Interview: Miniature Tigers
We sat down with Miniature Tigers before they rocked the Independent in San Francisco. The band is part of the Modern Art Tour with Geographer, Pretty and Nice, and Chain Gang of 1974. They talked Mia Pharaoh (out today!), pop art, influences, and more.
How does Mia Pharaoh continue your creative evolution as a band?
Charlie: This album is a lot more poppy than the last album. I feel like our goal is to always do something different with an album, and treat each album as its own work. So I think with this we were really influenced by top 40 hip-hop and pop, and also more 60’s pop, like Simon and Garfunkel, that kind of stuff. I guess the idea was to fuse those two worlds together and see what that would sound like. For me, at least, that’s what Mia Pharaoh is, is a merging of those worlds.
Would you say you draw inspiration from David Hockney, pop art, photography…?
Charlie: Yeah, when I was writing a lot of this I was just discovering his art, and really fascinated by this stuff. I was trying to make music that sounded what his paintings felt like to me—sort of warm, southern California, very simple, straight edges, things like that.
What’s your songwriting process like? How do you all collaborate as a band?
Charlie: I’ll usually start a song, and do a demo, get the song structure and stuff down, then I’ll send it to Rick and AJ and we’ll collaborate on things. Like the song “Angel Bath” started as a pretty rough demo, then I sent it on…we were all scattered over the country, so I sent the song files and AJ added all this stuff, and Rick added vocal harmonies and different parts, and we kind of came up with the structure together. This was the first time we’ve worked like that. Each of us being in our own work zone…there are no inhibitions.
AJ: Yeah, you’re in your own space and you can figure out your jam.
It seems like this album was approached differently from ones in the past. Do you feel like there’s a tangible difference in the finished product? Would you do it again?
Charlie: Yeah, I think this is a better way to do an album.
Rick: We did Fortress in like ten days and just recorded it all at the same time. That was just hard, to be in the zone for that long.
Charlie: Yeah, we spent a year and a half on-and-off while we were home and touring, sending stuff back and forth, taking time to perfect everything. Whereas our last album, Fortress, we learned a lot of those songs live before we even recorded the album. We pretty much knew the album as a band, and in ten days just live-tracked a lot of the stuff. [With Mia Pharaoh] we had time to fine tune things, and orchestrate things. We used a lot of the stuff from the demos, and just expanded on top of them.
We love the illustrations that accompany the album’s tracks. How did that idea come about? How do you feel the different art forms work together?
Charlie: I actually did most of [the drawings]. Rick has done the art for the past two albums, the past two album covers, and I’ve just recently gotten into painting on my iPhone, so all everything painted on my iPhone. I think art just correlates with music for me a lot, even with demos and putting things in iTunes I want to find an image that goes along with it–and now being able to paint and create, I never had that outlet before. I feel like that was a huge thing, where instead of having to find an image that correlated with how I felt, I could create something that for me felt like the song. I feel like this is the most personal record for us as a band, in that we’ve done all the artwork, we mixed the album, we made this ourselves pretty much. And really collaborated as a team.
Your playlist for Consequence of Sound was fantastic–and diverse. Who are your musical influences?
Rick: I’ve been listening to Talking Heads, recently some Michael Jackson.
Charlie: Yeah, [Michael Jackson] was a big thing while making the record. I think Thriller especially. For me almost the last year and a half it’s been Simon and Garfunkel. I mean I’ve always known them, but I’ve just gotten really deep into their songwriting, really deep into their catalogue, so that was a really huge influence for me.
Brandon: Musically, for the last several months I’ve been on sort of a jazz kick—I’ve been listening to a lot of Jelly Roll Morton, Django Reinhardt, Ella Fitzgerald, the classics. I keep going back to that, it’s definitely been heaviest on my playlist.
AJ: Probably some hip-hop, I’d say. I like Madlib a lot, there was a lot of Rick Ross going around, Wayne, Doom.
