Miniature Tigers are four busy cats. In addition to the nationwide tour they’ve embarked on in support of their second album Fortress (available here), the modern art/beauty pop foursome has received nods from the likes of Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and NPR. After hearing the first 10 seconds of the cheery ‘Bullfighter Jacket’ coupled with the first 20 seconds of the quirky ‘Mansion of Misery’, I immediately went to iTunes to download the rest of Fortress. The album reminds me of a more musically complex Yeasayer and of Montreal‘s unstoppable pop masterpiece Satanic Panic in the Attic: it’s got an abstract, distinct sound that you can’t quite pin down. Charlie, the guitar player and vocalist, was kind enough to answer a few questions about Miniature Tigers‘ future tour plans, working with Neon Indian, and what he’s been listening to lately.lt;/p>

BnB: Miniature Tiger’s current national tour includes dates with Neon Indian, The Walkmen,  and Japandroids. You also recently worked with Neon Indian‘s Alan Palomo on one of the songs on Fortress. How did that happen?

Charlie: We didn’t know him that well, but we had some mutual friends. We had this song ‘Gold Skull’ and didn’t know how to approach it for the album, so we reached out to him because he has this whole organic/electronic thing going on.  We asked him if he was interested in producing the track, and he wanted to do it so we all met up and did an all-night session in a studio. We all met that day too, and just sort of made this song in one night which was really fun. Since then we’ve all become friends. We actually just started the tour two nights ago with him. He’s a really great dude, it’s been nice making friends. I didn’t know what to expect, it seems like there’s a lot of hype around him and I didn’t know what his personality would be like. But he’s one of the most down-to-earth, nice guys.

 

Your sophomore album Fortress was released this past July. Parts of it were recorded at Dreamland, a 19^th century converted church. How did that setting influence the record?

We had seven days up there: we recorded, tracked a lot of songs live and sort of did what we could. We got pretty much all of the album recorded up there, then went to Manhattan and spent a few weeks on overdubs, vocals, that sort of stuff. It definitely rubbed off on the album- it was really this big church, so it was this really warm space. We were all living up in the woods in this place; I think just all being up there and playing them all live in a big room, there’s something about it… When I hear the record it sounds like the vibe of the place.

How do you create such a textured, layered sound? What is your songwriting process?

Oh wow. Well it kind of starts…I’ll have an idea or, I keep a little thing in my phone of song title ideas or concepts for a song. When I sit down to write, I’ll look over that, or I’ll just have spontaneous inspiriation before that. Once I get a feeling for the song, I like to have each song to have its own personality. I’m into albums where it has a particular vibe, you know? For this, I noticed all of the songs had distinct personalities and sounds and we wanted to go further in that direction: like, we recorded the drums differntly in each song. We would either make them sound really blown out or really tight. It’s a lot of layering, and a lot of different instrumentation. It’s hard to explain- it’s really not too planned out. We just go in there, sit down, see what happens. But we’re definitely conscious of each song having its own sound and personality.

Is it hard to conjure such an immense amount of energy for every show? Or does it get easier as you play more?

The more we play, I feel like the tighter we get as a band, and we’ve already played a lot of these tunes live. I start a song with a demo, we’ll send it to the band, then we’ll learn it live and figure out how to approach it as a band. We’d been playing a lot of these live for almost a year, and when we went up to Dreamland we tracked a lot of guitar, drums, and bass live: we wanted to be able to play this album live as it sounds on the record. There’s a lot of textural stuff we just can’t cature live, but we wanted to be able to present the album as best as we could live.

You’ve toured the country and played Lollapalooza. What was your favorite venue or space to play and why?

Um let’s see. Well Lollapalooza was awesome, like a really crazy moment. It was really exciting. We like playing San Francisco a lot, we’re playing there tomorrow actually. Chicago is really fun, New York. We just did a headlining tour before this tour we’re on now, we played a few places that sold out. Small venues, like 200 capacity rooms and clubs. That was really crazy, we’d done bigger support tours with bigger venues before, but playing your own show and having 200 people show up for you, it has a different feeling to it; it’s more energetic.

Where do you want to play in the future? Do you have any tours lined up after this?

We’re gonna try to do another support tour with Freelance Whales, after that I think we’re taking a little bit of time off and going back out early next year. The festivals seem to start up around early summer, hopefully we’ll do more of those next year. Then possibly another headlining tour, and we want to go over to Europe at some point. We’re not exactly sure, but there will definitely be lots of touring.

Where do you go for new music?

Well, that’s a good question. It’s a mixture of a lot of stuff. Unfortunately, I do check Pitchfork once in awhile: I’ll see a ‘best new music’ thing on there, and sometimes I’m not into it at all, sometimes I find something really cool. More often than not, it’s a friend telling me to check someone out or I’ll hear something in a friend’s car and I’m like ‘Oh what’s that?’ Or someone posts on Twitter, and talking to friends with like minded music tastes. Some of those music websites, you can’t realy trust them all of the time.

Do you have any personal music suggestions for our readers?

Sure! What have I been listening to…I’ve been into the new Ariel Pink album. And Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water I’ve been listening to on repeat, you know? So that’s been doing it for me lately. I guess I haven’t been listening to as much music as I thought- though I do listen to the Ricky Gervais podcasts in the van all of time.