Written by Shea Roney | Photo Courtesy of Sleep Tight Tiger

“In a small town called Ypsilanti, where Iggy Pop would listen to Motown and catch flying frogs by the river, arose four friends with a magnificent dream: to make music that could rival a tiger.” 

Last month, Ypsilanti, Michigan-based band, Sleep Tight Tiger, shared their debut album with the world, seven songs under the title Plum Something. Made up of collaborators and BFFs Evan Beane, Laura Topf, Ruby Howard, and Steve Poeschel, this project initial started as an inside joke back in 2023 to play one show, under the name The Goopies, and tragically break up on stage that night. But there is no such thing as a joke without a surprise. A year after that singularly influential show, the four were back together writing tunes and playing shows.  

Plum Something provides proof of journey over destination; where snacks for the road and change in your pocket linger with the same anticipation of a simple jam session and a really solid pop song. Flowing like little doodles in a sketchbook, ideas parsing through colorful influences and shared impulses, the songs that Sleep Tight Tiger create are never deterred to lead with a bit of whimsy or a nasty bite. At their core, songs like “Skate” and “Jeannie” flow with excitement, where jangly guitars get tangled in sweet melodies like a string of twinkle lights, and songs like “Tiny Poem” curdles the blood with its lucid fever, vocal shrieks and punk-rock antiquity. Yet, as they will say themselves, this was never going to be an album. But these tracks are snug as a bug in a rug, regardless the direction they are pulled. It’s the pure joy that lives in these tunes, the same that is also embedded in their collaboration, that feels uniquely intuitive to what’s to come out of the St Tiger universe in the foreseeable future.

We recently got to chat with Sleep Tight Tiger about playing into the jokes, their style of collaboration and keeping the tiger in mind. 

You guys met at the freeform radio station that you all were a part of, and just started jamming just for fun?

Laura: Essentially, yeah. Steve and I had been in a band beforehand. So, if I remember it correctly… actually, I don’t remember it, but we were kind of like, ‘we should play, that’s fun.’

Evan: I don’t think there was a defining moment, it just occurred to us one day that we all played music, and it just made sense that we should all play music together.

Laura: The only reason why we played a show at all was because Ruby was leaving to study abroad in Japan, and we thought it would be funny if we played one show as a band and then broke up. So, yeah, one night only, and we were gonna immediately break up after. And we were thinking of how we can fight on stage. We’re really into performance.

And it was a one-off under the name The Goopies?

Ruby: Yeah, that name was based off of one of Steve and Laura’s favorite bands called The Doopies.

Laura: Which is this fake band that this composer and pop musician from Japan started. One of the people from Buffalo Daughter was one of the vocalists, so he essentially just had two voice actors playing little girls who went on a space coming-of-age journey. Steve and I love it. We were like, how can we capture that? And we just needed a name for a poster, essentially.

Starting off in this very loose headspace around what this project is and could be, how did you eventually approach the idea of writing songs and putting out a debut EP?

Ruby: I was gone for a semester, and I got back for Laura’s graduation, and she was like, ‘I’m just gonna move to Ypsilanti.’ And we’re all still here, so we started practicing in the freeform radio station and writing songs that summer of 2025. We have a very good friend, Evan Courtney, who Evan is also in a band with. He was trying to set up a recording studio in his basement, and we had all these originals that we were playing over and over. He was like, ‘I really need to practice recording some people’. And we were like, ‘well, if you record us, it would be the lowest stakes project ever – we would like the lo-fi sound and we’re not too fussy.’ It would be fun to record these originals that we had, and so he recorded us for free, basically for practice.

Laura: To me, it wasn’t on my radar. I saw it as, I guess he needs practice, so we will record. I had never had the experience of recording music and I don’t really know anyone who has either. I never thought that was a thing that you could just do. 

Steve: But I also remember that every time we would practice, we just thought it would be nice to have these recorded somewhere that isn’t on voice memos. I think we all collectively thought we got something here, we got something with this! [Screams]

Did that motivation change at all when you got into the studio? Or did it take actually finishing the recordings to feel like, oh, shit, we did that?

Laura: It felt like such a goof-around moment. We recorded all of the music in a day, and then we came back to do the vocals separately. I mean, I’ve known Evan for five years. So, it was kind of just like hanging out.

Evan: The way we set up the recording process, we didn’t really do any overdubs on the instruments. We pretty much played everything you hear on the album live. We just set it up as we would playing a concert, which I think is more of an untraditional way of recording in the modern day. So it definitely felt more comfortable, and I think allowed us to express a lot of that rawness you would see if we were playing a show or something.

Laura: A lot of my confidence as a musician comes from being with these three. If I had to record my tracks by myself, it would not be the wonderful experience that it actually was.

