Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon tea break with our Afternoon Tea curators.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by VENNA.
VENNA is an indie alt-pop artist from Edmonton, Alberta with a passion for evocative lyricism. She holds an immense appreciation for the power that music has to effect change and self-realization, and strives to be the type of artist that can both intrigue and relate to her audience.
New single, “Only,” was inspired by a toxic relationship dynamic. This song explores the weaponization of infidelity between two people who’ve both been hurt before, and their fight for power over one another.
Tea: I chose Lemon Spice black tea. I’ll admit, I just reached into my bunny cookie jar (where I store the last few bags of whatever tea I picked up so I can get rid of the box) and chose one at random, but it ended up suiting the theme of my ten minute afternoon tea break quite well.
Song: Violent Sun by Everything Everything. To me, this song is about holding on to something you know you’ll have to leave behind eventually. It felt perfect for this morning (as I’m writing this) on my balcony with my tea, the sky all smokey from a distant wildfire. I moved into this home around the time this song came out, and I remember thinking that I would look back and it would define that time for me, this great upheaval of life and the struggle to accept that it was just going to be different now. There’s something a bit melancholic about it, sure, but something also very comforting.
Visual: I chose John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14 (Batter my heart, three person’d God). I’m not a religious person, and so, I read John Donne’s work with perhaps a different eye than he intended, but when I first read his work in an English class a million years ago, I was deeply enthralled and, admittedly, a bit put off by it. I chose this poem now because it had a hand in influencing the concept of toxic, aggressive love in my upcoming EP, ‘Sugar Venom’. I drew from the metaphysical motif of discovery and conquest – in this case regarding the nature of people to seek dominance and power even in such a calm joy as love. To me, this poem really speaks to that (religious connotations aside) and to how different one piece of art can look or feel from one person to the next. Our eyes are different, and so, we see differently; that is why sharing art is so valuable.
Tea + Me 