‘My fear is to come across as preachy. The last thing I want to do’ – Tom Odell
With a new album out, Brit Awardwinner Tom Odell talks to to Alex Green about panic attacks, LA and embracing a different musical style
While recording his new album, Tom Odell had a realisation.
“I feel very passionate about talking about mental health,” he explains during an early morning Zoom session.
“And I feel very passionately that it is a problem every person is responsible for.
“It is everybody’s responsibility to try and help fix because it’s so often passed off as the individual’s problem.
“I don’t think it’s the individual’s problem. It’s the collective’s problem.”
Speaking from his home just off Victoria Park in east London, the singer-songwriter is recalling how his worldview has evolved since 2018, when he was rushed to hospital while on tour with a panic attack so serious he believed it to be a stroke.
“I look at the world around us,” he adds.
“Never before has life been so convenient, and so connected with the internet, and yet felt so lonely and at times so trivial.”
Odell, who turned 30 in November, has in the last four years dealt with a painful break-up, taken up transcendental meditation, recorded a new album and got engaged.
The album, titled Monsters, is a far cry from the ballads and keening love songs of his early years.
Everyone will know the omnipresent Another Love that became his breakthrough single in 2012 and helped him on the way to the Brits Critics’ Choice Award.
Instead, his fourth album is a dense, often unsettling listen that directly addresses the anxiety that has haunted him through electro sounds and, here’s the curveball, hip hop-influenced beats.
The NME famously gave Odell’s debut album Long Way Down a zero out of 10 rating.
Monsters has gained much better reviews.
“I hope you are aware I haven’t made a hip hop album,” he jests.
“I don’t think anyone in the world is in need of that right now from me…”
Odell says looking outside his established sound was not a “wake up in the middle of the night eureka moment”.
Instead, it was a gradual movement towards what he calls “contemporary music”.
“For many years I was quite stubbornly and stoically just a huge champion of 70s singer-songwriters,” he admits.
“That’s what I grew up on. “That’s what I was obsessed with since I was 15.
“I would turn my nose up at songs that I felt weren’t following those rules and I feel like a big part of this album has been embracing the now.
“That really was streaming. I really started spending a lot of time streaming music and discovering playlists.”
These influences, he explains, range from Spanish superstar Rosalia to Australian rapper The Kid LAROI and Norwegian singer-songwriter Girl in Red.
Quite the eclectic mix. One part of Odell going outside of his comfort zone on this record was his move to the US where he spent time in Nashville, the home of country music, and Los Angeles.
Both shaped him in different ways.
“It has been hugely inspiring,” he recalls. “So much of it has been learning from others.
“I travelled to Nashville, I travelled to Los Angeles, I lived there for a bit, I got in rooms with people. “I listened and listened and learned as much as I could.
“I have a lot of people to thank for this record. “Although it has my name on the front, a lot of credit is due to others.”
His time in Los Angeles found an outlet in the sarcastic track Money, a sing-song highlight that features a comic video, directed by his fiancee Georgie Somerville, in which he frolics among fast cars, helicopters and fine dining restaurants.
“The street I was living on, there were so many people who were homeless there,” he offers.
“And yet it was such an affluent street. “I felt anger at times.
“People will be like, ‘Well look at you’ and that’s the thing – I know I am a hypocrite. We are all f ****** hypocrites. “That’s what Money is about really.
“It’s just absurd, the whole thing. The world we live in is absurd.”
Odell is keen to ensure his words are taken with a pinch of salt.
“I hope people see that I’m never preaching,” he explains. “That’s super important to me. That would be my biggest fear, if I’m being honest. I feel invigorated talking about this stuff. I feel liberated to be able to do that.
“But your initial question – was there any fear?
“My fear is to come across as preachy. That’s the last thing I want to do.”
Confronting his anxiety – what he describes as a “monumental struggle” – has also helped him explore other avenues in his songwriting.
Odell felt liberated enough to write a song about school shootings in the US.
“It was trickier,” he admits. “For example on Streets of Heaven, which is a song that is later on the album – that lyric I spent so long on. We’re talking months and months with (American singer) Courtney Marie Andrews, who I wrote the lyric with.
“We studied news articles on school shootings. We tried to understand it as deeply as we could. I wanted to never cast judgment.
“It was so important to me through this album that I feel there is a responsibility as an artist, a duty as an artist to observe and to report, to observe what we see without casting judgment.
“And that gives us artistic licence to write about anything.
“But for me it could never turn into an opinion piece because then the power is lost a bit. All we can do as songwriters is shine a light on things rather than just paint a picture about how bad it is.”
Now settled back in London, life is looking good for Odell. Monsters is garnering some of the best reviews of his career and late last year he became engaged.
“I love my girlfriend to the moon and back,” he tells me.
“I’m very lucky.”