The last time Mary Timony played with one of her many bands in San Diego, nobody had ever heard of COVID-19. And the last time she released a solo album, George W. Bush was still president.
But the biggest changes that yielded her musically expansive, strikingly warm new record, “Untame the Tiger,” were much more personal.
To anyone who’s listened to much independent rock music in the last 30 years, Timony — who performs Friday at the Casbah — is an inescapable influence and an unmistakable voice, particularly on guitar.
That’s been true from her early Washington, D.C., punk band Autoclave and her influential ‘90s indie rock band Helium through her work in more recent years — joining two-thirds of Sleater-Kinney in Wild Flag, founding guitar power-pop band Ex Hex and forming another D.C. punk band in Hammered Hulls.
Her songs combine a sense of frankness with regular flights of fancy, and often a knowing sense of humor. Her trademark combination of confident, playful guitar riffs and solos — always relentlessly melodic, even when doused in distortion — and conversational manner of singing have often contrasted with elaborate lyrical metaphors and sometimes prog-inflected sounds.
But not on “Untame the Tiger,” the product of what Timony describes in her personal life as “nonstop insanity for three or four years.”
She was caring for both her ailing parents before they died. Her long-term relationship had just fallen apart. And, of course, the pandemic.
“I was working on the record as a way to escape from my everyday life,” Timony explained from her band’s tour van this week, crossing the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles en route to Boise. “The record was a way of me soothing myself.”
It was also, she says, a chance for a change of perspective. Suddenly, the stress of constant decisions about her parents’ health made the decisions that come with making an album — decisions that might once have felt onerous — seem much more fun.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I get to make this record, and it’s a privilege to be able to do this,’” she says.
For Mary Timony, the “incredibly stressful life stuff” she was going through while making her new album offered some new perspective, on herself and on making music.
(Chris Grady)
A few of those decisions distinguish “Untame the Tiger” from Timony’s previous work.
There’s the sound — cleaner and more acoustic-driven, with influences of psychedelic folk and country. (She was “listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers a lot, and the Dead,” she says.)
“I had this big realization that I really liked acoustic guitar,” she explained. “When I start using a little bit of distorted guitar, it’s all relative, and you start adding more and more. But when you start using really clean sounds and acoustic sounds, then there’s a lot of different variety.”
There are her collaborators — including drummer Dave Mattacks, best known for his work in British folk rock band Fairport Convention, whose presence Timony credits to friend and co-producer Joe Wong. (“I wouldn’t have ever even imagined that would be a possibility,” she says of working with Mattacks. “He really is a hero.”)
There’s a sharpened focus on song arrangements and editing that she attributes to what she’s learned in Ex Hex, paring its bursts of classic-rock guitar down into simple, tightly crafted structures — “no filler or fluff.”
Mary Timony’s new album “Untame the Tiger,” out Feb. 23, 2024, on Merge Records.
(Album cover art by Colin Burns)
That focus comes through in songs like “Summer,” where her Television-reminiscent intertwining guitar solos end with a provocative abruptness. It comes through, too, on the pedal steel-sounding riff that opens “The Guest,” and in the psychedelic instrumental opening of the title track.
And there are how her personal struggles inform her music, and her own identity. Decades ago, she often sang about consuming depression — figurative lyrics of realms “between outer space and the sky,” of walking through the “everlasting pit,” of fairy-tale symbols like long slumbers and dragons.
“I definitely had a few years of being just sick, so depressed I couldn’t function,” she says of that time. “The stuff that was going on in my life during making this record was incredibly stressful life stuff, but it wasn’t me … It wasn’t within my own brain.”
On “Untame the Tiger,” pain is a fire to be fought off one’s face, darkness is a former friend, and loneliness is an unwelcome house guest.
And Timony’s own identity as a musician, she acknowledges, has come into clearer view — particularly as she’s said goodbye not only to her parents, but to their expectations.
“I guess I’m taking myself a little more seriously,” she says.
Still, for as clear on the album as her themes of grief and loss are, the expansiveness and warmth underscore the newfound directness of her lyrics, and the hope in them.
“Now I wanna feel like I’ve never felt before: the sun on my face through an open door,” she sings on opening track “No Thirds,” setting the tone for the album.
“I’m trying to be less scared in the lyrics and just say what I feel,” she says with a laugh. “It’s hard to be vulnerable. I’m doing my best to try!”
Mary Timony with Rosali
When: 8:30 p.m. March 29
Where: The Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd., San Diego
Tickets: $20-$22
Online: casbahmusic.com