Before Tigercub released their third album, The Perfume of Decay, singer and songwriter Jamie Stephen Hall had already written somewhere between 50 and 100 songs, or portions of them, written. “I like to overwrite,” Hall tells American Songwriter. “I’ll live with the tracks for a while, and try and understand what the flow of the record is, or what the identity of the record is, what the fingerprint of the record is.”
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To Hall, an album isn’t a collection of songs but one entire track, a larger story. For the Brighton, England trio—rounded out by bassist Jimi Wheelwright and drummer James Allix—The Perfume of Decay bestows the gravitas that can fill stadiums, from the opening 31-second “Dirge” and crunch of its title track.
Funneling through heavier riffs and drums, The Perfume of Decay prods brooding vignettes, from a desire to reconnect to one’s root on “Swoon”—There’s a wave coming on / And I can’t see the shore / There’s a weight of the truth / Pulling me back to you—more telling realities on “The Dark Below,” and exploring the euphoria of an addictive love on the funk-inflected “You’re My Dopamine.” More swells and sonic booms steer through a more tranquil closer “Help Me I’m Dreaming.”
Along with working on his more pop- and glam-bent side project, Nancy, Hall is an inexorable songwriter. Now signed to Loosegroove Records, co-founded by Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, Hall has fitted Tigercub’s new era.
“I find songwriting immensely cathartic,” says Hall. “If nothing else, it serves as a good way for me to process and understand how I experienced the world.”
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Hall recently spoke with American Songwriter on how DJ-ing helps him write, the conceptualization of albums—and then some—and how a bit of distance makes one’s ears grow fonder, with songs.
American Songwriter: Now three albums in with Tigercub, what kind of songwriter are you nowadays? Was writing The Perfume of Decay a different experience from As Blue as Indigo or Abstract Figures?
Jamie Hall: It depends. I’m always writing. At the moment, I’m writing songs that could potentially make up the next Tigercub record. I’ve been in situations where the touring schedule has been quite brutal, and I’ve not really had enough time to go through my songwriting process and sort of refine things. I’m always sort of anticipating getting really busy. So with tracks for The Perfume of Decay, I’d started writing that almost as soon as As Blue as Indigo came out because I like to overwrite.
I’ll probably write between 50 and 100 songs for a record and whittle it down. I’ll live with the tracks for a while, and try and understand what the flow of the record is, what the identity of the record is, and what is the fingerprint of the record. It takes quite a long time to put all the pieces together, and I kind of needed to create a lot of stuff and move it around like jigsaw pieces until it all starts to fit.
Once I find a structure and an identity of the record, then it all moves really quickly. Sometimes I’ll even rewrite it once I’ve sort of burned through a prototype of the record.
I think of albums as 30-minute songs, rather than a collection of different tracks. There are so many different ways a record can be amazing, but the sort of records that I want to make, I want them to be like a coherent song you live with.
AS: When working through the songs, are you ever thinking in terms of concepts when pulling songs together?
JH: Many of my favorite records don’t have anything to do with concepts or themes. They’re just a great collection of songs, which is totally valid, but personally when I’m making stuff I like to try and include some kind of theme. It helps me visualize the marketing and stuff that comes later on down the line. It doesn’t have to be a crazy concept. It can just be a vision. It’s what you want to present, what the overall impression is, and what the world is that people want to step into when they put on your record, or what they think about your band, and when they put on your T-shirt. What sort of person do they want to be? What sort of lens do they want to see the world through?
I like bearing that in mind. With The Perfume of Decay, I wanted it to be like a nighttime record, almost like the journey from bedtime, like 9 p.m., 10 p.m., all the way to dawn, and for it to feel like by the last track, that you’ve arrived somewhere. There’s been a full scene trying to transition, and you’re almost ready to start the record again.
AS: Is it the same approach when working on Nancy?
JH: I like circular narratives. I always like things to have something at the end of the record or if I’m watching something it gives me satisfaction for it to be brought back home at the end, to have this nice cyclical feel to it. It’s a sign of craftsmanship, which I see in good content across all mediums. The Nancy records are a lot more conceptual than the Tigercub ones.
The 7 Foot Tall Post-Suicidal Feel Good Blues [2021 Nancy release] was a conceptual album. You could consider The Perfume of Decay a conceptual album, but it’s more like a meditation on getting older, and the bittersweet nature of that. Those deep thoughts and meditations tend to happen when I’m trying to get to sleep, so I was trying to express that because I find songwriting immensely cathartic. If nothing else, it serves as a good way for me to process and understand how I experienced the world. As a utility, it serves that purpose for me.
AS: Are you always writing?
