Mary Timony at 7th Street Entry, Minneapolis (09 Mar 2024)

American musician Mary Timony is currently on tour in support of Untame the Tiger, her first new solo album in 15 years.
She has a full band, featuring guitarist Betsy Wright (also in Timony’s Ex Hex), bassist Chad Molter, and drummer David Christian. I was told that Anna Wilson, a pedal steel guitarist, is also in the band, but I did not see her on stage.



Opening the show was New York’s youbet, a project singer/guitarist Nick Llobet. The live band features drummer Jojo and bassist Micah.



It would seem many of these new songs from their latest album Way To Be (like “Carsick”, “Peel” or “Vacancy”) were inspired or written when they were on tour or being on the road. Their bassist even offered $10 to anyone who can guess what their songs were about.



Their drummer was missing earplugs and had some issues with the loud sound. “I guess my hearing is just too good,” Jojo said. It wasn’t long before a fan in the audience went and grab earplugs from the venue to offer it to the drummer. That is the famed Minnesota Nice, in action.



As for Mary Timony, what can I say. I’m a big Helium fan, so I’ll always support whatever she does.



Just to give you a little background, but Timony is in many bands, before doing the solo-thing. Her music career started in a band called Autoclave, but as I previously mentioned, I did not discover her until her weirdly dark band called Helium. The band didn’t last long, releasing only two albums and a few EPs, before breaking up in 1998. Since then, she’s been in the super group Wild Flag, Hammered Hulls, The Spells, Lincoln ’65, The Mary Timony Band, and Ex Hex. Whatever band she’s in, I’ll check it out.

Mary Timony (25 May 2005) Ex Hex (20 Jul 2015)

I did see Timony in May 2005, the latter touring for her album Ex Hex, and July 2015, for her band Ex Hex, “Of course, nearly ten years later, she would form a new band Ex Hex with Betsy Wright and Laura Harris. As expected with bands with only one album, the trio played their entire album live… but throwing in a cover or two to stretch out the time for a full set. Most of the songs were sung by Timony, except Wright took over two songs on their set: “How You Got That Girl” and “Radio On”.”



The majority of this Untame the Tiger tour has mostly the same setlist… but Mary made some minor changes, night after night. For our show, it started with “No Thirds”, and switched some songs out of order. Please refer to the photograph of the setlist.



Of course, the highlight of the show, at least for me, was hearing two Helium songs, the upbeat “Leon’s Space Song” and “Walk Away”, which served as the final song of the encore.



Maybe I’m over analyzing the double-song encore, but they go hand-in-hand with the same theme… In the song “Untame the Tiger”, Timony sings “I want to know where this feeling goes, don’t want to walk away” … while in “Walk Away”, a song written over 27 years ago, Timony is also singing “That’s why I’m going to walk away, I want to walk away, baby.”



Mary Timony’s Untame the Tiger is available now on Merge Records.