Victoria and Vancouver Island have a lot of musical talent, and Victoria Buzz wants to highlight some of the best and brightest local artists and bands.
Every Monday, there will be a fresh ‘New Music Monday’ article to help people find and support local artists and bands that are up-and-coming, well established or hidden gems!
For this endeavour, Victoria Buzz has partnered with our good friends at CFUV 101.9 FM, UVic’s campus radio station, to find and select the musicians and bands for this regular column.
This week, Tyger Jackson is the New Music Monday highlight!
Tyger Jackson was born and raised between Victoria and Salt Spring Island and she has been making music for as long as she can remember.
Now, she has poured her heart and soul into releasing her first album, Survival of the Weakest.
She first began singing as a young girl and eventually learnt ukelele before she turned to playing guitar.
“I just kept on adding different instruments and I taught myself everything that I know,” Jackson told Victoria Buzz.
“I found a guitar outside of one of my old complexes and it was old and beaten up but I taught myself guitar because I thought ‘I’m too cool for ukelele now,’” she laughed.
On top of her extra curricular musicianship, she joined an R&B band at Victoria High School and learnt bass as well as some other instruments.
There she got the opportunity to have a taste of playing live for an audience, touring with the band all over Victoria, as well as outside the country in Denmark at the oldest amusement park in the world.
“That’s what gave me the confidence to be able to do it. I’ve always wanted to perform and I knew from a very young age that music was going to be my driving force in this life,” she explained.
Jackson is a singer-songwriter who describes her music as indie-folk, with essences of country music. She says her biggest musical influences are Cat Power, who has been her main source of inspiration, but she has also been getting more and more into alt-country.
“Last winter I drove my little short chevy school bus down to Mexico and me and a buddy of mine were busking all down the coast,” Jackson said.
“I started getting into country as we went south and my voice started developing a bit of a twang while listening to a lot of Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams.”
Her inspirations can all be heard on Survival of the Weakest, because once she returned from that trip, Jackson got busy recording all the songs she felt most important to her life.
“The songs are kind of a collection of a lot of ebbs and flows of my life, like some are from many moons ago and others were written quite recently,” she explained.
Jackson chose the last song on the record, “Coming Home,” as this week’s New Music Monday highlight.
She says that she wrote that song on the road trip that took her down to Mexico.
“I was writing it about all the landscapes we travelled through, like the desert, we went through thunder storms, down through Death Valley, up mountains and kind of all over the place,” she said.
“I was just kind of longing for home. Even though I was seeing all these beautiful amazing places, I was just reminiscing, feeling so grateful and lucky to have such a beautiful place to come home to. There really is no place like BC, like Vancouver Island.”
She said the song came to her while driving through Nevada, while she was in the back of the bus laying in the bed and writing.
Meanwhile, her friend was up front driving a dangerous stretch of highway, but she did not realize that at the time.
“The last lyrics are, ‘No steep snowy road with the tires spinning slow is gonna keep me from you babe,’ the babe is kind of a lover, but also the island and all it holds for me,” she explained.
“As soon as I finished that I was so excited I told my friend I finished the song, but he didn’t seem excited at all.”
She recalled that he told her to come up to the front of the bus, when she realized they had been driving through a blizzard.
“We were almost at the top of this mountain when I see a dip in the road and we hit it and started sliding backwards,” said Jackson.
“It almost felt like I manifested it cause of that last line I wrote—the tires spinning backwards.”
Preview “Coming Home” from Tyger Jackson’s Survival of the Weakest below:
Survival of the Weakest is also available on all streaming platforms, including Bandcamp, Spotify and Apple Music.
Jackson says she hosted a little release party for the album on January 18th up in Cumberland, but plans on playing release shows sometime in the near future in Victoria and on Salt Spring Island.
Follow her on Instagram for more about upcoming shows and releases.
Related:
- New Music Monday: Conjure Hand’s latest single tells story iconic Black Canadian cowboy
- New Music Monday: Juniper Smile rises from the ashes of another prominent Victoria band
- New Music Monday: Oily James embraces the weird on ‘Head Phone Music’ EP
CFUV is a non-profit campus and community radio station that plays a ton of local music of all kinds across Vancouver Island. If you like to support local music they are an amazing resource with a plethora of new local tunes in their arsenal.
“Anyone that’s playing the local stuff is crucial to our music scene,” Jackson said about CFUV.
Tune into CFUV 101.9 FM on air or online!
Let us know what you think of Tyger Jackson in the comments below.