Steve: It sort of puts into perspective that being in a band is awesome and fun and sunshine and rainbows, but then it does sort of feel like at a certain point, you do have to treat it like a job. There was a point where we’re all kind of trying to lock in, and you’ve been there for six hours – I sort of compare it to trying to full combo a song in rock band, where everyone’s trying to get 100%, and then I’ll fuckin’ mess up on the drums, and then everyone turns around, they’re like, ‘bro, we gotta run this again. Let me full combo twist right now.’ 

With the thought of recording it all live, did you guys have any expectations of the way you wanted these songs to sound?

Ruby: We really like the lo-fi sound. There’s a lot of music coming out right now that is recorded to tape, and we really did like that sound and how thrown together it was. But Evan [Courtney] is a very talented mixing artist, and he really wanted to dial these things in. So we sent him a couple different albums for inspiration, like Tiger Trap, Tallulah Gosh, Dear Nora, those kinds of artists and sounds. But we got to basically go back into his studio and tweak the songs with him, which was very nice to be there. It could have been something that was super flash-in-the-pan, record to tape, but it wasn’t. We really dialed it in. We even got someone to master it for us, so the end product ended up being just a million times cleaner. I wouldn’t say better, but it was just so much more crispy than I was ever expecting.

Evan: Overall, I think it gave me more confidence in our music. When you’re focused on having a really lo-fi, trashy sound, but then listening to these very polished recordings and realizing, like, oh, our music sounds really good with this good recording process. It helped us realize that we could take this to the next level.

Laura: To the moon! 

Laura: I played a show, and the former music director at WCBN was talking to me, and he’s like, ‘knowing you guys and your tastes, I don’t want to mean this in any bad way, but I thought you guys were just gonna record this in your basement or something’. And I was like, we did record it in a basement, just with Evan Courtney mixing it, and then Fred Thomas mastering it. 

Ruby: And all the guys that work at the record store – we couldn’t have done any of this without the people in our community, in our spaces. We really owe it to them, and I want to continuously shout them out. We wrote these songs, but they didn’t sound like this when we were playing them in our basement.

I mean, these songs are so full of joy and excitement and love. How did your relationship to each other and your surrounding community impact what you were writing about?

Laura: I think “Skate” might be a good example of that. Ruby was away on a work assignment while we wrote that song. It was the summer I had graduated college, and it fucking sucked. I didn’t want to do anything. But Evan, Steve, and I got together in Steve’s basement, and we wrote it. The process of writing a song about something happy, and looking back on memories, and being with each other – even figuring out those awkward points of feeling insecure about what I’m writing and what I can bring to the table – those moments of getting really excited together brought back the hope and that enjoyment that I had missed in my hobbies and life. That was a turning point in that summer for me, where I was like, maybe things will just work, maybe I’ll just roll my way there.

Evan: It definitely helps in the way we write songs, because our songs are incredibly collaborative, even in the lyrics and composition of it all. Because a lot of times, we’ll sit in our living room for a couple hours and just write lyrics together.

Laura: And a lot of songs start off as jokes. The noise break in “Tiny Poem”, we had that song complete and finished, and then we showed it to Steve, and Steve was playing around with the station kit, and he was like, ‘these toms are tuned weird, bom bom bom bum’ [alternating in pitch]. 

Steve: They were tuned into D and E flat, and I was like, what if we go, like, boom, boom-bum-bum? 

Laura: And that’s the defining moment of the songs that we’ve written, is that super soft song that’s about a retired San Rio character, and then this crazy explosion. And “Jeannie” is written about the TV show I Dream of Jeannie. Evan’s riff is an interpolation of the theme song. And the theme song of I Dream of Genie is actually sampled in Doopie Time, the album by The Doopies. Pull back! It all comes back together. But no one’s got that yet.

Evan: It’s just nice because this has been the most stress-free writing environment I’ve been a part of. Usually writing stuff solo, I always have a lot of hesitancy in showing it to other people, or expressing how I feel. But because of our very close friendship with each other, it’s been a good practice to try and be really vulnerable with each other and the type of music we write.

I love finding those little hidden jokes in songs. As a band who is thinking of how to fit them in there, are you hoping people find them, or are you content with them being just for you guys?

Laura: I mean, they’re for us at the end of the day, but I do sometimes think, is someone gonna be a big I Dream of Jeannie head? We have a lot of stuff for ourselves, and I think sometimes we’ll talk to each other, and it does seem like a different language, like how people who spend too much time together sound. But we also like to bring the audience in on jokes. We like to have costumes that we wear. I come from a dance background, and Ruby did a lot of theater growing up, so having that performance background, you learn you can’t ignore the audience. We’re here to have fun, they’re here to have fun, and we all dress up for shows because we want to show that we care.

