Bad Tiger songwriter Yasi Lowy offers quiet steadiness in “Do It Right,” a gentle folk meditation from the band’s third album ‘Bean Hollow’ that lets grief breathe while reminding us how to keep going with softness and resolve.

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Stream: “Do It Right” – Bad Tiger

There’s a moment grief doesn’t warn you about: When life starts moving again, and you’re still stunned it has the audacity to.

Bills still come. Morning still happens. Your body still asks for sleep. And somewhere inside all that forward motion, you’re trying to learn how to be a person again – how to carry what happened without letting it swallow you whole. That’s the quiet emotional terrain Bad Tiger inhabits on “Do It Right,” a gentle, grounding folk meditation that feels less like a statement and more like a companion, something to walk beside you while life keeps unfolding at its own imperfect pace.

Unbelievable –
What it felt like when it worked,
Indecipherable
Can’t make sense of it
or do it again with some guy.
Can’t even make myself try.

Taken from Bean Hollow, the 2025 album by Portland-based band Bad Tiger, “Do It Right” exists in the liminal space between grief and grace – a place where you’re still sorting through loss, still learning how to live with it, but beginning to feel moments of light again. It’s not about fixing anything; it’s about continuing – about showing up gently, about learning how to keep going without hardening yourself in the process. The song sits near the heart of an album shaped by nonlinearity – emotionally, structurally, spiritually.

Led by singer/songwriter Yasi Lowy, Bad Tiger has forever resisted straight lines and tidy arcs.

“[It] has evolved as a project over the past six years, but none of that growth is linear,” Lowy tells Atwood Magazine. Bean Hollow, she says, is simply “the latest point in that spiral.” That refusal of linearity is key. Bean Hollow was born from a period of tremendous grief, yet emerged as a deeply joyful record to make – written quickly, recorded largely in solitude, and shaped by instinct rather than expectation. Lowy spent a week alone at Panoramic House in Stinson Beach, waking at dawn, tracking most of the instrumentation herself, moving at her own pace, unmonitored. “That made a huge difference for me,” she reflects. “It was incredibly empowering and meaningful.”

Getting older, though.
Getting old enough to know
Things just go, sometimes
Meaning sewn on the other side,
I shouldn’t have lost you, I lost you.

You can hear that freedom in “Do It Right.” Built around a nylon-string guitar played in an alternate tuning, the song moves with a soft, hypnotic pulse – plucky, circular, quietly radiant. There’s a calm confidence in its repetition, an ease that settles into your chest rather than asking for attention. Lowy cites Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again” and Big Thief’s “Cattails” as touchstones – songs where steady motion carries complex emotional undercurrents without collapsing under their weight.

Lyrically, “Do It Right” balances tenderness with perspective, allowing big feelings to surface without overwhelming the listener. “I’m always trying to blend the big feelings with some perspective and with some humor,” Lowy shares, “and trying not to overdo any of it or be too dramatic. Always trying to pull back, find a bit more grace and understatement for some of the intense emotions underneath.” The result is a song that feels both vulnerable and grounded – emotionally open, but never indulgent.

Lines like “Should at least enjoy the ride / Do it right, but don’t worry ’bout doin’ it right” land with warm wisdom, not as instruction but as reassurance. The song doesn’t pretend life will resolve neatly. Instead, it acknowledges the impossibility of doing everything “correctly” while still urging care – for yourself, for others, for the moments that pass whether you’re ready or not.

It’s time to quit this job,
It’s time to get my head on straight
It’s time to pay my bills.
Always do, I’m never late,
I’m never late I’m never late
I’m never late I’m never late
I’m never late.

That refrain lands like both reassurance and accusation. Grief doesn’t cancel responsibility; it coexists beneath it. You still show up, you still pay rent, and you still answer emails. The world keeps asking for you, even when you’re not sure how to hand yourself over. In “Do It Right,” perseverance isn’t triumphant – it’s soft, steady, and almost stubborn in its ordinariness.

Within the larger arc of Bean Hollow, “Do It Right” functions as a sort of respite. Lowy describes it as a golden twin to the album’s next and tenth track, “Lamb” – written in close proximity, representing the push-pull of grief’s nonlinear rhythm. The album moves like weather: Storm, sunlight, storm again. Meaning found, meaning lost, meaning reassembled. “Do It Right” offers a moment of steadiness inside that churn – not resolution, but rest.

That sense of rest is part of what makes the song so magnetic. It doesn’t rush you toward insight. It lets you sit. It hums beside you. The circular guitar line turns and returns, the lyric gently correcting itself – “Do it right, but don’t worry ’bout doin’ it right” – until it begins to feel less like advice and more like breath. Over time, it becomes a mantra – not because it insists on being one, but because repetition, in moments like these, is how we steady ourselves.

Bad Tiger’s work has always leaned toward intimacy, but Bean Hollow feels especially unguarded. Less polished than 2024’s Bliss, the album foregrounds lyrics, texture, and atmosphere – birds in the trees, ocean churn in the distance, the sound of someone trying to “feel their way through impossible things.” It’s folk music at its most human: rooted in tradition, but unconcerned with propriety or genre boundaries.

Should make it out alive,
Just to die on the other side.
Should at least enjoy the ride,
Do it right, but don’t worry bout doin it right,
Keep your chin up, and your tread light.
You gotta sleep at night, rest up and live
to miss your baby with all your might.

Ultimately, “Do It Right” doesn’t ask listeners to take away a specific message.

Lowy is clear about that. “I love the part where music goes out and makes its own meaning for people without my input,” she says. What she hopes, instead, is simply that the song finds someone when they need it – that they sit with it, return to it, let it walk alongside them for a while.