JH: All the time. I also write music for TV and that’s quite demanding. I produce other artists as well, and I’m helping younger bands, mainly from Brighton and in London.
AS: Working with other artists can often inform what you’ll do next, or inspire something new.
JH: It’s a great way to pick up on other people’s drives. I find DJing the most interesting. That’s the most informative thing for me when songwriting, outside of composing, because you’re curating playlists, and seeing how a sequence of tracks can affect a room. You pick up on songs, which sound a certain way. Maybe they’re in a certain key, or there’s a certain tempo. If it’s 1 a.m. and you play that track, it unlocks something in people. It’s quite amazing. As a DJ, it’s a part of my job to read the room, to make sure that people are staying in the bar and drinking. It’s picking up on little cues about what you’re playing, whether people are engaged with that, or if they think it’s bullshit.
AS: Have you always written so many songs per album before dwindling it down to the final 10, 12, or more tracks?
JH: I have quite a short attention span with songs, so I always just want to start again. I want to clear the deck and just start fresh, and sometimes you can get these moments of inspiration, where there’s some great voice that’s shining down through you, and the song just appears. My most popular tracks have just come out and been written sort of immaculately in 10 minutes. Those tracks show you where to go. The inspiration just naturally takes you to what the song needs or what the arrangement needs.
I’m always trying to trigger that inspiration, so that’s what makes me have a high turnover of tracks. I’ll have 50 to 100 demos, but to be honest, they’re not all complete songs. Maybe I’ll sing gibberish with a melody or vowel sounds over the top of some chords and a drum idea. Sometimes I’ll think “It’d be great to have this style of song on the record, this tempo track on the record,” so it’s more about just getting the ideas out so that I can move stuff around and build the structure and the foundation of a record, and leave enough room for me to also doubt myself and have chronic option anxiety.
AS: That’s the other half of it. Once you have those 10 or so tracks then it’s “Is this any good”?
JH: Yes. Totally. With this record, Stone [Gossard] was quite good. He’s a great guy to talk to about approaches to a record and stuff like that. He’s given me some really good advice. He was listening to demos, and he was letting me know which songs he thought were strongest, and what the record should be. Just having that extra person in the group—outside of Jimi [bassist Jimi Wheelwright] and Jallix [guitarist James Allix]—with opinions and thoughts on demos helped me have more objectivity since I’m too close to the tracks that I wouldn’t be able to tell what’s good anymore. His sensibilities towards making a record is “What’s the coolest thing?” rather than what might be the best single sort of thing, so he helped restore some of the artistic elements into the tracks.
I’ll have songs in these big demo lists, and some of them want to be pop songs, and it’ll be born out of frustration with where I’m at in my career. So, I’ll want to write this song that accelerates us to the big venues. That’s where I always wanted us to be. Sometimes songs written from that place can be great, but in my case, not always. I can sometimes be a little blindsided by ambition versus what’s artistically right to put out and what’s authentic to me. Stone, in that regard, was really useful on this record, helping me weed out some things, which were maybe me trying to please people rather than creating something that I just feel artistically comfortable with.
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AS: Because you are so close to your songs, I’m surprised you’re comfortable enough to let someone else, like Stone, guide them along. Some songwriters are very precious about what they write and don’t even want a collaborator, or collaborators.
JH: Throughout my career, I’ve always liked people getting involved on the creative side of things a little bit more, like distant members of the team. It helps grease the wheels a little bit. There are certain boundaries that I have with things. If I legitimately don’t like something, then I’ll put up a fight. I’ll work on tracks until I feel like I’ve gotten to a point where they know what they are, and I’m happy with them. And then I’ll just put them on a playlist, send them off to people, and I probably won’t think about them for two months. When I come back and listen to it with fresh ears with that little amount of time separation away from the process … that helps, coming back to something after two months. I immediately know what’s good, what’s shit, and what needs to be done. I can make those calls really quickly.
Sometimes you can just be so close to the canvas that you just can’t really make any good decisions. There’s this golden period of time when you first listen to something, look at something, or watch something when your instincts take over and you can immediately make these great decisions.
I know a lot of mixing engineers and mastering engineers will complete a mix within the first three or four hours, and then everything after that is like diminishing returns. I definitely think that is true with listening, so having a little bit of distance from my demos after a period of time, I can truly hear them for what they are.
AS: It’s similar to sharing the track list with people. You almost become one of them when you return back to the songs.
JH: Yes, I’m pretending I’m other people, and how I think they would receive it. It’s quite an interesting topic of discussion. Bias and objectivity. I guess you could apply the spirit of that to other aspects of your life. That’s why it’s kind of cool.
Who the fuck knows. Maybe I just need therapy.
Photo: Lauren Carnell / Courtesy of e2 PR
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