How the cookie crumbles into Tofusmell

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This article was published 25/07/2024 (725 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Rae Chen approached the bar at a Wolseley café during the first week of summer expecting only to walk away with a cup of coffee.

“I got a free cookie, too,” he says, holding up the spoils of a previous customer’s generosity. “Do you want a piece?”

Chen was 23, and had only lived in Winnipeg for six months, but already, the singer-songwriter behind Tofusmell was earning a reputation for reflective, tongue-in-cheek indie songs. In May, he opened for Jacob Brodovsky and Dom Adams during a set at Barn Hammer Brewing, commanding the audience with natural banter.

“This is a song about dreams that I’ve had before,” he said as the set-up to one song. “It’s called Dreams That I’ve Had Before.”

Chen’s is the kind of relatable, diaristic and catchy music that will be in style so long as there are moody outsiders and sensitive misfits listening in their bedrooms and through noise-cancelling headphones on their bus routes.

Raised in Winter Garden, Fla., “about 20 minutes from Disney,” Chen — who has released music on the SubPop sister label Hardly Art Records and toured with Leith Ross, a close friend and fellow adopted Winnipegger — started writing songs and sharing them under the Tofusmell pseudonym the summer after high school graduation.

The music wasn’t meant to be heard by crowds, only by select friends to whom Chen (who uses he/they pronouns) sent their first EP. Entitled Memos, it was passed around like a love note intercepted by a gossip.

“I remember one of my friends took a picture of the Smart Board in the choir room, and it was them listening to my whole EP during lunch, showing it to people I wasn’t already friends with. I was like, ‘This is my nightmare. Why would you ever do this?’” Chen recalls with a laugh.

“I was still in the phase of wanting people to like my music, and it was horrifying that strangers were hearing it.”

They liked it, though, and as Chen moved on to a few stints in different U.S. colleges, the only pursuit that really commanded his full focus was songwriting and producing. Pandemic-era lectures on Zoom just didn’t have the same appeal as hours-long sessions of music production in Logic.

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Originally, Chen — who has more than 20,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and about 23,000 followers on TikTok — posted self-recorded music under the name Suburb Smell, a reference to a song by the Pennsylvania rock band the Districts.

“But then I was like, if I’m making music I can’t be a reference to someone else’s music the whole time,” says Chen, pulling off a green hoodie to reveal an Elliott Smith T-shirt.

Inspired by automatically generated usernames in the online game Poptropica, Chen, who was a vegetarian before consequently becoming anemic, decided to think of something “random and meaningless.”

The name Tofusmell — which is graphically rendered all lowercase — stuck after Chen made it his social media username.

Before making their own music, he played with his brother in a duo while also singing in a choir, an experience that changed as Chen became a harsher literary critic.

“Before the age of 15, I was pretty religious,” he says. What changed? “It wasn’t like, ‘I’m gay so god doesn’t love me. Not anything like that. It was just I started to be like, if Jesus was god, why did he have to die. I started finding plotholes… and was like, OK, that’s enough. So it was pretty natural and slowly floated off.”

Around the time Chen decided to leave school to pursue music, he befriended the Ottawa-born Ross online. Ross, who was named the Newport Folk Festival’s inaugural John Prine Songwriter fellow, visited Winnipeg in 2020 to record the EP Motherwell and quickly recognized the city’s appeal. Since then, Ross has become a hugely popular artist with more than one million monthly listeners on Spotify. As his friends left Florida following college, Chen, a former English major, also sought a new chapter.

Meanwhile, under Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, Chen’s home state enacted dozens of anti-trans restrictions, including prohibitions against gender-affirming treatments for youth and other anti-LGBTTQ+ legislation. Florida’s hostility toward trans people was not unrelated to Chen’s decision to leave, he says.

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In January, Chen and his father climbed into their Volkswagen Passat and drove for three days from Winter Garden to Winnipeg, listening to the audiobook of Terry Pratchett’s death comedy, Mort, on the transcontinental voyage.

Before leaving, Chen took the car to the mechanic for some standard maintenance.

“They switched out the wiper fluid for the kind that doesn’t freeze, and I guess that they didn’t push all the old fluid out, so as the temperature was dropping below freezing, suddenly the wipers didn’t work. I hadn’t ever been in snow. I couldn’t see anything, so I had to get a spray bottle, and every few minutes we’d pull over and spray our windshield down,” he says.

“It was kind of a nightmare, moving in winter.”

Since then, however, things have been easier. Chen’s settled into his neighbourhood and found the nearest library, often visiting multiple times per week. In June, he had Michelle Winters’ I Am A Truck tucked into his backpack, waiting to be cracked. Chen has played a handful of gigs, including a rain-shortened set in Ross’s band at the Winnipeg Folk Festival.

But the highest profile performance came on June 26 — Chen’s 24th birthday — at the West End Cultural Centre opening for Mount Eerie, the songwriting project of Phil Elverum (the Microphones). He sang a song about dreams he’d had before, telling the same joke to a new crowd.

Most of them came to see Elverum, but each of them likely left with the feeling of discovery — handed a free cookie when all they expected was a cup of coffee. ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com