The first quarter of 2008 ends tomorrow and The Lady Tigra’s Please Mr. BoomBox tops my list of favorite releases. In the late ‘80s, Tigra was half of L’Trimm, the Miami-based girl duo that took bass music out of the streets and straight to the top of the charts with their pop-rap hit “Cars That Go Boom.” After the group was shanghaied by its producers, Tigra (aka Rachel de Rougemont) and partner-in-rhyme Bunny split and L’Trimm eventually faded away. Tigra moved back to New York City and got a job as a manager at trendy nightspot Plaid (which became Spa), and kept her head up. “I made a natural transition from making music and being around naturally creative people to working behind the scenes in nightclubs,” Tigra says. “As a manager I got to work with DJs and bands, and I got to always hear new music and watch bands develop. I was close to music, which has always been my first love, and I had no idea that I would return to music as a front person.”

It was only after moving back to Miami three years ago to help a friend’s clothing line take off did she begin to think about making tunes again. “It wasn’t planned,” she says. “After working in clubs, I went to work in fashion. My friend had started a high-end athletic wear clothing line in Miami, and I handled in-house marketing and promotions. When I was living there, sometimes I’d wind up hanging with my homies and end up making songs. I went from music to fashion and back to music.”

Those early days planted the seeds for Please Mr. Boombox, which she started working on with her friend Jacob “Berko” Bercovici while visiting him in LA. While staying at his house, the two started to make beats and craft songs “just to have fun and bug out.” Eventually, he decided to start a label, and because they had worked on a bunch of songs already that received the stamp of approval from their friends and family, they decided to release an EP, which led to the album, which includes a hot cameo from MC Lyte on “They Stole My Radio.”

While Tigra is focused on her future, which aside from DJing also includes writing jingles for the likes of Pinkberry, she doesn’t hold any obvious baggage from her past. Now 37, she gets a kick out of hearing the lyrics she wrote when she was 18. “Sometimes I’ll go back and listen to a B-side, and I will start cracking up because we were so young and it’s so obvious from our lyrics. The stuff we came up with was so creative that I’m sometimes even impressed.”

As Tigra sets her sights on , and —the area she jokingly calls her Golden Triangle—she’s counting her blessings that she didn’t end up as a casualty. She’s fallen in with a good crowd of cool friends (’s Mr. Hahn remixed “Bass on the Bottom”) with cool jobs, and she’s confident that happiness will continue to follow her. “I’m lucky that I am on an independent label that’s run by my friends, and I have a lot of creative leeway. We share the same style and go to the same parties. It’s cool that I get to work with homies. Yeah, I’m definitely in a good place. I guess I got lucky."