’m Hot,” with skittering, syncopated hip-hop beats, hypnotic rap-meets-alt rock vocals and alternately grimy and ringing guitars.

“Hot take: I don’t need protection/ Don’t color me too reckless/ Don’t know it’s too excessive/ When it comes to self love or self expression/ I’m not concerned about rejection/ That’s why I never have to question why I’m hot…”

The infectious track doesn’t let go, entwining turntable scratching, chiming spiraling guitars and supple fine-grained vocals.

“It’s just such a fun song to sing along to,” says Te’Jani, who wanted to make a tune that included all his musical inspirations.

“My worlds are rap, hip-hop, and indie rock,” he offers. “Rap was my cousin, but indie rock raised me.”

The song’s feel-good, hip-shaking rush owes much to its layered yet uncluttered production, guitars that effortlessly shapeshift from progressive rock to grunge, and succinct songwriting and wordplay — all the work of Te’Jani — but the tune also bears an uplifting, personal yet inclusive message.

“If you look at the verse, it isn’t me comparing myself to other people,” Te’Jani says. “It’s me [saying] I’m going to respect myself.”

“This is Why I’m Hot” is aptly named. As he charges into the second half of 2025, Te’Jani is doing much more than advancing his career; the local songwriter-producer-guitarist-engineer is on a hot streak. “This is Why I’m Hot” is the lead-off track of Te’Jani’s latest album, Life of the Party, which drops Aug. 29 with an album release show at the Neighborhood Theatre, headlined by Te’Jani and featuring Charlotte’s explosive alt-rock band Petrov.

The Life of the Party release follows a stunning string of singles from Te’Jani, beginning in late 2024 with “Darkslide,” a buzzing, bristling guitar-driven rock tune featuring Grammy-nominated artist boyband.

“I Hate New York,” Te’Jani’s conflicted regretful response to being dumped by his then-girlfriend via an Instagram post, followed in 2025. Here Te’Jani’s plangent spider’s crawl guitar cradles his close, confessional vocals before the tune unleashes a collision of riffs, choruses and hooks. Ironically, Te’Jani calls this musical emotional wringer his “most fun song to play live.”

May 2025 brought the release of “Medicine,” a vulnerable, emotionally rangy alt-rock tune, inspired by a party Te’Jani attended after neglecting to take his anti-depressant meds.

“I can’t forget all the messages/ Through the broken glass on my finger tips/ And all these conversations in stranger’s beds/ And they’ll still remind me to take my meds…”

On the strength of his impressive songwriting and production as well as immersive, engaging videos by Rudy and Judson Kavascitz, the brothers who created the down to earth Home Movies Music Sessions series, Te’Jani notes that his work has received love and encouragement from music industry luminaries including Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst, Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker and members of alt-rock band Dashboard Confessional, as well as genre-fluid Black indie artists like Bartees Strange (“Wants Needs”) and Kenny Hoopla (“How Will I Rest in Peace if I’m Buried by a Highway?”).

While it’s good to receive notice from music industry peers, Te’Jani notes that it’s not necessary to his sense of self and well-being.

“I feel like my confidence is way up and it doesn’t come from external validation or results,” Te’Jani says. “It comes from me believing in myself, trusting myself and actually loving myself enough to move forward.”

Te’Jani also reveals that he plans this year to rejoin fellow members of the Living Quarters Collective, a group of producers, engineers and musicians that includes the likes of Ike Byers, Matt Square, Mike Larry and Tré Ahmad, who created groundbreaking genre-fluid tunes with the Summer Camp project in 2020. What title the reunion will go by and what form it will take are still under wraps.

Te’Jani is also the subject of a recently completed music documentary by local filmmaker Nick Will. The as-yet-untitled documentary was screened on Aug. 9 at a film and live music event called Wish You Were Here, hosted at a private home in Rock Hill.

Read more: Low Groves Doc Kicks Off ‘Wish You Were Here’ Event Series

It was the second event under the Wish You Were Here banner. The first, held at Evening Muse in June, included Te’Jani performing and hosting an open mic among its attractions.

“Te’Jani puts a lot of effort into his production and you can see it in all of the music he does,” Will says. “He’s telling an honest story [and] being completely honest with himself.”

Between running track and tracking songs

Te’Jani grew up in a deeply religious family in JAARS, an area outside Waxhaw that takes its name from a flying missionary organization (Jungle Aviation and Relay Service) that is based in the area and focuses on providing transportation support operations for partners who work in Bible translation services in hard-to-reach areas along the equator. Will also grew up in JAARS, though he and Te’Jani did not meet until years later.