And that’s exactly what “Do It Right” does. It doesn’t promise clarity. It doesn’t solve grief. It doesn’t rush healing. It offers something quieter and, somehow, more lasting: Companionship. A steady rhythm. A reminder that you don’t have to do life perfectly to keep moving forward – you just have to keep going, gently, honestly, and with your chin up.

Sometimes, that’s more than enough.

Yasi Lowy recently sat down with Atwood Magazine to talk about the nonlinear grief behind Bean Hollow, the freedom of recording alone, and why “Do It Right” feels like “a brief break in the clouds.” Read our conversation below, and spend 31 uninterrupted minutes with Bean Hollow wherever you stream music!

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:: stream/purchase Bean Hollow here ::

:: connect with Bad Tiger here ::

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Stream: “Do It Right” – Bad Tiger

A CONVERSATION WITH BAD TIGER

Yasi Lowy (Bad Tiger): Just that we’re out here trying to make the best and most honest music we can! Bad Tiger has evolved as a project over the past 6 years but none of that growth is linear – Bean Hollow is the latest point in that spiral. If folks like a more polished studio sound, they might prefer our previous record, Bliss. These are all just time capsules of the best music I could have possibly made at the time I made it; what’s possible is always changing.

Yasi Lowy: Yes, third record! I try not to let my personal stories get in the way of the listener’s interpretations, but I’ll just say that this record was borne out of some pretty tremendous grief, but ended up being an incredibly joyous album to produce. I started writing it in the Spring of 2023 and finished writing it about a year later, Spring of 2024, so it came very quickly. I then worked super closely with Jacob Sherfield on drums to envision the greater arrangements of the songs, and then went to Panoramic House in Stinson Beach to work with John Baccigaluppi who engineered and mixed the record. John basically set up all the equipment and left me alone in the studio for a week that Spring, and I was just manic, euphoric in this gorgeous recording studio all alone, waking up at dawn and laying down almost all the instrumentation for the tracks in a week.

Later on we added in drums, saxophone, clarinet, bass and cello, and in the Fall, John and I mixed the record together. So, unlike previous records where I was working with a producer in the studio, and often had the band in the room with me, for this record I was really in charge of the process: Able to feel into it, set my own pace, and record vocals without being monitored. That made a huge difference for me, and it was also awesome to be able to learn more about mixing through this process with John. He was super patient with me, and included me in all decision-making, which was incredibly empowering and meaningful for me.

Yasi Lowy: We talked about this a lot when we were tracking, but Bean Hollow is a strange record! It goes a lot of different places genre-wise, and almost none of the songs have any sort of conventional structure, like a chorus. Bliss felt much more locked into the indie genre, whereas Bean Hollow feels less inhibited by any sort of sense of propriety or fitting in. I was also really influenced by folk-style guitar during this period, and began messing heavily with alternate tunings (only two of the songs on the record are in standard tuning), and made a point to play the guitar track of every song on the nylon-stringed classical guitar I’d written the songs on. So Bean Hollow is also a move towards the acoustic, strings and sticks and bows, though I ended up throwing some weird synth and pitch-shifted vocals in there too.

I also think every Bad Tiger record so far has been more lyrically driven than the ones before it, and this record is really, really driven by lyrics. The recording and mixing strategies of the record were able to highlight and enunciate the lyrics more than previous Bad Tiger records, which I think made sense for the songs, and ended up making the record feel really raw and intimate. It’s not as polished or sparkly as Bliss, but I think it captures the energy I was hoping to catch of just being out there at Panoramic, birds in the trees, ocean churning in the background, trying to feel my way through impossible things.

Yasi Lowy: I’m so, so happy to hear that!! This song felt like a real growth point for me in my lyricism – I’m always trying to blend the big feelings with some perspective and with some humor, and trying not to overdo any of it or be too dramatic. Always trying to pull back, find a bit more grace and understatement for some of the intense emotions underneath. This song came to me really quickly and pretty fully-formed in terms of arrangement, and I was so excited about it, it felt very relieving to have for the record, a bit sunnier than some of the other songs. It sort of reminded me of Fleetwood Mac “Never Going Back Again” or Big Thief’s “Cattails”; just that nice plucky, bouncy guitar consistency – an energy carrying throughout a much more nuanced emotional experience, a steady pulse carrying forward.

Yasi Lowy: I think of “Do it Right” sort of as the Abel to “Lamb”’s Cain if that makes sense? The sort of golden twin of the two songs which I wrote sort of back to back. They’re part of that tension in the B-side – the shock and horror of the A section fades and you’re sort of left with life plowing on, trying to make sense of it, and then this anger or resentment or grief that swells up, returns. That sort of push-pull, back and forth nonlinear process. There is something to Bean Hollow that really holds, for me, the non-linearity of a grief process, a storm, a moment of sun, a storm again, meaning made and then lost and swirled up and pushed forward. “Do it Right” is like a brief break in the clouds.

Yasi Lowy: Oh man, well I hope listeners take something away from the song or the record! I’m not sure what – I love the part where music goes out and makes its own meaning for people without my input, so I would love if that happened for some people with this record! I will say that it is a record in the sense that it was designed to be listened to as a whole, so if listeners have 31 minutes to listen top to bottom, that is the dream.

In terms of creating and releasing – I am so glad for these songs and the opportunity to record them, and I am so, so ready to put them down. These songs belong to the world now, finally, and I am looking ahead.

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:: stream/purchase Bean Hollow here ::

:: connect with Bad Tiger here ::

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Stream: “Do It Right” – Bad Tiger

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