Our album is a totally immersive experience”
In his seventh job, “Lost on You” (Hopeless, 26), Tigers Jaw They enter a territory where past, present and future coexist as simultaneous timelines.
Far from the urgency of the music industry, the band has created a reflective and enveloping album. Its singer and lead guitarist, Ben Walsh, answers our questions by email and reveals the ins and outs of a calmly made album.
Past, present and future occur simultaneously in our lives. Starting from this idea of time as a superposition of layers and versions of oneself that interact with each other, “Lost on You” proposes a journey that aims to go beyond the strictly musical. “The album is a totally immersive experience and the idea is to let yourself be carried away by it, lose yourself in its themes, lyrics and musical arrangements,” says Walsh, founding member of a band with two decades of history.
Gone is the screaming emo punk of their beginnings, when they were teenagers and adored My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy. “Lost on You,” the Pennsylvania band’s seventh album, is something much more sophisticated. “I would say that it is our most ambitious album to date because it covers a much broader sonic terrain than the previous ones, has stronger thematic links throughout the entire album and probably draws on the greatest variety of influences we have ever had”. Regarding the general tone, the album “collects internal dialogues with oneself over time and longs for inner peace.” The opening “It’s ok,” “Baptized on a Redwood Drive” and the ending “Lost on You,” Walsh continues, “they represent conversations with your past, present and future self, respectively.”
“We love making music together, going on tour and seeing the world”
An album as reflective as this one “Lost on You” He asked for time and the band decided to set the pace, ignoring a hyper-accelerated context in which it seems that you cease to exist if you are not publishing stories every day. “We didn’t want to rush into doing something new. We wanted to take our time and explore every song idea that we found interesting to make our best record. And I’m glad we did it that way. I love these songs and this record. We didn’t feel any pressure, and that was the best part.”emphasizes Walsh.
Walsh and Brianna Collins (vocals and keyboards), the band’s main lyricists, share the vocal spotlight when they are not intertwining their beautiful voices, one of the hallmarks of Tigers Jaw. “Normally whoever sings the lead vocals is the one who wrote the lyrics, although there are some exceptions. ‘Staring at Empty Faces’, for example, was written by me, but the vocals for the verses were perfect for Brianna to sing,” clarifies the musician.
The line-up currently made up of Colin Gorman (bass), Teddy Roberts (drums) and Mark Lebiecki (guitar) worked slowly and, for the first time, collectively. “Each song is constructed a little differently, but we all contribute ideas. ‘Lost on You’ has at least one song that comes from each of us, so it really is Tigers Jaw’s most collaborative album. We shared our demos in a common folder and met regularly to play and work on the songs together,” Walsh recalls.
In “Lost on You” Legendary producer Will Yip (Thrice, Turnstile, Quicksand) also participated, with whom they had already worked on two other studio albums and an acoustic album recorded live. For Walsh, the highly sought-after Studio 4 engineer has become “an extension of the band” and especially highlights its “positive energy” in the studio. “Will is very intuitive and makes great creative decisions and makes great suggestions.”
In this seventh studio work, the second for the independent label Hopeless Records, there is a mainly artistic ambition. The one of Tigers Jaw It is a commendable career in the background, with numerous successes – I am thinking of the 2008 homonymous album, which became a cult album, and “Spin”, one of its creative peaks – and no notable setbacks. “We’ve never been the most successful band in the world; we still have side jobs when we’re not on tour to make ends meet. And we love what we do. We love making music together, going on tour and seeing the world. Being away from home gets harder with each passing year, so we’re grateful to continue growing and that more and more people are discovering and supporting the band,” ensures a musician with his feet on the ground and a very clear idea for the future of his usual band: keep moving forward.
Speaking of timelines, how do you see yourself after thirty years as a band? “It’s hard to say. We’ve always followed what feels right, what feels stimulating and motivates us naturally. I’d like to think that in ten years we’ll be playing the biggest gigs of our careers and still creating music that we love.”
