Interviews: Tigerwine

On this new occasion, we had the opportunity to interview the Post-Hardcore/Alternative Rock band Tigerwine from the USA. Check out the interview and follow the band on their FACEBOOK PAGE.

1.“Wax Magnetic” has a powerful narrative, exploring themes of belief and purpose. Could you dive deeper into the inspiration behind this track and what led you to explore this kind of existential tension?

While I am not a lyricist, I can speak for all of us in the band that the last few years have been a time of intense growth and questioning. Hayden wrote the lyrics about the difficulty of letting go of previous ways of thinking or learning that what we have taken for granted as truths have turned out to be lies. For me, the song is about lamenting the loss of a worldview in search of truth, while still believing it’s the right thing to do.

2. How did the creative process differ for Toil & Spin compared to your previous releases?

We have always written records “live” in a room and taken those songs into the studio without “proper” pre-production. On each release up to this point, we wouldn’t hear vocals on the songs until we entered the studio. For Toil & Spin, we were all living in different places around the country, working full time, busy with family, etc. so I invested in a Pro Tools rig and started demoing out ideas at home which we were able to send back and forth and refine (or scrap all together). Hayden also had an opportunity to properly demo his vocal ideas in his own home studio.

The nice part about this process was that we were ultimately able to keep some of the sounds and ideas from the demos without having to try and recreate them later on in the studio. Consequently, certain parts of the record are snapshots of the original moments of inspiration. When it was all said and done we probably had around 25 songs for this record and we were able to whittle it down to our absolute favorites.

3. Your music pulls from both '90s post-hardcore and alternative rock, while still feeling fresh and dynamic. What influences were you consciously tapping into while crafting this album?

At the risk of sounding self-caressing, we’ve always prided ourselves in trying to create a sound that pulls from nuances in the music we love without falling into the trappings of writing for a genre (though I suppose whether or not we have succeeded isn’t for us to say. There were songs written for this record that were quickly scrapped that absolutely pandered to more palatable or marketable genres and it felt super insincere. Though you could argue we have a musical home in these genres, I think if you’ve sat down to write a “shoegaze” or a “grunge” song you’ve already lost the battle.

That said, we borrowed a lot of the maximalism of bands like The National, and the aggression of bands like Sumac or Botch. We like the idea of marrying musical worlds at opposite ends of the spectrum.

4. There’s a noticeable shift from impulsivity in your earlier work to a more meticulous approach in Toil & Spin. What drove that change, and how did it affect the final sound?

We’ve always tried to incorporate elements of our live show into the recordings, i.e. painting the songs with guitar feedback or even tracking certain things live. Due to the nature of writing this record on a computer, we intentionally left the feedback out of principle and instead made room for a little more ear candy and experimental production than we have attempted in the past. We also got to live with the new songs a little longer before taking them to the studio, which allowed us more time to dream up how we wanted certain parts of the record to sound.

5. You’ve been a band since 2012, and the past decade has seen a lot of evolution in your music. How do you feel Tigerwine has grown as a band, both musically and personally?

Great question. A lot of this record has to do with this very subject. For each of us, this band has represented one of the greatest adventures of our lives, one with a lot of joy and a lot of pain and a myriad of emotions in between. We’ve always maintained that this band will never be more important than our friendships with one another, which has had the inverse effect of creating a lot of musical trust between us. Ultimately that trust has truly helped us to check our egos and trust in this musical process that we have developed over the past 12 years. We started this band when we were young idiots, and now we are all married and most of us have kids and I’m forever grateful this band has helped to tether us together as our lives continue to change

6.Reinvention seems to be a theme in your music, always pushing boundaries. How do you strike a balance between staying true to your core sound while experimenting with new elements?

We’ve never been able to explicitly say what we want this band to sound like. When we first started to play together we were positive we wanted to sound like Title Fight and we never even managed to write anything that even somewhat resembled a Title Fight song. A few years ago, I remember that in one week at three separate shows, we had people come up to the merch table and tell us we sounded like Chevelle, Circa Survive, and finally Korn. While I don’t necessarily agree with those comparisons I do think comparisons like that have helped us to take bigger swings at experimenting with various genres. But at the end of the day, we like big drums 100 100-watt amps, and big riffs, so we are always approaching new ideas from the context of a rock band. That will probably always be the home base for us.

7. In a time where genre lines are increasingly blurred, your music appeals to both metalheads and indie rock fans. How intentional is this blending of genres, and how do you see it evolving in your future work?

It’s extremely intentional. Our goal is to avoid smashing together our influences in any way that feels forced. I’d never want to write a Death Cab For Cutie song with a breakdown shoehorned into the bridge. But instead, our thought is how to take a revolving piano melody like those found in Death Cab songs and compliment it with fuzzed-out guitars and a “heavy” rhythm section. That said, I have no idea where we are headed musically and that is part of what makes this so much fun.

8. Signing with Tooth & Nail Records seems to have been a pivotal moment for the band. How has being on this label influenced your creative process or opened up new opportunities?

Tooth & Nail has been great in that they have given us total creative freedom. I don’t even think they asked to hear the songs before we went into the studio, so it seems like there is a lot of trust there.

9. Looking back at your earlier releases like Die With Your Tongue Out and Nothing Is For You, how do you feel those albums set the foundation for what you’re doing on Toil & Spin?

On each record, there are always a few songs that we feel really represent us as a band, and with each record, we try to write songs that are spiritual successors to those songs. The album name Toil & Spin itself is a callback to a lyric on DWYTO. All that to say, it’s nice to have 2 full lengths to look back on and assess what we feel has worked really well and then burn away the elements that didn’t quite match our vision for each release. If that technique proves effective, this record should theoretically be our best work yet haha (we think it is.)

10. What message or feeling do you hope fans take away from Toil & Spin, and how does it reflect where you are as a band in 2024?

Making music is so much fun. There is not one person who plays music that upon getting their first instrument and dreamt of a day they could spend all of their time posting about it on the internet or networking. Those things have their place, but I guarantee you they aren’t the things you’ll look back on when you’re old and gray. If you are in a band, don’t spend all of your energy loving an industry that you have to convince to love you back.