How Lucid Liars Wrote "Paper Tiger" | Behind the Song

It's Monday and you know what that means.

> Rig back to kick off a mammoth blog

We recently put out the video for 'Paper Tiger', a song we put together shortly after finalising 'Hard Times'. We've always been a band that doesn't like to sit on material for long as we find going back to a song after a lot of time has passed can either ruin the creative flow or alter the track completely, and by this time it was a big wait between 'The Best is Yet to Come' in 2023 and 'Hard Times' taking shape in 2025. It's interesting to look back and see that the latest album took a year and a half to put together, we played nearly every song live before its release, and we had jammed and rehearsed them so much that we were beginning to get a little antsy around the material. I guess that's just the nature of being in a band that prefers to move forward - we're always looking for the next challenge.

"Paper Tiger"

When we begun to write 'Paper Tiger', it was an idea based on a syncopated chord progression and nothing more. My initial idea was to introduce the syncopated piano with the vocals then half way through the song the drums would kick in, recontextualising where the '1' in the beat was and getting in to a dancey groove. We had a couple of run throughs in the jam room, got a few things together, and recorded a video. I was looking over this video recently and can't believe how close the vibe was back then to where it ended up. The prevailing idea was a rhythmic build that would see Jackwan being the driving point towards the ending, utilising every changing snare and cymbal tricks to bring the whole thing to an ending.

When it came time to demo it, I just had the words "We can do this together", hoping that Jo would turn it in to a more interesting chorus. The guitar parts were written to be built in to loops which would guide the song towards it's ending, but that was really all I had for it.

A syncopated piano and a vague idea that the guitars should get louder and more visceral towards the end. That's not quite a song.

So I threw it over to Jackto aka Big Sexy -

> Jackto here

My part in the Paper Tiger story starts with finding ways to work through limitations.

For the last year or so I have been having tendon / joint issues in my wrists. I thought it was carpal tunnel for a while but got the tests and my nerves are fine! It just turns out that playing Bass/Guitar, Drums and having a day job at a desk is a perfect combo for RSIs.

So I was hunting for a way to reduce the strain on my hands/wrists whilst still being able to play bass and I stumbled into short scale basses. Put simply they have a shorter neck, tuned to the same pitch so they have much less tension in the strings. I made my choice of a lovely pink (Rikki is still adamant that it's white) Gretsch. (Rig Edit - it's fawken WHITE)

From the moment it arrived and I started playing, it had character and I could tell there were riffs in this instrument! And started the process of finding a new set of bass tones. Which led to me spending much more money but arriving at some righteous noises!

It just so happened that during that time of discovery the first ideas of paper tiger started getting thrown around. We jammed a couple of times (with my previous bass rig) and ideas were growing. And one day I was just throwing tones and ideas at the wall to see what stuck and I landed on what felt like an outrageous synthy octaver sound and along with it a bassline that would have been more at home on a dance number than an indie rock track. For some reason I felt inspired enough to record it. I laid down some guide tracks and as it would turn out, everyone loved it! And apart from a bit of development and arranging what is on the record isn’t far from the first demos. A moment of exploration and adventure captured and immortalized in one hell of a track.

> Rig jumping back in.

At some point Jackto sent over some trumpet, a lot of it was very freeform and built on hamornic layering to build up chords that would back up the track as it moved towards the latter half.

In one of these tracks, Jackto had played a little 2 bar hook that was probably just a bit of experimentation. Typically, Jackto will send me a whole bunch of takes to parse through and on this occasion this little hook based around a G, F and D, was something I knew had to be the counter melody to the underlying chord structure. I layered up the take, and started to put it everywhere in the track. Soon, I worked out where it sounded best and got a rough arrangement of everything together.

Around this time I'd finalised the vocals, telling of new relationship beginnings and the feeling that all it takes is companionship and it'll all work out despite the struggles faced between each other.

Then it was time to throw it over to Jackwan to get some drums over it. By this point it had been about 6 weeks and the demo drums were the only thing holding the track back creatively, as they were placeholder drum loops I put together over the winter.

> Jackwan weighing in.

As for the drums, I remember jamming away at the demo like I always do, patiently waiting for my considerable talent and technical skill to become obvious. Sometimes it takes a while.

The first groove came from a jam session: straight hats, four on the floor, simple and driving. Exactly what the song needed. When I revisited the video later, though, it felt a bit too straight. It worked I guess, but it didn’t feel right during multiple playthroughs.

At some point I shifted the hats to catch the upbeat the rest of the instrumentation was already nudging at, and there it was: the missing vibe. Tiny change, massive difference. Moral of the story is don’t fight the song and sometimes less is less.

The ending wasn’t planned so much as unleashed. I basically jammed with the word ESCALATE flashing in my head and tried to see how close we could get to falling apart without actually doing it. Locking in with the bass while also getting unhinged with the guitar.

A fairly typical Lucid Liars formula.

It’s hype.

Note: ‘ESCALATE’ good album title? Anyways here's Big Jo.

> Big Jo

The next stop for the Paper Tiger Demo Bus was my desk – the first listen was in the car while I was waiting for a ferry to Mull. By the time I received the track there were some lyrics too and I loved the vibe – the off-kilter piano chords in the intro giving way to a driving rhythm.

Just like the others have said it was clear the track wanted to build and reach a kind of frenetic energy by the end – so I wanted to give the option of a load of vocals that could be layered up by the end of the track – a 2 or three part harmony for the chorus plus another hook to run potentially at the same time. 


With the first two verse/choruses divided up, what stuck for the latter part of the track was a call and response version of the “we can do this together” hook to bring us into the last chorus and that danceable finale.

> Rig tying off this blog.

Paper Tiger represents everything we enjoy about being a a humble independent indie rock band from Inverness. Every Lucid Liars song evolves through collaboration, experimentation and plenty of trial and error. As we continue writing new music, we're excited to share more behind-the-scenes looks at how our songs come together.

Until next time.