Though money was tight, Te’Jani’s family found time for music. He recalls dancing to the soundtrack CD for Prince of Egypt, an animated retelling of the Book of Exodus.

“All my earliest memories are with music,” Te’Jani says.

After his parents bought a radio, they showed their young son how to record a song from there onto audio tape. It seemed like magic.

“I vividly recall hitting record, hitting stop, hitting rewind and hitting play,” Te’Jani offers. “My brain exploded. It was like I just rewound time.”

Getting his first guitar at age 7, Te’Jani remembers that he played so badly that he cried. Te’Jani’s determination to learn the instrument revived when his guitar teacher gave him the Nat King Cole Trio compilation CD Jumpin’ the Capitol, but the fledgling guitarist truly got hooked when the Guitar Hero 3 video game came out. The game exposed Te’Jani to hard rock and coruscating guitar solos, and served as gateway exposure to heavy experimental bands like Bloc Party.

“Guitar Hero 3 is what really got me going,” Te’Jani notes. “This is a common story among people in my generation who play music now.”

In fact, Te’Jani often describes his music as being for “Black kids who love Guitar Hero 3.”

Throughout high school, Te’Jani honed his performing and songwriting chops at Evening Muse’s open mic nights.

“I started out rapping because I couldn’t figure out lyrics and melody at the same time,” he recalls.

Gradually, Te’Jani built upon his strengths and sharpened his songwriting.

His single “Hurricane” from 2018 captures the artist honing his craft. One of Te’Jani’s rare rap-rock songs — the other notable example being “This is Why I’m Hot” — it couples the artist’s ruminative flow with haunting, radiating electric guitar.

Attending college at Queens University, he crossed paths with members of the Living Quarters Collective, as well as the Kovasckitz brothers. He also started learning about music production and engineering while interning at Charlotte’s Black Pearl Studios. He began producing other artists’ music as well as his own.

“I’ve always [produced] stuff in my own room by myself, and I realized the quickest way to start building a community is by working with other people,” Te’Jani says.

In the meantime, Te’Jani had also been focusing on a career in track. In high school he was the ninth fastest kid in the U.S. and was a seven-time state champion. Offered an athletic track-and-field scholarship, he briefly transferred to Purdue University in Indiana. Training to join the U.S. Olympic team, he was six seconds over the qualifying time for the Olympic trials.

All the time, Te’Jani’s gut told him something was wrong. He knew he would have to choose between the two life paths before him — music or track. Then Te’Jani got injured going into his senior year at college. He had aimed to coach at the collegiate level or professional level, but now he wanted out.

The arrival of COVID in 2020 put the final kibosh on Te’Jani’s track career. Amid the widespread uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, Te’Jani decided to focus on his music. Sitting in his room and feeling depressed, Te’Jani recognized that he didn’t want to realize at age 40 that he hadn’t taken chances he should have.

“I needed to accept that, and just put out the music,” he says. The result was his eclectic and critically-lauded Gimp EP, which dropped in 2020.

His next major release, the six-track autobiographical EP On Prozac, followed in 2023. It marked an artistic and personal turning point for Te’Jani, but it came at a cost.

Te’Jani turns dark thoughts into deep sounds

“Basically, in 2021 my life came to a screeching halt,” Te’Jani says today. “I had every uncomfortable conversation I had been putting off. I broke up with my family, my girlfriend [and] my friends. It was crazy.”

Perhaps the most unpleasant confrontation came when Te’Jani told his religious parents that he wasn’t Christian anymore.

“That was not received well,” Te’Jani says.

He also wasn’t taking care of himself and ended up in the hospital for four days.

“They sent me back [home] with Prozac, and I was shitting my brains out,” Te’Jani remembers. “Apparently SSRIs [a type of antidepressant] make you poop a lot, and I didn’t know that.”

Despite the side effects, the antidepressants actually made Te’Jani feel better.

With most songs stripped back to voice and guitars, On Prozac is a stark, courageous and honest confessional.

“The songwriting is honest and direct, and the response was great,” Te’Jani says. “People were moved and touched by [the EP].”

In August 2023, Te’Jani played an EP release show for On Prozac at the Evening Muse, the club where he had cut his teeth as a performer through open mic nights. Lines at the venue wrapped around the block and the filled-to-capacity club turned away people at the door.

