Life on the open road has been something of a theme for singer-songwriter Lucie Tiger. Equipped with an intoxicatingly upbeat disposition, it’s nearly impossible not to fall instantly for her country-infused charm. She’s used it to her advantage, living the free life of a solo artist since 2018 and taking to the road for her second USA tour and releasing two EP’s and a single in that time. 

Her story has its roots in Sydney, Australia, with the strong influence of country life coming from her years at boarding school in Armidale, 8 hours NW from her family home, and regular holidays spent horse riding in the Bathurst countryside, West of the Blue Mountains. You can all but see Lucie’s cowgirl inspired chic gracing the trail rides of the mountain region, keenly taking in the landscape and mentally storing it away for later translation into song. 

As a child Lucie began playing the piano at age six, moving enthusiastically to guitar by the time she was 10. With a keen ear for a tune and a voice that was picked early for its ‘pitch-perfectness’, Lucie fell naturally into the culture of performance. Her sound has evolved to the background influences of Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd to name but a few, with the open tuning technique of Keith Richards and Joni Mitchell playing a principal part in her playing style. 

Since her debut solo release in 2018, Lucie’s main inspiration has come from her time on the road, travelling around the United States, through the iconic Blues regions of Chicago, Nashville, Muscle Shoals, Memphis, Clarksdale, and New Orleans. Songs like ‘Greenwood’, from the aptly named 2020 EP ‘Gasoline’, were written about the Mississippi town where Robert Johnson rests his Blues soul and directly references her time spent absorbing the stories and legends of each place.  

A storyteller through and through, Lucie continues a tradition that long predates her own journey.  Her experiences on the road have equipped her with a veritable suitcase full of lyrical content. As she explains of her time in the USA “I wrote a bunch of songs while I was on tour in the US where I was inspired by all the people I met - the ex-Secret Service agent who moved to Clarksdale to open a harmonica store, the lady who ran the hotel in Muscle Shoals and the bikers with guns in the dive bar I played in Memphis who really dug my songs.” 

As Lucie’s burgeoning musical career moves into its next chapter at the end of the unusually stationary 2020, Lucie’s ambitions to resume life on the road are heralded with the release of a new single ‘The Wind Cries Mary’. Covering the much loved Jimi Hendrix song, Lucie sights the release as a “slight divergence from my usual output -  it’s kind of a Christmas present per se for my mum as it’s her favourite Jimi Hendrix song!” 

The song is aptly released on November 27, which is Hendrix’s birthday, and was recorded at Ocean Way Studios in Nashville. It follows on from some impressive time at FAME studios in Alabama, recording 2020’s ‘Gasoline’. The EP features some of the Blues industries best, including Bob Wray (Highwaymen and Ray Charles), Will McFarlane (Bonnie Raitt), drummer Justin Holder and producer and engineer John Gifford III and Don Srygley, both of whom were GRAMMY-nominated for Gregg Allman’s final album ‘Southern Blood’.

Biding her time until life on the road resumes, Lucie has much to enjoy from her latest release. She’s not short on inspiration and is currently playing gigs in Sydney, waiting for international borders to reopen. Her hunger for life on the road is something that is sure to fuel her music now and in the future. As she deliciously quips about her ongoing inspiration for songwriting “Every small town I’ve visited has a different flavour, and I just want to try them all! Like being in an ice cream store and getting a sample of every flavour.”

 It seems appropriate then for Lucie to cover ‘The Wind’. It is after all, the very essence of where she seems to belong.