A Conversation with Tom Odell – HuffPost 9.30.13

Mike Ragogna: Hi, Tom, how are you doing?

Tom Odell: I’m good, man, how’s it going?

MR: It’s going well, thank you for asking. It’s going well for you too, isn’t it! Despite the title of your album being Long Way Down, your career’s on a real crescendo right now.

TO: Yeah, it’s nice. Pretty busy, doing touring. It’s great, man. It’s really nice that people can connect to the songs and to come and play to people every night is a real dream. It’s good.

MR: Nice, congratulations. This is a very honest album, Long Way Down. It seems like you were basically writing how you felt and you weren’t thinking of shoehorning it into anything. Can you tell me how biographical this album really is? And what is your writing process?

TO: With my writing process, I try and just write what I’m feeling. I think when I was a teenager and had just started writing, I had the ambition to write good songs and there was this moment when I wrote “Grow Old With Me,” which is the first song on the album, and I just sort of wrote what I felt rather than this analyst type writing where you analyze everything. Then afterwards, I try to go back and form it into a song. I think that just clears the way. It allows you to just lay down the most genuine feeling rather than it being sort of contrived. My writing process changes. Sometimes it’s on the piano late at night or sometimes I get revved up a bit or I’ll get an idea on the guitar and then I’ll move it to the piano. It’s always different.

MR: You’ve done your share of busking and the whole open mic thing, and those must’ve been pretty difficult years financially, et cetera, but I’m sure there was a lot of growth that happened. True? What do you think?

TO: Yeah, I think that if you were given everything on a plate straight away, there’d be no struggle, would there. You have to sort of yearn for something and want something. But I wasn’t really bothered by it and I’m still not really bothered by it, as long as I’ve got enough to eat and sleep. To me, the biggest yearning was to make an album. That was my goal. That was at the end of the road for me. I knew that’s all I wanted to do. So when I first moved to Brighton when I was seventeen or eighteen, I moved with the intention to absorb a lot of music and make an album. It took me two or three years. It’s a pretty difficult thing to break into.

MR: Your goal was to make an album, and you have been inspired by some of the best–Leonard Cohen, Elton John, Bob Dylan–and I believe I even hear some of those influences in your work. Now that you have your album, have your priorities changed? What did you feel when you listened to your album? Did you feel some sort of completion?

TO: [laughs] No. It’s funny, because you sort of get to one point and immediately, the goalposts change, you know? I learned so much from making the first record that I know the day I finished it, I just wanted to make another one. I think, particularly on a first album, I made a lot of mistakes. I listen to it now and I think, “I know what I want to do next.” That’s part of what being an artist is about; it’s about developing, and going forward and pushing yourself. You’re never going to make a record that’s just right the first time, are you. You make mistakes. I think part of being an artist is also being able to sign off and leave that there and move on to the next thing.

MR: Overall, were you able to see musical growth happening? In other words, you’re seeing the album and you move the goalpost, but can you see where you’re heading now after this project?

TO: Yeah, I do actually. It’s not black and white, it’s not solidified, but I think the direction I’m heading right now is that I put my band together just before we recorded the album, so we were still pretty fresh. But now, we’ve been touring for a year and there are a lot of songs coming together for me during sound checks. They happen with the band and there’s a feeling of these songs coming together. Right now, I’m really excited about being in the studio again in close to the next three or four months, maybe around Christmas time, to get some of these songs down. I kind of know what I want to do for the next record. The songs aren’t all written but you get those pinpoint songs… I don’t want to talk too much about this, but I feel myself going in a certain direction, which is really exciting for me.

MR: You mentioned “Grow Old With Me” earlier. Usually, that can be a more difficult topic to bridge when you’re young. Sometimes, the desire to grow old with someone is an older person’s sentiment.

TO: It’s difficult to say that when you’re old, though.

MR: [laughs] See, that also proves the point I’m about to make, which is you seem to already have a worldliness about you and your music and to your lyrics, a real depth. There’s a depth. Where did you get that depth stuff?

TO: I don’t know, I guess there’s always been a small desire in my head to make music that was inclusive. I don’t think about it that much, but when I set our recording Long Way Down, I didn’t want to exclude people. I think there’s something wonderful when music can be shared by many. At the end of the day, it’s just sound and it’s people uniting through music. That’s not saying I’m desperately trying to write things that every age can relate to, but I just didn’t purposefully write things that people couldn’t relate to. I think to me, that’s not so much about having music that’s popular, it’s just about keeping it real. There are things in everybody’s lives that I try and write about, but it’s not really a conscious decision. This is a hard topic, I don’t know if I’m saying it properly, but I’d love nothing more than in twenty years time for one of my songs to still feel relevant.

MR: Well, you seem to be relevant right now, sir, because you won BRIT’s Critic’s Choice award. Were you surprised?

TO: Yeah, I was surprised. I think the thing about that is you kind of take it with a pinch of salt. This industry is so fickle, if you listened to everything that happened, you’d have a very turbulent lifestyle. but it was a real honor to win that BRIT, definitely. A real honor.

MR: Seeing as you’re both a new artist yourself and a bit of an old soul, what advice do you have for new artists?

TO: For new artists, I don’t know if I’m massively in a position to say, but I would say that for me, the joy I get from music is the same joy I got when I was writing songs in my bedroom. I would’ve made music regardless of if I was still there now. I think it’s very important to have that. I meet artists occasionally and they ask how I made it. I think if you can just make the most genuinely satisfying music that you personally feel satisfied with and it moves you, that’s all you can do and the rest will come into place.

MR: So you’re no stranger to the States?

TO: No, I’ve spent quite a lot of time in New York and LA, we did a two-week tour back in May and we just did another two-week tour again. It’s great, man, I love it. I guess it’s quite a weird schedule at the moment because in Europe, we just started playing in much bigger venues. We played a festival the other day with twenty-thousand people and it was overwhelming, and then you come over here and you play in front of a hundred and fifty people. It’s really a wonderful thing because it keeps you on your toes, you know? It keeps you grounded and working hard and trying to get that same joy you got out of it in the first place.

MR: Do you think having been here is going to be inspiring yet another batch of material?

TO: Yeah! Last time I was in America, there were a lot of songs that came out. I’m very influenced by American culture, American music; I grew up absorbing a lot of it. I think being out here and touring is very inspiring. Very, very inspiring.

MR: Fabulous, Tom. I appreciate your time, I’ll let you get back to it.

TO: Nice to speak to you, man.

MR: By the way, I really like this album a lot. What a terrific debut.

TO: Thank you very much, that means a lot, man. Thank you very much.

MR: Take care, all the best.

TO: Cheers.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne