Sometime last summer, Lily and the Tigers decided to record their third studio album. They chose a studio far outside of town, gassed up the car, and packed it full of instruments… then threw in some tents and camping gear, too.
For a week, the band tracked songs in a Vermont studio during the day and camped under the stars at night. It was cheaper than renting a hotel, but for a band that specializes in ramshackle, flea-bitten folk songs, it was also a stylistic move. The Hand You Deal Yourself is the product of that week spent in the New England wilderness. It’s a raw, ragged campfire album, full of guitars that twang and drums that clang. On the title track, you can almost hear the summer wind whistle through the maple trees.
“The basic concept of that song encompasses the entire album,” vocalist Casey Hood says of the title tune, which you can stream below. “The idea that you can be influenced by a lot of things, but ultimately you deal your own hand. In the song, I sing, ‘I cast the lines. I reel them in. This is the hand I deal myself.’ I was sitting on the edge of the Chattahoochee river when I wrote this song. I have this special place where I like to write, and I was just humming the melody and thinking about how this album would be about the work that we put in along the way to get to where we were going, and realizing that life is what you put into it.”
“It’s very much about believing in something and putting forth the effort and energy without fearing what you can do,” adds upright bassist Adam Mincey, who met Hood at an Atlanta pool hall in 2010 and co-founded the band with her soon after.
“Everybody has fear,” Hood wrapped up. “We don’t carry our fear. We set it aside.”