Editor’s Note: Tigers Jaw performed at the Baltimore Soundstage Friday, April 17th with Creeks, the solo project by former Balance & Composure singer Jon Simmons, and California based Hot Flash Heat Wave on the heels of their fantastic new LP, Lost On You. Correspondent Jake Luckey offers this mediation on the influence of the band’s music and that journey of discovery. And while this leg of the Lost On You tour has wrapped, Tigers Jaw kick off the second leg of their US tour in May.

‘Cause why shouldn’t I live as God in a glowing canyon?

It’s funny that Tigers Jaw is the band I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the most. In enough different places, at enough different times, that the way I hear the songs in my head is as much how they sounded in interchangeable rooms along the Eastern seaboard as the recordings, which enter my ears as a waveform and land in my cortex as an un-Shazam-able sense-mix of hot rooms and crushed toes. And it’s all an accident really. I don’t definitely know that I would have no idea who Tigers Jaw are without the accident, but it’s possible. The accident was I met a girl. As accidents go, only painful very occasionally, and completely painless at the point of impact.

The Baltimore Soundstage 2026 version of Tigers Jaw has been added to this sense-mix, in some banker’s box of the mind with my stomped-on Grant Taylors, an empty can of Modelo, a full-body dog costume, and these photos my friend Dave took. 

I’ve known Dave for like forever. We met in college when he pretty much wouldn’t leave me alone about how good this or that band was. Most of them I didn’t really latch onto, but a good number hit. So he’s loved it all for a long time. So have I. But we never did anything together except the occasional jam session. He wrote some songs. I did, too. We played a lot of records, and a lot of WWE on a Sega Genesis. Went to a lot of shows, too.

Then I met the girl, a cousin of a Tigers Jaw. So it’s been an inside job since then. But it’s mostly been me inside these rooms. Sometimes with a friend, sometimes solo. The girl isn’t big on what I found to be the revelation of a Tigers Jaw gig: the completely good-natured lotto-ball dance floor. Having been well freaked by a Tool pit very early in my concert life, where I was hovercrafted 25 feet forward from my originally assumed axis of enjoyment toward a half-naked Maynard James Keenan after only a single chord strike, I’d suspected the jellyfish-like heart of the crowd, though alluring, might be beyond me. But I just had to find my jellyfish.

The Baltimore Soundstage 2026 episode of Tigers Jaw is among my favorites. We got 10 of 11 tracks (no “Roses + Thorns” alas) from the very, very fine new one, Lost on You, in album order, spiked with 11 other perennial champs—6 from the self-titled (you know who you are), Charmer tag-teamers “Nervous Kids” and “Hum,” the much-loved “June” from 2017’s Spin, the close-to-home “New Detroit” from 2021’s I Won’t Care How You Remember Me, and “We Are Great, There Is Only One (Tigers Jaw)” from the Spirit Desire EP.

The guy in the dog costume was my north star. (I’m saying it was a dog costume, but I really don’t know. The ears flopped, there seemed to be a white oval belly.) Someone pointed at him and said that he must be hot in that thing, upon which he zipped it down from the neck a few inches to show that one musn’t fuss: dogs aren’t wear much under their fur.

Then there was the guy who lost his glasses (this seems to happen every time actually). After ascertaining that a stranger had picked them up and was agreeing to a temporary guardianship, the guy dove back into the dance. Better safe than sorry.

An early-spring downtown stuffiness was on this one. I had to drink a lot of water. I exited and reentered the jellyfish a few times. Dave and I got some air and caught up a bit. (He still lives in Baltimore. I’ve moved farther north.) He’d texted me a bit before, “I know it’s a good show when I have over 1,500 shots and right now I’m about at 1,700.” The mind reels. The disk space, the winnowing. My only job had been to carom around the center, see what I might see.

Oh, to be always…

In a tiger’s jaw, loving living raw

Listen to the new single, “BREEZER” by Tigers Jaw:

The setlist included:

It’s ok
Primary Colors
Head is Like a Sinking Stone
The Sun
Nervous Kids
Between Your Band and the Other Band
Anxious Blade
Baptized on a Redwood Drive
Hum
June
Never Saw It Coming
BREEZER
Ghost
New Detroit
Staring at Empty Faces
Light Leaks Through
We Are Great, There Is Only One (Tigers Jaw)
Plane vs Tank vs Submarine
Chemicals
Lost on You
I Saw Water

Check out more photos of Tigers Jaw rocking the socks off the Baltimore Soundstage on April 15, 2026. All photos copyright David LaMason:

And check out photos of Hot Flash Heat Wave at the Baltimore Soundstage:

And check out photos of Creeks opening the evening at the Baltimore Soundstage: