Tigers Are Bad For Horses is an electronic/alternative pop duo that blends lilting vocals with jazz-influenced, multi-textured piano and production. The group features Lyell Evans Roeder on keyboard and production and Mary Ellen “Mellen” Funke on vocals. The DC-based band found its roots at Georgetown University: the pair met in 2013 and began Tigers a year later.
Lyell began playing piano at age 5. What started as a chore quickly became an interest: “In middle school I got into improvising with my cousin, and that turned into studying jazz in high school, and that became doing other sorts of production, songwriting, playing guitar and rock. But it started with being interested in improvising, and that’s what turned it into fun.”
Though the pair says their music has evolved significantly since forming the band, the roots of it have remained constant. Mellen grew up playing a lot of folk and singing in the folk tradition; before Tigers a lot of her music was folk-oriented (her favorite artist is Bon Iver). Lyell grew up with a mix of rock and jazz and began film score work in college, which brought him to contemporary classical music. The textual influence of this film experience – combined with Mellen’s deep knowledge of electronic music – informs the aesthetic desires and ultimately the decisions for how a track should sound.
While performing, Lyell plays keyboard and cues electronic bites and Mellen sings. Songwriting is a collaborative fuse of Mellen’s folk influences and Lyell’s jazz interests (particularly Keith Jarrett): Mellen maintains a strong voice in all creative aspects – her aesthetic desires for each track, separate from the message of the track and its core with lyrics and musical movement – determine the palette the group draws from, instrumentation in a given line, what to try and what to cut. Mellen writes almost all of the vocal melodies, many of the harmonies and the vast majority of the lyrics; Lyell controls the mixing that requires a lot of back and forth: “it’s a slow trudging process toward finishing a song.”
Lyell celebrates the most effective moments of their EP TABFH as those where they embrace the contrasts of the jazz and the production: “In Messenger where it’s quite simple, we were going for an Alt-J style on the chorus, and we contrast that with a more jazz movement in the verses and the chords; it has a kind of deliberate and unique-sounding production. I think that one gets its efficacy from having the counterpoint and trying to go for each one – trying to go for a few interesting chords and then letting it slide around in the verses.” Overflown sees the opposite: more chord movement in the chorus with simpler verses.
New song Embers “feels like a bit of a departure from that – disregarding song form a little more, making a song form that is aesthetically interesting and brings you from point A to point B; I think a lot of songs do that but sort of close the circle a little bit, which Embers doesn’t try to do – Embers takes you here, here, here, and then drops you off here and that’s where you are.” He contrasts this with Messenger, which takes the listener full circle – literally with the lyrics and the chords “you end up right where you started.”
Emphasizing their jazz influences, the duo frequently invites friends to join in on performances, most recently Aamir Javaid on tenor saxophone, Chris Almeida on alto saxophone and Joe Epstein on trumpet. Lyell says, “The idea is to bring in another voice when we’re playing live. They’re improvising the vast majority of what they’re playing; I think that makes it a little more exciting for the audience to have this really live intriguing element and more exciting for me playing.” The woodwind or brass is brought into the electronic genre with features on the microphone – reverb, delay, compression – to make the sound more ethereal.
The group is moving to be based out of Los Angeles in August after a month of songwriting in Chicago and Michigan. Besides creating, the duo doesn’t have much of an agenda. Lyell says, “The art scene is so vibrant in LA right now – there are a million people making music videos and doing photography and shows. Our plan is just to dive into the scene as much as possible, make cool things and see where it goes. I don’t feel like I’m going to get there and get a list of things I have to do – it’s more that I’m going to try to do as much as possible and see what comes out.”
Toward the end I had to ask the question everyone’s been thinking of: what’s the story behind the name of the band? Lyell chuckled and responded, “Well, that’s a secret.”
Look out for new releases and projects from Tigers Are Bad For Horses on their Soundcloud and social media pages!
Lyell began playing piano at age 5. What started as a chore quickly became an interest: “In middle school I got into improvising with my cousin, and that turned into studying jazz in high school, and that became doing other sorts of production, songwriting, playing guitar and rock. But it started with being interested in improvising, and that’s what turned it into fun.”
Though the pair says their music has evolved significantly since forming the band, the roots of it have remained constant. Mellen grew up playing a lot of folk and singing in the folk tradition; before Tigers a lot of her music was folk-oriented (her favorite artist is Bon Iver). Lyell grew up with a mix of rock and jazz and began film score work in college, which brought him to contemporary classical music. The textual influence of this film experience – combined with Mellen’s deep knowledge of electronic music – informs the aesthetic desires and ultimately the decisions for how a track should sound.
While performing, Lyell plays keyboard and cues electronic bites and Mellen sings. Songwriting is a collaborative fuse of Mellen’s folk influences and Lyell’s jazz interests (particularly Keith Jarrett): Mellen maintains a strong voice in all creative aspects – her aesthetic desires for each track, separate from the message of the track and its core with lyrics and musical movement – determine the palette the group draws from, instrumentation in a given line, what to try and what to cut. Mellen writes almost all of the vocal melodies, many of the harmonies and the vast majority of the lyrics; Lyell controls the mixing that requires a lot of back and forth: “it’s a slow trudging process toward finishing a song.”
Lyell celebrates the most effective moments of their EP TABFH as those where they embrace the contrasts of the jazz and the production: “In Messenger where it’s quite simple, we were going for an Alt-J style on the chorus, and we contrast that with a more jazz movement in the verses and the chords; it has a kind of deliberate and unique-sounding production. I think that one gets its efficacy from having the counterpoint and trying to go for each one – trying to go for a few interesting chords and then letting it slide around in the verses.” Overflown sees the opposite: more chord movement in the chorus with simpler verses.
New song Embers “feels like a bit of a departure from that – disregarding song form a little more, making a song form that is aesthetically interesting and brings you from point A to point B; I think a lot of songs do that but sort of close the circle a little bit, which Embers doesn’t try to do – Embers takes you here, here, here, and then drops you off here and that’s where you are.” He contrasts this with Messenger, which takes the listener full circle – literally with the lyrics and the chords “you end up right where you started.”
Emphasizing their jazz influences, the duo frequently invites friends to join in on performances, most recently Aamir Javaid on tenor saxophone, Chris Almeida on alto saxophone and Joe Epstein on trumpet. Lyell says, “The idea is to bring in another voice when we’re playing live. They’re improvising the vast majority of what they’re playing; I think that makes it a little more exciting for the audience to have this really live intriguing element and more exciting for me playing.” The woodwind or brass is brought into the electronic genre with features on the microphone – reverb, delay, compression – to make the sound more ethereal.
The group is moving to be based out of Los Angeles in August after a month of songwriting in Chicago and Michigan. Besides creating, the duo doesn’t have much of an agenda. Lyell says, “The art scene is so vibrant in LA right now – there are a million people making music videos and doing photography and shows. Our plan is just to dive into the scene as much as possible, make cool things and see where it goes. I don’t feel like I’m going to get there and get a list of things I have to do – it’s more that I’m going to try to do as much as possible and see what comes out.”
Toward the end I had to ask the question everyone’s been thinking of: what’s the story behind the name of the band? Lyell chuckled and responded, “Well, that’s a secret.”
Look out for new releases and projects from Tigers Are Bad For Horses on their Soundcloud and social media pages!