Evan: Part of the way we express art is through performance and through aesthetic, and I think that coincides very heavily with our music. It’s almost equivalent to the way we present ourselves.

Laura: I think it can seem easygoing or it comes naturally, but I think something that is super important to us is showing that we care. I don’t think Sleep Tight Tiger would be what it is if we didn’t have our hearts on our sleeve. We want this to be awesome. We want this to be fun.

Ruby: And that’s the thing that when we started playing, quote-unquote, real shows. People would be there wanting to review us, and would always write something like, ‘they brought the fun.’ When we get to have so much fun on stage, it’s kind of like letting the audience in on that space, you’re creating the space for fun and jokes and giggles. We’re all very serious about the music in a real way, but it’s not just for the bit, you know? With the bit, at some point, you lose the barrier between you and the performance.

Laura: I would not describe us as an ironic band. I used to think that people thought that we were so bad, and the only compliment they could give us was, ‘you look like you were having so much fun!’ So it’s nice to hear, ‘that was so much fun, and you guys sounded great’. Actually having that album come out and doing the recording process felt legitimizing in that way. I was like, okay, we’re not just entertainment. We have a perspective that people think is worthy.

What other costumes have you guys done?

Ruby: Laura sewed us all these amazing white gilded shirts, and we all had a different card suit on them. That’s what we wore at our album release show.

Laura: It’s hard to make costumes on a budget. We have big dreams, but typically we’ll just be like, okay, everyone, we’re wearing plaid today.

Steve: There’s usually a small little visual piece, like ascotts. Or last night we all had ties and Laura put the letters of our initials on there. But someone came up to us, and they’re like, are your ties supposed to read ‘sire’? Because Laura did a lowercase L, and they thought it was an I. It’s our names! [screams]

Laura: When we were at The Big Pop Show, people were like, did you plan to all wear neckties? And the cool response is, no, we’re just all mind-meled. But the true response is, absolutely, of course. We do plan our outfits together. We did plan to all wear neckties. Ruby tied them all on for us, because she’s so good at tying those. We’re a team and you wear a uniform when you play. And we’re all up there to put on a show.

Ruby: Capital S. Show. 

And you guys just only recently changed the name to Sleep Tight Tiger, right?

Laura: Yeah, we realized that if we were gonna put our music out, that was our one chance to change the name without it being a big ol’ hassle. 

You guys wrote somewhere describing the band as making music that could rival a tiger. How do you approach the resting beauty and danger that is a sleeping tiger?

Steve: Usually when we record, there is a live tiger in the studio, and we have to play to where they’re not gonna wake up and kill us, but to where it can influence their dreams. I have no idea, I wasn’t involved in that sentence, so I’m not one to answer this.

Evan: I feel a lot of our ethos goes between wanting to write very fun, light-hearted pop songs, but underneath that is this basis of punk and noise influences. We have similar music tastes, but I feel like we all sort of bring different things to the table. Especially in how we gather influences. I’m equally as influenced by The Pastels as I am by Wolf Eyes or The Stooges. I think it’s that dichotomy that I feel resembles a sleeping tiger, because, you know, tigers can be really cute and adorable, but you don’t want to mess with a tiger. Don’t let our sweetness fool you, because we mean business.

Ruby: Especially because people come to us kind of shocked about the range. We didn’t write these songs for an album, so we didn’t write them to be cohesive. We all have different things that we find exciting at different times, and want to pursue that. Even our covers that we’ve done range really wildly in terms of the decades or genres that they’re from. We all just really love music, which is really nice because not many people in my life outside of the people I’ve met at the radio station are music generalists like these awesome people are. They know so much and there’s so much inspiration to derive from that it would feel crazy to pigeonhole ourselves into a style. 

Laura: Like a tiger, we are hungry…for more genres. Give us more.

Ruby: But yeah, that was super comforting to me, because I’ve been in a couple other bands in my life where it was very much one genre, and not my music personally. So, being able to be like, I love this band, I love this sound, let’s write a silly song, or write a very ernest, heavy song.

I mean, “Tiny Poem” immediately comes to mind. People are often like, ‘that was so shocking’. And we do scream live when we play that, too. And so people are usually just blown away because we were just playing a jangly little tweet pop song, and now we’re on stage playing a heavy noise break, screaming at the top of our lungs.

Laura: And I think making everyone uncomfortable.

Ruby: A lot of people like it, some people don’t. But some people like it because they’re uncomfortable. 

Laura: I mean, our music education in our 20s was largely dictated by having freeform radio shows. The beauty of music listening happens when you pull two different disparate genres, songs, artists, and you find the through line, and I do think that that’s kind of how we set out to write songs.

You can listen to Plum Something out now. You can also catch Sleep Tight Tiger in a Midwest city near you this summer.