Editor’s Note: On Friday, July 17, rockers Tiger Bear Wolf will release their third self-titled album, and it’s their first release in 21 years. Released via Ernest Jenning Record Co., the album finds the quartet – which formed in 2002 in Greensboro, North Carolina and currently features singer Jonathan Moore, lead guitarist Noah Howard, bassist Matt Bostick, and drummer Lawrence Holdsworth – further mining the unique blend of southern rock, hardcore, and psychedelic post-punk they’ve become known for. A word to the wise, the quickest way to tell which album is which is via the album’s covers. The first album features a Tiger, the second a bear, and the upcoming release a wolf, completing the trio.
The fact that the album even exists is a miracle. In 2009, the band started recording their third album. However, the sessions were seemingly lost after hard drives failed. Recently, though, they were able to recover the recordings. Now based in Greensboro, Louisville, and Baltimore, the band members, according to a press release, “slowly completed the record with new overdubs and production work alongside Howard’s Calogera Audio and producer Joel Hatstat. Finished more than 16 years after it began, the album captures Tiger Bear Wolf at their most expansive and fully realized, balancing the urgency of their early years with the perspective and craft gained over time.”
Prior to the album’s release, Moore wrote an exclusive Artist Essay for SWT describing how a fun party game the band played relates to the band’s long-awaited return to music.
We used to play this party game. This is the kind of game you play at the bar, or on someone’s front porch when you’re done with your job in the dish pit, or the record store, or cleaning pools, or whatever. The game is: draw a line through three artists. The first artist is whoever you want; the second artist cannot exist without the first, and the third cannot exist without the second. These descendant artists have to be almost wholly foretold by their musical ancestor. They have to owe a debt to a single artist that can never be settled. I will give you the Platonic ideal of this formulation. Actually, I’ll give you two.
Woody Guthrie > Bob Dylan > Bruce Springsteen
The Rolling Stones > Aerosmith > Guns N’ Roses
See how easy that is? These two are pretty much self-evident. Not every line is so easy, though. Does it go:
Black Sabbath > Iron Maiden > Metallica or Black Sabbath > Motörhead > Metallica?
James Brown > Sly Stone > Prince or Little Richard > Sly Stone > Prince
Big Star > R.E.M. > Wilco or Big Star > The Replacements > Wilco?
Joni Mitchell > Kate Bush > Tori Amos or Joni Mitchell > Kate Bush > St. Vincent
This is super fun for know-it-alls and blowhards. But the essential distress of the self-aware (neurotic?) songwriter/musician/etc. is hidden inside this simple game. When even the most compelling artists in our canon could stumble backward into the gaping mouths of their towering predecessors, where does that leave us?
Jeffrey Lewis has this great song called “Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror,” where he meets Will Oldham on the train, and asks him a beautifully winding question, concluding with,
“Like if you hear a record by Bob Dylan or Neil Young or whatever You must start thinkin’: Yeah, people like me, but I won’t be that good ever” And I’m sure the thing is probably Dylan himself too Stayed up some nights wishing he was as good as Ginsberg or Camus And he was like, “Dude, I’m such a faker, I’m just a clown who entertains And these fools who pay for my crap, they just have pathetic puny brains”
We want the mystery of pulling a song from the air – but we know we’re pulling it from the grave.
I’m writing this because Tiger Bear Wolf, a band that I spent most of my 20s with, playing in basements, bars, and small clubs, is releasing our third record. We had self-released Tiger in 2003, and Hello Sir Records put out Bear in 2005. We started recording Wolf in the summer of 2009 on ADAT in our practice space and abandoned it by the end of the fall. I can’t say how everyone feels about why it got shelved, but for me, there were just other things I wanted to do more than grind out vocal takes in a sweltering attic. Noah didn’t like how his guitars sounded. We didn’t have our own ADAT machine. It was a lot of little reasons – and then the moment was gone.
Then, in 2016, we got an email from Noah. He and our friend Joel Hatstat had somehow pulled the basic tracks off of ADAT and got them into a DAW-compatible format. He sent some rough mixes, and they sounded pretty good. Over the next few years, Noah retracked his guitars. I added vocals for the songs that had seemed mostly complete in 2009. Noah wrote and recorded vocals for anything that was incomplete. He sent some mixes to our friend Pete, who was interested in putting Wolf out on his label, Ernest Jenning Record Co. This past summer, we met up in NC to play these songs together again for the first time. How would they sound in a room?
The process of re-engaging with this record has let me do something that we don’t usually get to do – look at something with both the benefit of hindsight and the opportunity for revision. But all I ended up changing was my mind.
So, of course, I can’t resist playing the game of three with us. We all want to know who we are, not in isolation, but in relation to others. Here’s the thing, though – we are always going to be the third band. Is it:
Gang of Four > Fugazi > Tiger Bear Wolf
The Jesus Lizard > Shellac > Tiger Bear Wolf
Captain Beyond > Soundgarden > Tiger Bear Wolf
Drive Like Jehu > Hot Snakes (cheating) > Tiger Bear Wolf
Sleep > Dead Meadow > Tiger Bear Wolf
Wire > Q And Not U > Tiger Bear Wolf
Or: Tiger > Bear > Wolf
What band can’t exist without Tiger Bear Wolf?
You can connect with Tiger Bear Wolf via the links in Jon’s author box below
Jon Moore
Contributor
Jonathan Moore sings and plays guitar in Tiger Bear Wolf. He currently lives in Baltimore, MD. Tiger Bear Wolf will release their first new album in 21 years on July 17 via Ernest Jenning Record Co.
