Crewel Intentions

After Palma Violets broke up two years ago, Chilli Jesson was suddenly thrust into reality. Overcome with worries and feelings of anxiety about what the future would hold, the dreamboat spotlight-stealer of the former indie rockers began to pour his feeling out into songs, and slowly his new project Crewel Intentions was born.

Shaking off the sarcastic cynicism that characterised his former lyrics, Chilli is (slightly) older and ready to be a lot more real. We caught up with him to find out more.

Q: It’s been two years since Palma Violets ended, what have you been up to since then?

A: Quite a lot, I suppose! It’s been some real highs and lows. I sort of foresaw that Palma Violets was going to hit a brick wall about six months before it finished. From that moment I really had to think about the future and imagine a world where I’m not with the same three other people that I had been with for the last six years. It was a sad feeling but there was also this enormous sense of freedom that just encapsulated me when it actually did happen. It was just me and a guitar, and suddenly this flurry of music and songs just started bleeding onto the page. I started writing personal accounts of my life which I’d never done before. I’d always dressed everything in irony because I was scared of what my peers would think of me. If you dress something in irony you can always shake it off as “Well obviously that was a fucking joke!” Anyway, I just started writing this personal stuff and really digging deep basically.

Q: Your debut track “Youth In Overload” has just come out. How’s the reaction been so far?

A: It’s been great. This song basically sums up that two year period, in feeling anxious and massive highs and lows, and it felt like a call to arms. I think it’s like the beginning of the story.

Q: You’ve already been performing for quite a while before releasing this one…

A: That was a conscious decision for all of us. I’ve seen it in the past when somebody just jumps on it, and I wanted to build this band from the ground up. I’m allowed to say this - I don’t know why, but I am - but it’s the best live band out there. I sit back in rehearsal and listen to them and it just works, they’ve made songs into something that I couldn’t even imagine them to be. We could’ve just come out straight with a single but we wanted to play around and almost wanted to integrate back into it. I missed that shit.

Q: Does it feel kind of weird to go back to the start again?

A: It feels really good! A big factor was because it was so quick [with Palma Violets], I wrote about five songs in five years, which is fucking pathetic, but there was just never enough time! Also, for me, I only sang like four/five songs a set, I was like a glorified bass player. I was pretty lucky, I got away with it. During that period of time that I was talking about, it all kind of came out and I’ve got this body of work which is just sitting there. Everything I look back on fondly, like how lucky am I? I’ve toured the fucking world, I’m fucking lucky. But this really feels like a natural step.

Q: What do you want people to take away from the new Crewel Intentions music?

A: Some people might get deep and relate to the lyrics, and then someone else just thinks they can fucking dance to it. Everything is kind of relative when it comes to emotions. I think people will take different things, I just hope it’s good! The next single is called “Cruel Intentions”.

Words by Elly Watson | Illustration by Tjaša Cizej