The first few chords of Mary Timony’s Untame the Tiger, her first solo record in 15 years, feel like a warm hug from an old friend. After all, the singer-songwriter has been making music for three decades as part of the bands Helium, Autoclave, and Wild Flag, and, currently, Ex Hex. Then her voice, unmistakable after all these years, with her gravelly tone that always finds beauty in the matter-of-fact, sings, “Check the situation, is it cruel or is it kind?”
Though not immediately apparent, Untame the Tiger is a record about loss and grief. In 2021, Timony’s long-term relationship ended, and then both her parents got sick at the same time and eventually passed away. “They lived right down the street so it was really intense,” the singer-songwriter explains on a recent Zoom from her basement studio, her band set up visible in the background. “I didn’t really have a plan for what I was going to do, I just knew I wanted to get back into being creative.”
Although Timony hadn’t released an album under her own name since 2005’s Ex Hex, she’d been busy with her other bands and projects recently Hammered Hulls; but these songs were different. “The songs that were coming out of me didn’t sound like a band, they sounded like a solo record,” she recalls, “Then I started thinking about how I wanted to use acoustic instruments, and how I wanted to play with different drummers…I wanted the freedom of not working in a specific way.”
The resulting nine tracks explore loss and loneliness, and yet together they do not make for a sad record. “I think that the songs came from my trying to comfort myself,” Timony says. “There was so much crazy stuff going on in my life that when I had the time to be creative, I was self-soothing.” She continues, “Not to be dramatic, but I did feel like [music] was all I had at the time because I was losing everyone in my life which was a very isolating and weird feeling.” In “The Guest,” a slow jam country-tinged ballad with a melancholy slide guitar that quickly burrows itself in your heart—she sings, “Hello Loneliness, you’ve come back home / You were the only one who never left me alone” and then later “In the end, Loneliness, I guess you’ve been a friend.” It’s one of the best songs on the record.
Empowerment is not the right descriptor for these songs—co-opted as the word has been by girlbosses galore. But there is a sense in this heartbreak that Timony is recognizing her value of and trusting herself. What does “Untaming the Tiger” mean? “I would say I have spent the last couple of years trying to untame the tiger; just coming out of my shell a little,” Timony answers. “There’s one meaning of letting your inner self free, your freak flag fly, and being proud of—or not being proud—just showing you are and speaking your truth.” She continues, “But then there s also a real basic song about having a crush on the totally wrong person for you because he’s a little crazy,” she laughs a little. “So then it can also just be about giving into your passions.” In the song she sings, “What do I get from loving you? Just this song about the pain.” For those who have grown up listening to and being comforted by Timony’s voice and words throughout her three decades in music, her “songs about the pain,” and love, and life, remain as essential as ever.
