Tei Shi (the artist moniker of Valerie Teicher) recently released a new single “Even If It Hurts” featuring Blood Orange. The beautiful new video was produced in partnership with sun-grown cannabis Sunday Goods. It was directed by Cara Stricker and filmed in Untermeyer Gardens in Yonkers, New York. Stricker said:  “I wanted to explore the iconography of love in art history through a modern yet romantic lens. Creating stillness and emotive movement to reflect the physical or emotional space in love… vulnerability, numbing immersion, knowing the truth, becoming closer, fighting for it, letting them in…even if it hurts. It’s a conversation between opposing perspectives in a relationship.”

Tei Shi said: “I made this song with two of my closest collaborators – Dev Hynes (Blood Orange) and Noah Breakfast. It came together in pieces between LA and New York but sprouted from the lyrics Dev and I kept on singing – ‘even if it hurts…I just don’t mind’. The concept is really the realization and acceptance that pain is a natural consequence of love. It’s a duet about the ways in which we make ourselves vulnerable to those we love, sometimes at a high cost. The video was directed by Cara Stricker and with an incredible and almost exclusively female creative crew. It features a multitude of amazing designers like Collina Strada, Vaquera, Christopher John Rogers, Mugler, Maryam Nassir Zadeh . I wanted to capture the romantic and melancholic elements of the song but put them in a world that feels removed from the every day, its own little odd paradise where Dev and I existed parallel to one another but never really together.”

Tei Shi will release her sophomore album, La Linda,  on November 15, 2019.