motel void

Tigerblind is a solo recording project based out of Dallas, TX. Focusing on melody and arrangement, Tigerblind crafts indie rock and singer-songwriter material that sometimes blurs genres with introspective and upfront lyricism.

MOTEL VOID: You’ve just released your new album ‘It’s All Gonna Happen To You’. It’s really good, my favorite track right now is ‘Hold You Tight’. You started recording this album (all by yourself) last October. Could you tell us more about the whole writing and recording process of it?

TIGERBLIND: I started writing for it almost immediately after the release of my last album. I’ll have these bursts where I’ll get a couple of good ideas down, songs that more or less feel like they belong together – I usually have to demo them and live with them for quite a while before really deciding on how I want the final version to be – but that’s true of anything I work on, I just need to be listening to stuff I put down so that I know what about it needs work. I did a lot of writing and recording that summer, and going into the early fall. Like most of my projects, this new album didn’t really start shaping up completely in terms of vision until a few months before I finished it and narrowed things down.

Thank you for liking Hold You Tight, I really love the sort of summer-y jangle atmosphere on that. I had a bunch of other kind of weird, nervous stuff demoed and when I started tracking it properly late last year I was envisioning something kind of insane with 15 or 20 tracks or whatever – Taken Your Good Advice which did stay on the LP is sort of a remnant of that scattershot, messed up feeling.

Going into early 2024 I sort of focused in and knocked out a few tracks properly… Crashed Ur Car, Not Quite Swallow Me, and Hold You Tight were all finalized in January, and hearing those sort of made the whole thing come into focus a little clearer.

I also started playing live solo acoustic shows in February, so some considerations were made with the tracklisting in the sense of what might work for me to play live, Make It Long is an older song that I brought back cause I thought It’d be good live, and I’m mostly happy with how the recording of that turned out. I would say I definitely struggled with deciding on what to do with Awake and Miserable – I recorded that a bunch of different ways and it always felt kind of messy and wishy washy not in a good way, I think the way it is on the album now is a happy medium, and I thought it was strong enough to warrant really trying to get a good recording down. What’s funny to me is that a few people have singled out that song and You’d Cry as favorites, and to me those were two I was really unsure about – so it’s just nice to know people see things differently. I’m pretty happy with how the final product as an album came out, and it’s definitely getting a lot more attention than anything I’ve put out in the past – so I guess people liked it more than I thought they would.

MOTEL VOID: You released the album digitally, any chance that you will put it out also physically anytime soon (tape, cd, vinyl)?

TIGERBLIND: I’d really like to do a physical release, yeah. I probably will – cassette and CD most likely, though I wouldn’t be opposed to vinyl it’s just obviously more of a financial commitment. Would love to get the ball rolling on that very soon, it’s difficult because I’m the only one doing anything and it would take time for me to get it looking the way I’d want it to regardless of if I did them myself at home or got a proper company to press copies. But this isn’t the first time I’ve been asked about a physical release, which is very flattering by the way thank you, so I guess there’s demand. It would be nice to have something to carry around with me for my shows, too. I’m a big t-shirt guy, I actually own the sole Tigerblind t-shirt – it’s hot pink – but I’d love to get some shirts made too if people are interested in owning them.

MOTEL VOID: When did you start learning about music production? What kind of DAW do you use?

TIGERBLIND: I’ve been playing guitar and trying to write songs since I was in high school, there was a lot of messing around when I was first learning, but I didn’t really start taking things seriously until late 2019 when I started Tigerblind. And even then, of course the first few years I was still finding footing (and still am…), but I obviously feel better about the whole process now than I did back then. Going into 2020 was when I really started taking recording and multitracking stuff seriously v.s. just the acoustic and vox into my mic like I was doing as a teenager! Wasn’t even that long ago, but looking back I can just say how magical and enjoyable it was to really be learning that stuff and spending all my time actually putting albums and EP’s together – even if most of it was ramshackle and bad. It was really transformative and important, though, and I’m glad I’ve been putting the time in and am glad I stuck with it – and hopefully can learn even more. I use Reaper as my DAW and always have.

MOTEL VOID: You’re from Dallas, Texas. How would you describe the current indie scene? Do you feel that you’re part of it? What are your favorite local venues?

TIGERBLIND: Honestly I don’t really feel like Dallas proper has any sort of coherent scene, but what do I know. I’m about 20/30 minutes outside of Dallas to be specific, so there’s a little bit of a disconnect there. For whatever reason, there’s a lot more happening in the Ft. Worth and Denton areas than there is in Dallas – at least that’s the vibe I get looking from the outside in. It’s all one big sprawling area, though, so it’s maybe easier to consider it all part of a DFW scene. Truthfully, no I don’t really feel like there’s a ton of room for what I’m doing there anyway. It seems like most of the stuff that people latch onto is loud and harsh noise – which I’m fine with sometimes when I’m in the mood for it, but it’s just not the type of stuff I’m doing or something I’d reach for to listen to typically. There’s a few people doing some cool stuff, though, that I connect with a bit more. I’m currently in the process of putting together a band to play live with – who knows if that will ever happen – and I do have a lot of material that’s very loud and I’d love to do live, it’s just loud in a melodic and arranged way. Maybe that’ll work out and people will be into it, I don’t know.

As a performer, I’ve only ever played at a few different places, two of those times have been at the Haltom Theater in Ft. Worth. It’s pretty far from me, but they seem super willing to host a bunch of different styles and people and seem to always have something going on, super cool place.

MOTEL VOID: I read that you ‘still believe in album as an art form’. What do you think of the current trend of releasing singles? And do you think that it is disadvantageous to release albums in today’s era of streaming services?

TIGERBLIND: Good God almighty, that was a pretentious thing I said. I do believe in albums as an art form, but saying it like that makes it sound more important than it really is – which maybe in some ways is the game. I guess what I mean is I really love the whole process of coming in with a thematically linked batch of songs… be it in the way they were written musically or lyrically, or the actual sonic qualities of the recording, and then taking all of those and trying to decide on an order for the tracklist. I take a lot of time and put a lot of thought into sequencing, making sure the songs flow into each other, making sure any run on the album doesn’t drag too much.

I think people underestimate how important this is. You can have a great batch of material and a great streak of recordings, and that’s all well and good, but elevating it into a complete statement comes with sequencing. I have dozens of configurations, stiched together in Audacity or whatever, of any project I’m working on – trying out different orders, different mixes, different songs. You’d be surprised at how much clearer it can make things to actually listen to the material like that and think of it in that way. Sometimes you have songs that are completely inseparable and if one goes, the other one has to go too. Things are definitely different when you’re thinking of something in the context of an album, and I find that it benefits the writing and recording of each individual track as well.

I like singles, and similarly I’m in love with the old school notion of “THIS one’s the single!!!” or whatever, even though I usually have weird taste and am tremendously bad at picking which one I think people will like the most. It’s only disadvantageous to save most songs for “the album” if your goal is constant exposure and constant marketing. Of course I want people to hear my music, but I’m not going to abandon a principal that made me want to start writing and recording in the first place just so I can always have something to promote on my Instagram or whatever. At the end of the day, all I want to do is make music that people will listen to, come back to, and be impacted by in the same way so many of my favorite albums and artists have to me, so I’ll keep aiming for that above anything else.