Having thoroughly exhausted the songs about ‘Lions’ we move onto the second creature in the refrain ‘LIons and Tigers and Bears Oh My’ with a first selection about ‘Tigers’.
Tiger Rag” is a jazz standard that was recorded and copyrighted by the Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917. It is one of the most recorded jazz compositions. Tiger Rag” was composed by Nick LaRocca. In subsequent releases, the ODJB members received authorship credit. This authorship has never been challenged legally. Tiger Rag” is often used as a fight song by American high school and college teams which have a tiger for a mascot. “Tiger Rag” is LSU’s pregame song, which was first introduced in 1926. In 2003, the 1918 recording of “Tiger Rag” was entered into the U.S. Library of Congress National Recording Registry.
“Eye of the Tiger” is a song by American band Survivor. It was released as a single from their third album of the same name and was also the theme song for the 1982 film Rocky III, which was released a day before the single. The song was written by Survivor guitarist Frankie Sullivan and keyboardist Jim Peterik, and it was recorded at the request of Rocky III star, writer, and director Sylvester Stallone, after Queen denied him permission to use “Another One Bites The Dust”, the song Stallone intended as the Rocky III theme. The version of the song that appears in the film is the demo version of the song. The film version also contained tiger growls, which did not appear on the album version. It features original Survivor singer Dave Bickler on lead vocals. It gained tremendous MTV and radio airplay and topped charts worldwide during 1982. In the United States it held No. 1 on the Billboard chart for six consecutive weeks. In September 1982, it also peaked at No. 1 in the United Kingdom, remaining at the top of the UK Singles Chart for four consecutive weeks.
“Neon Tiger” is a 2008 song by The Killers. Frontman Brandon Flowers told The Quietus: “I was trying to write like MGMT. And it’s nothing like MGMT, it never turns out that way. With ‘Sam’s Town’ I was trying to write a song like the Arctic Monkeys and of course it’s nothing like them. It turned out to be this big boisterous thing. But that’s cool. It’s actually a good tactic, I guess.” The album title takes its name from a lyric in both this mid-tempo number and “The World We Live In.” Flowers told Rolling Stone that he didn’t really know why they named their record Day & Age. He added: “You wait for moments. I just wait for it to come, and I knew that that was right when I had it.”
“Paper Tiger” is a song by Beck. Beck’s father, orchestrator David Campbell, helped with the brass and string arrangements on this song and the rest of the album. Beck told NPR how they worked together. “I usually get some kind of keyboard and I’ll play the basic voicings and we’ll map it out,” he said. “With strings, a lot of times I’ll play or sing parts over the song, which we’ll transcribe.” He added: “For ‘Paper Tiger’ there’s a whole solo that the orchestra does; that was actually something I sang, and then we just transcribed it.” A paper tiger is a person or thing that seems strong or threatening, but is, in fact, feeble or ineffective. The expression arose from a Chinese saying applied by Chairman Mao in the 1950s to the USA. Beck sings of the paper tiger protagonist in this song as being, “torn apart by idle hands.”
“Tiger” This song finds Paula Cole unleashing her inner beast, free from the strictures of her small-town upbringing no longer contending with “sex-starved teachers trying to touch my ass.” Cole was class president and a top student growing up in Rockport, Massachusetts, but she wasn’t satisfied. “I wanted to break free from my self-imposed good girl expectations”. “I was a bit of a repressed goody two-shoes, you see, and I needed to bust out of that in my 20s and I needed to rebel.” This is an important song for Cole, with a regular spot on her setlists. When she returned in 2007 after a seven-year absence with the album Courage, it included a song called “14,” with the line, “The mighty tiger doesn’t blink.”
