For a while, it seemed that Tiger Lou had disappeared forever from the music scene. Rasmus Kellerman’s project hadn’t released a record since 2008’s A Partial Print. Then last year, signs of life started to return with the California Hauling EP, and the it was confirmed: Tiger Lou were back with The Wound Dresser, their first full-length in eight years. We met Kellerman to discuss it.
First of all, it’s been a long time since A Partial Print, though you’ve had a bunch of other projects since then, you’ve played live gigs, you’ve put out a solo album, and you’ve had the Las Puertas album as well. So what’s been behind the big gap between releases?
I think just the fact that everyone had a lot of stuff to do. For us it doesn’t seem so long. We decided in summer 2009 that for a long time, maybe three or four years, Tiger Lou had been our main priority in life. And I think that all of us felt that we wanted to change that, because everything else in our lives had been on pause mode. So if felt natural to take a break and get an education, find a job, maybe start a family. I did my solo record, and Erik [Welén] and Pontus [Levahn] had a band called Torpedo, and they were doing that for two or three years, full time. Mathias [Johansson] is now a professional photo artist, and all of us have kids. So it felt like the years just flew by. We started playing again in 2013, those were the first shows. So it just took a while to get the album sorted.
And is it intimidating or apprehensive to return after that long a gap? Or is it okay because you’ve slipped in gradually? You had the California Hauling EP last year, you played some shows. So it hasn’t been a dry start.
I think that was very calculated in a way, because I think what felt a little scary at first was the question: ‘Why should there be a new Tiger Lou album?’. When we returned, it didn’t feel like we had broken up. We’re not a huge band, so it didn’t any sense to make a grand gesture, you know, ‘This is the big comeback gig of the century!’, or whatever. We had no idea if anyone wanted to see us. So we played at a friend’s party, just for the sheer fun of it. And when we did that we felt: ‘Why don’t we do this anymore?’. So we decided just to do it on our own terms, to book a show, play some songs and see if anyone shows up. So every little step has been gradually working towards this. So in that sense, it doesn’t feel overwhelming at all. It feels very natural. For me as a songwriter, it’s been such a relief to allow myself to write Tiger Lou songs again.
To get that outlet back?
Yeah. I always write songs, and I always have to decide beforehand what I’m writing for, which project and what kind of song I want to make. For a number of years I really made an effort not to write Tiger Lou songs, and I didn’t want them to sound like Tiger Lou songs, and I hid my guitar, y’know, all of that. But at the end of the day this is my outlet, and this is my style of songwriting. And it felt very relaxing admitting to yourself that this is it! There’s no point trying to change it, this is the natural state of the song.
There’s a lot of mentions of location and place on the album, and you’ve moved around yourself a bit, you lived in Berlin for a while and now you’ve come back to Aspudden. And obviously a lot has changed in that time period, you’ve had families, and pursued different career options and things like that. So was that something that fed into the themes on the record, thinking about place?
The theme of the whole album is the sensation of feeling at home. If you’re returning to your home town, or finding a place or an atmosphere, or a feeling of where you feel most comfortable. And every step in this process has kind of felt like that, reuniting with the band, and working with the same producer, the same mixer. The same record label, the same booker. Most of them hadn’t really met for a few years. So we gave each other a big warm hug and said ‘Wow! We’re here again, let’s do this!’. Without any pressure. I’m kind of always looking for that feeling, feeling comfortable enough to feel at home, and it doesn’t really matter where. I don’t necessarily feel more at home in Stockholm, but my family is here. If we moved to Dubai tomorrow, I guess I’d feel at home there.
The Wound Dresser seems a softer album, musically, than A Partial Print. Less guitar crunch and more subtle, low-key melodies. It breathes in more. So I was wondering if that was a deliberate stylistic direction, or just the way the songs happened to work out?
I think it’s both. What I deliberately tried to set out and do was to write intuitively. But when I did A Partial Print, it was very much calculated. I knew this was the type of record I want to make, and then I wrote and recorded demos, and rerecorded, and wrote and arranged and rearranged, forever and ever and ever. And then we started recording, and the recording process was extremely methodical. Every day I was in the studio I knew exactly what I was going to do. This time I had no idea. Which felt necessary, because I wanted to keep the whole process very open, and keep the songs simple, and have them revolve more around the feeling and the atmosphere. I guess that’s why it feels more relaxed and lighter, in a sense.
I wanted to ask about ‘Untitled #3’, because it’s such a gorgeous little piano piece, so how did that one come about?
