Daniel Tompkins
The Tesseract singer discusses his very first solo album, Castles.
TesseracT is always going to be the number one thing, everything revolves around TesseracT. But I’ve already started working on my second and third solo albums.
Putting a record out under your own name is a statement. There comes a lot of responsibility with that and I didn’t feel like I had enough pull or stature within the music industry.”
Four years ago, Daniel Tompkins wrote and recorded his debut solo album, Castles, and then put it on ice. In part, the decision was a practical one. At the time, the vocalist had only recently rejoined prog pioneers TesseracT, after quitting in 2011. The band had released their third album, Polaris, and headed off on a world tour. Logistically, it meant Tompkins’ solo material had to be left on the back burner, but his reluctance to release Castles also came from a personal place.
“Four years ago, I was still growing as an artist,” he admits. “I didn’t have a big reputation or a following. I procrastinated for a very long time, uncertain whether it was even the right decision to put a record out under my own name.”
Now Castles is about to make its way into the world and much has changed in the four years it’s been sat on a shelf, not least Tompkins himself. During our long conversation, the word ‘confidence’ pops up on several occasions. Certainly there’s no sign of that crippling self-doubt that plagued him back in 2015, a shift he puts down to experience and relentless work both with TesseracT and his many side projects, most notably his experimental pop outfit White Moth
Black Butterfly and synth wave band Zeta. Last year Kscope, TesseracT’s label since 2014, signed Tompkins, throwing their financial support behind Castles.
“I never thought I’d be in a position where I would have the backing of a label to even consider putting this record out,” he says. “I was just going to put it out on Bandcamp and selfdistribute it but as soon as I realised I had the input of the label, I had money and an actual advance to put into the record. As soon as I spoke to Kscope and had the green light to go with this, my whole mindset changed. I rehashed everything. I’ve revisited pretty much the whole album and added parts, just to give it a new breath of life, because if you listen to the same thing for four years you start to question it.”
At the time of this interview, Tompkins’ official website displays a bulging discography of 15 albums, yet prior to the writing sessions for Castles he was in a creative desert.
“I had released something stupid like 10 albums in six or seven years and I just felt drained,” he says today.
“I had no inspiration. I’d sung and written about everything I wanted to and drawn on all the emotive stuff. I was numb.” His inspiration came in the form of US producer Eddie
Head, the rhythm and lead guitarist in metal band Haji’s Kitchen, with whom Tompkins had worked a few years before. The pair began jamming out ideas over Skype and online,
Head in the US and Tompkins in his home studio in Nottingham, eventually writing the eight songs that made up the main body of Castles. Tompkins is no stranger to making music remotely – that’s the way TesseracT have recorded all of their albums, but working with Head, he found something different in the familiar.
“In the past I’ve always been given music to write to, with Eddie we worked the opposite way,” he explains. “We created the vocal and then added the music and sound palette around it, with TesseracT it’s always been the opposite way. I asked Acle [Kahney, TesseracT lead guitarist and producer, who also mastered Castles] to do a remix of one of the tracks. I gave him just a vocal and said, ‘Try writing music around this and see what happens’ and he came up with the remix of [first single] Saved. Hopefully that might inspire a new writing direction for TesseracT!”
Kahney was just one of the individuals who was asked to provide a remix for the final version of Castles. “I was going to put out the eight tracks, but then when I signed to Kscope there was a conversation about having more songs,” says Tompkins. “But
because the album was so old
I didn’t feel like me writing extra songs would work. That’s where the idea came from to invite friends to remix some tracks.” To flesh out the album’s track list, Tompkins roped in several of his peers to produce remixes of the original tracks he’d recorded with Head, including Zeta’s Paul Ortiz, producer Dmitry Stepanov and White Moth Black Butterfly’s Randy Slaugh, the man also responsible for adding sublime orchestration to work by TesseracT, Periphery and Devin Townsend.
The result is a record that explores many tangents and myriad visions while pushing past the boundaries of progressive rock. TesseracT fans might pine for the synapse-frying poly-riffs of Tompkins’ day job, but Castles is held together by a dark, electronic backbone where choppy glitches and warped bass hiss and bubble, recalling work by Björk, Massive Attack, Nine Inch Nails and even dubstep. Naturally up front and centre, Tompkins’ silky voice is the star of the show, an almost angelic anchor amongst the digital soundscapes. “I know it’s not what my core audience necessarily want to listen to,” he admits. “They want to hear heavy music, but this is what I want to do. I love pop music and pop vocals; really well-produced contemporary vocals, and I feel confident in my own voice now. I’m happy to put it on a pedestal, let people listen to all the nuances and the detail.”
