Given the band’s playful music, it’s fitting the name the Ghost Of A Saber Tooth Tiger comes from a playful place. Sean Lennon and Charlotte Kemp Muhl first started writing together in 2008, but they reached back further for a moniker. At age seven, Kemp Muhl collected her childhood writings in a hand-decorated book dubbed “the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger,” and Lennon loved the name immediately. Their music soon took on that sense of wonderment, with songs reflecting the more imaginative side of psychedelia. Despite forming a band to bring the songs to life, friends and family convinced the pair to release them in their original form, resulting in the bare-bones Acoustic Sessions, their 2010 debut.
Now the GOASTT (as their fans call them) returns, this time with something closer to the original vision. Midnight Sun ratchets up the intensity, fleshing out their complex songwriting with a full, dynamic band, as we found out recently when they took over Studio 1A. The group stuck around to perform an exclusive song for the audience, closing with a show-stopping cover of Syd Barrett’s “Long Gone.” They turned it into something even the former frontman of Pink Floyd would’ve dug.