I think when we started recording I didn’t have any ideas about featuring instrumental stuff. The first piano track came when we did that song, ‘California Hauling’, and I just played some chords at the end of the song. And then I started noodling around, and we just said ‘Let’s roll tape!’. At the beginning it was just supposed to be the outro of the song, and then it made sense to chop it and have it as an individual track. It’s really sad, because one of my favourite movies is called Harvey. It’s an old movie from the fifties with James Stewart. It’s a crazy story about a guy whose best friend is called Harvey, who’s a pooka, an invisible two-metre tall rabbit. James Stewart’s character is fucking fantastic, and he has this long monologue outside of a bar, where he talks about who Harvey is and what they do every day. I sampled that monologue, and it was so fucking great over that piano tune, but the rights were so expensive, so we couldn’t clear the sample. I think they wanted $50,000 or something.
I also like the fact that you placed it after ‘Undertow’ in the track listing, which is a nice contrast because ‘Undertow’ is the soaring single, and then you have this gentle piano piece afterwards. Was that intentional, to have that breathing space there?
Yeah, definitely. It’s the same with the ‘Rhodes’ instrumental track. We toyed around with playing a melody on some song, and just struck these chords and felt ‘Woah, we have to record this!’. I really love the concept of an album and I like that it has breathing points and ups and downs.
The imagery in the track ‘The Wound Dresser’ is really vivid, I kind of interpret it as using the vocabulary of medical trauma to depict the drama between two people. So I was wondering what the inspiration behind that one was?
I don’t know, I think every argument I’ve ever had with everyone. Not a single line on the album is super-autobiographical, but as the same time there are little pieces of me everywhere, of course.
And did you decide to use that type of imagery for the effect of it? Because it’s so raw?
I think the lyrical theme of the album is this one person that loses his or her partner, and then moves away from their hometown. A few songs are about that, a few songs are about when they’re gone, and a lot of songs are about when they come back. A song like ‘The Wound Dresser’, for me, can serve both as a past memory or can be when he or she returns, in a way. I like to write something that’s very descriptive and non-metaphorical in a way, but still doesn’t reveal so much. It’s more about tiny tiny details, and not explaining so much. There’s a cartoonist called Adrian Tomine. He’s a master of doing this, creating forty pages of basically nothing really. The story starts and it ends and there’s no proper arc to the story, but a little glimpse of everyday life. I like that.
So you do all the initial writing for the songs yourself. So how do those ideas typically kick off? Do you just sit at the piano and play?
Usually it’s guitar. I’m self-taught (on piano), but on a guitar it’s much more easy to write a riff or a chord progression and sing to it. But I can’t sing and play on the same time on the piano. So usually everything starts with that. And I record at home, and I always hear what type of beat I want, and I take it from there. For this album, Pontus plays drums on all the tracks on the recordings, and he was more involved early on, in the selection process of which songs to discard. That’s something that I’ve never done before and I really wanted to try it, and I really liked it. It just adds so much liveliness to the songs having him play drums on the tracks, pretty much one takes throughout. When I’m in the process of recording I listen a lot to the songs, and there are so many things that I really want to change. But I didn’t let myself this time, because I wanted them to be one-takes. It doesn’t matter if he [Pontus] plays differently this cycle, or I sing differently, because no-one gives a shit. It’s just in my head.
Is it [the one take system] because you want to keep that energy, or because you think that if you start messing with things you’ll get bogged down and keep tweaking forever?
My sense of recording and creating is that I really love electronic music, techno specifically. I really love the layer process, of having a little tiny loop and then adding to it. They might have ten seconds of music, and then they just build and build. And at some point they say that’s enough, and start taking everything away. I’ve always found that super fascinating. When you loop a lot of acoustic instruments you kind of take away the human aspect. For the last song, which we recorded in Los Angeles with a producer, and after a recording he said ‘I can make it perfect if you want, but it’s not going to be any better’. That pinpoints the mathematical pinpointing of songwriting today. But if the feeling is good, then it’s good. One of my favourite albums of all time is In Rainbows by Radiohead, and there are so many points in that album where you feel all the instruments going off in different directions and not being completely in sync. But no-one cares, and you feel like you’re in the room together with them, which is cool.
So what are your plans over the next few months? You’re playing in Stockholm with Rome Is Not A Town on October 15, and then a short German tour.
That’s pretty much all the plans for now. We’re just trying to keep it spontaneous, or at least as spontaneous as we can. The bookers and stuff obviously have to plan ahead. But this is what it felt natural to do now. Do a few shows here and in Germany, and I think that’s what we’ll do in the spring as well, some more shows and a few festivals. And then make a new record, as soon as possible.
So no eight year gap this time?
No way.
Tiger Lou’s The Wound Dresser is out now on Startracks.