“I’ve never felt like I deserve love or [that I] bring joy to anyone,” Te’Jani confides. “So, for people to come out like that was crazy. [For me] it solidified some belief in what I was doing.”

The night of the Evening Muse show, Will met Te’Jani, who invited Will to shoot photos of the gig. After the event, Will started shooting footage for his documentary on the artist.

“Te’Jani is so precise, so exact with all of his stuff,” Will says. “He’s a perfectionist.”

“There’s not a lot of documentation of Charlotte artists, and it’s really cool that someone like Will is taking the time and effort to make sure [those artists] are seen and heard,” Te’Jani says. “I think these stories give other artists something to look up to and look forward to.”

In October 2023, Te’Jani traveled to Boone to produce the album Legend Tripping by Charlotte pop-punk combo Dollar Signs. He believes the band, which he calls “legendary,” hired him after hearing the snaking, swaggering sound he got on his song “Dark Slide.”

Te’Jani also accepted the producing gig because it offered him his first chance to record a full instrumental band.

When Dollar Signs’ second guitarist Tommy McPhail couldn’t make the band’s upcoming tour to support the LP, Te’Jani offered to fill in, pointing out that he knew the guitar parts for several of the songs already.

Te’Jani describes the subsequent tour, his first time hitting the road and playing for audiences night after night, as brutal and eye-opening.

“I needed to know what it feels like; I needed to know if this is what I really want,” says Te’Jani.

The answer was a resounding yes and Te’Jani hopes to go on his first solo tour soon.

In 2024, Te’Jani participated in an edition of Home Movies Music Sessions, spearheaded by his longtime creative video partners Rudy and Judson Kavascitz.

Read more: Kovasckitz Brothers Capture Magic of the Mundane in Home Movies Music Sessions

In the intimate series North Carolina musicians perform in their homes using basic equipment like a camcorder, minimal lighting and a boom mic. Soon after shooting his segment, Te’Jani went from performer to partner, joining the Kavascitz brothers to record audio for the series.

Asked to describe his life at the moment, Te’Jani has one word: busy.

“I am always redlining; I have so much ADD,” he says. “I have learned to be more balanced with it, but recently I’ve just been like, fuck it. The universe has been blessing me wildly.”

Te’Jani calls his upcoming album a collection of songs that people will enjoy jamming out to or playing in the car.

“I made these songs with the mindset of … playing them for a show,” he says. “The hooks are fun, the tempos are fast and … [there are] a lot of rock and punk vibes.”

That said, the album kicks off with “This is Why I’m Hot, ” a lively singalong that also happens to be a rap-rock tune, something Te’Jani has rarely done. It’s as if he wants to deliberately shake up listeners’ preconceptions.

“I stepped away from rapping because when you’re Black and in music, you quickly get labeled as one thing,” Te’Jani notes, “even though I only rap on two songs.”

He points to his back catalog, where he sings on almost all of his material. On Prozac, for example, is all stripped-back singer-songwriter compositions accompanied by guitars.

“I’m a songwriter, singer, a guitarist and a musician,” Te’Jani asserts. “It gets annoying when [people] booking shows [say], ‘We don’t book rappers.’” Once bookers realize he’s not a rapper, Te’Jani notes, they often jump straight to assuming he’s an R&B performer.

Te’Jani concludes that he needs to do a better job of telling his story and showing people who he is rather than letting them run with their own narrative.

“When people listen to my music, I hope that they realize that I’m a Black motherfucking rock star,” Te’Jani proclaims.

It’s an honest, startling and funny statement, but Te’Jani doesn’t leave it at that. He hopes that people hearing his music come away with the recognition that everyone should feel comfortable making mistakes and that everything doesn’t need to be perfect.

That humane message that runs throughout his songs, from processing a messy breakup with compassion on “I Hate New York” to the humble realization conveyed in On Prozac that rebuilding from rock bottom begins with finding your foundation.

“You shouldn’t be afraid to fail,” Te’Jani says. “You can do anything. Just do what the job requires of you and you’ll be good to go.”

He’s speaking from compassion and experience. With a stylistically varied yet consistent body of work, Te’Jani embraces everything from pain, doubt and depression to hopes, dreams and desires. He tells us that we all deserve love, confidence and self-actualization. That applies to everyone from a dude helped by Prozac to a motherfucking Black rock star.