My Loving Tiger
Problem Set (EP)

My Loving Tiger, a Minneapolis-based soft rock duo, have a new EP out.

Straight from the bedroom, Problem Set showcases the lighter side of Midwestern rock — complete with laidback indie vocals, clean guitar, muted drums and non-confrontational lyrics. For example, take the last track on the EP, a 6/8 builder called “Sorry I Spent All My Money on Natural Gas.”

In my bedroom reprieved from
This weather that cages my home
My heater will battle
The cold air that sneaks in the window.

We sat down with the band to talk about the group, the new EP and how to successfully evade a hangover question.

Who’s in the group? What’s the backstory?
We’re a duo. Myself and Mark. Justin and Myself. We first met about 6 years ago. When our last band ended, we decided to continue writing songs as a duo. Justin had been playing drums and Mark had been playing guitar. When Justin switched to guitar and vocals, together; we had all the instruments covered. Plus we had been moving increasingly toward studio based writing and exploration, so this was the natural progression of that.

You guys released some tracks online last summer, right? What was the reception?
We were met with many adjectives — like ‘mellow’ ‘gentle’ ’soft’ ‘toned-down’ ‘modest’. People seemed to enjoy the fact that there was almost no distortion on any of the tracks, and if there was it wasn’t airplane distortion.

You guys go to the University of Minnesota? What are your majors?
Mark went to the U and studied World War Two era cryptography. Justin doesn’t attend the U, but a close by secret institution of linguistic arts.

What’s your writing style like?
Writing style or method? Usually, we just get on a rant about something. This is followed by coffee. Sometimes the coffee comes first, but we have had mixed results with this approach. Then we hash out a theme and start construct a bare bones song. Then Justin creates the drums in his head and we track those. Next Mark creates the bass line and lays down the track. After that, we just start piling on all the bells and whistles and out comes a song.

Pick a song on the album and tell us what it’s about, how the melody came out, any good stories about performing it.
“Sorry I Spent All My Money on Natural Gas” is the first song that we wrote together. In that song you will hear most of the elements that make up our approach. A simple and natural drums sound. Keyboards. Guitar noodles. Mellow vocals. Lyrics that seem to be about girls/love issues, but are actually about more tangible issues (in this case, Peak Natural Gas). All our performances are good stories.

Mostly we confuse sound guys. Somehow we are the quietest, softest band of the night, but they make us feedback all over the place. The highlight of sound check is when they ask us to level check Mark’s ‘distortion’. The look on their face is pretty classic. Also, this song is a seasonal song so it’s tough to perform. Trying to give people an aesthetic experience pertaining to snow in the summer is a challenge and sometimes we come out on the short end of the stick.

If My Loving Tiger faced Your Hateful Lion, who would win?
We are friends with all types of cats, who we really are looking to tussle with is a bear! Know any? I hear that bear milk will make you strong!

Tell us a crazy story.
In our free time we like to cover hit anime songs. We really liked a song from the anime BECK so we figured it out and recorded it. The next one we’re looking to learn is the closing credits for Naruto season one. Someday we’ll put these up on the internet and get sued.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and you’re at Burger King looking to quell that hangover. What do you order?
This isn’t a question about recording gear, so I am going to answer it this way. As always, it is the player, not the gear. We have recorded many bands on this same gear, in the same room with varying results. For the tech heads…We start with the overheads. They are run through the Cranesong Flaminco. We didn’t compress them on the first recording because of past experiences with too much compression on overheads and we wanted a more minimal, natural sound. Next we got the snare sound. It is mostly the sound of the Justin’s snare being compressed by the Distressor, but only when he hits the snare. Setting the correct level is crucial to the tone. Other than that, it is a pretty standard kit set up, but with the addition of a very ’smashed’ ribbon mic for ‘room’ sound. For keyboards we recorded the Radio Shack Concertmate straight into a Great River pre-amp, compression by the Distressor. We tracked the vocals using a Beyer 88 for a smooth sound. On this EP we didn’t use Auto-Tune, but we did heavily comp takes.

Have any gigs coming up?
Right now we are focusing on finishing our next release. We are hoping that we can find some people that want to help us get it out. After that there are some friend’s CD release shows we are talking about opening for them.