Castles’ dislocated textures and sparse pianos provides a fitting backdrop to examine the natural turbulence of human interaction, tapping into some of Tompkins’ own experiences. “I’ve always been in a very stable relationship,” he says.
“But being an ex-police officer and a high-risk domestic violence specialist, I also dealt with the serious end of failing relationships. I wanted to take a step back and tap into someone else’s troubles as opposed to my own thorns.” Tompkins joined the police force aged just 18, but quit to join TesseracT full time in 2009.
The impact on his salary was immediate and severe, and throughout his career Tompkins has spoken candidly about the realities and strains that leaving the force to go full time in the music industry has brought upon his personal relationships, eventually leading him to leave TesseracT in 2011.
“I’ve been through some really difficult times with [my wife],” he admits. “I’m 36 and we’ve been together for 20 years. We’ve been on the verge of separating but we’ve built a life together and grown stronger through all those struggles. The pulsating synths on Castles represent the passion in relationships. ‘Dark’, ‘electronic’, ‘deep’ and ‘passionate’ were the key words we drew on, the symbolism of finding victorious love. It is possible to find because I’ve found it myself. It pains me that people are so flippant about love these days. There are so many people who change their relationships like they’re upgrading their phone.”
What’s overwhelmingly apparent is that Castles has brought Tompkins an autonomy and independence he’s never experienced before, even with his own side projects. “The first
White Moth Black Butterfly album
[in 2013] was intended to be my solo project. But I started to include other songwriters and other producers and it grew into something much bigger,” he says. “I lost creative control. I’ve never seen a project from start to finish where I’ve had full control over the sound vocal production, the image… [Castles] is all about the visual, all about how creative I can be, and
I’ve treated it as an opportunity to redesign myself.”
The most telling sign of this artistic rebirth can be seen in the exotic press shots that accompany the album, which show Tompkins resplendent in fierce feathers, spiked jewellery and black makeup. “I know it looks a little Zoolander but I really enjoyed that process, it was so liberating,” he says. “I met with a stylist and photographer and I just said, ‘I want you to treat me as an open book.’ Putting yourself out there wearing a feathered headdress brings with it a lot of prejudice. I had so many mixed comments about those visuals but it was a real talking point, so exciting and it’s inspired me.”
To accompany the album, Tompkins also shot a couple of music videos for singles Saved and Limitless, in several locations across Wisconsin, Milwaukee, accompanied by a full film crew, his first time making a video alone. The short for Limitless feels especially bold, the kind of video a proper pop artist would make, with a full narrative that required him to push himself out of his comfort zone.
“Acting’s not my forte but when I filmed that video I had to go to some deep emotional place,” he laughs.
“The whole album explores the arc of relationships but Limitless explores the theme of loneliness and desperation. I’ve been together with my wife for 20 years, I’ve built a family and a home and I tried to put myself in the shoes of people who must feel absolutely devastated [when a relationship ends]. I think I’ve grown just by doing that one video. I didn’t know if I could do it, it was a risk. But I think I pulled it off. There’s a moment in a church scene where the tears you can see are real,
I’m actually crying. I was looking up at the cross and feeling this immense sense of vulnerability.”
Given where Tompkins was four years ago, both professionally and personally, it’s great to see him not only looking forward to the future but relishing the challenges to come. “TesseracT is always going to be the number one thing, everything revolves around TesseracT,” he assures us. “But I’ve already started working on my second and third [solo] albums and I’m thinking of working with a producer in the same room from start to finish. That will be another first for me; I’ve always shied away from working with producers. When you come from grassroots rock and metal I think there’s an expectation for you to write and produce your own music, but you can create some awesome work you’d have never created by yourself.”
As we come to the end of our conversation, it seems to dawn on Tompkins just how far he’s come and how much he’s changed since he first wrote the songs on Castles. “Over the years being an artist has grown me as a person,” he muses. “I’m so confident now because I’m a performer, because of music, because I’m a singer. That’s where I found my confidence – through music.”
I never thought I’d be in a position where I would have the backing of a label to even consider putting this record out. I was just going to put it out on Bandcamp and self-distribute it.