Confessional: Tom Odell on streaming, suffering, Another Love, orchestra gigs
Confessional Q+A with the British singer-songwriter, whose debut single has become one of the most-streamed Spotify songs of all time, with more than 2.8 billion plays.
Tom Odell, 34, is a British singer-songwriter whose debut single Another Love has become one of the most-streamed Spotify songs of all time, with more than 2.78 billion plays.
My love for live performance began… in New Zealand, where I lived for nearly a year; it’s where I first went to school. I remember seeing a band playing outside a pub, and from that moment I’ve been transfixed by it. Maybe unlike songwriting – where it’s a more ambiguous path, and often people write their best songs when they have the least amount of knowledge, at the beginning of their career – with playing live, I think you do actually get better with more gigs, and more experience.
The beauty of playing live… is that you can never predict how the audience is going to be on any given day, at any given time. I love to embrace that looser side of it; I’ve never played to click tracks. It’s always been about a live band, that’s the fun of it to me: the fact it could all go wrong and fall apart.
When it comes to performing with an orchestra, as I’ll do at the Sydney Opera House next month… I’ve done a bit of it over the years, but never on this scale, and not in such as iconic venue. We’ve spent the past three or four weeks working on the scores in my studio here in London. We’ve been working on the arrangements, and they’re sounding really good. I’m excited to meet [the orchestra], and to play with them; it’s slightly new for me.
As a songwriter, my view on music streaming services… is that it’s complicated. I feel as if I were to give a truly honest answer … (pauses, laughs) I might be running the risk of biting the hand that feeds me. On a slightly more zoomed-out perspective, I think streaming has done an extraordinary amount of good for the quality of music. Every so often you read a report that the music industry has grown; when I got into it 12 years ago, it wasn’t like that. They were down in the doldrums, the guys in the music business – and they’re not anymore. So I just hope that they’re able to divert some of that money back to the creator – to the songwriters and to the artists – in a slightly fairer way than I think perhaps it is right now.
The fact that my 2012 single Another Love has had 2.8 billion Spotify streams… at the end of the day, it is just a number. It has changed my life, of course; curiously, more latterly than it did formerly. It has exceeded my wildest dreams of what any song of mine could ever achieve. And even despite my best efforts, I can’t expect to have another one of that size. And nor do I really aspire to, to be honest with you. It was just right place, right time, right song, you know?
Writing that song… was a very lonely pursuit. I was pretty young, like 19 or 20, when I came up with it. It seems funny to me now, when I look back and think about that, and think about where the song is. But I don’t really sit around and think about it that much. It’s a bit on the nose to even talk about it. I’m walking down the street right now, back the studio, and I think, ‘God, can you imagine if someone passed me and they just heard me talking about Another Love?’ They’d think, ‘That guy’s obsessed with that song!’
As for whether hardship is necessary to create great art… there’s this cliche where we like to fetishise artists. It adds to the narrative when we can take an artist whose work is good – and if they happen to go through a relationship break-up, or an addiction or a death, even – it adds to the work when you watch or listen to it. It adds a layer of empathy, or sympathy. I’m always wary of avoiding the cliche of it being a necessity for good art, because I think it feels a little two-dimensional. Really bad suffering – for example, debilitating depression – is totally counter-productive to the work. I don’t think anything ever gets done with that, or crippling anxiety, or various other mental ailments, which I’ve experienced small bites of over the years. Sometimes there’s actually no relief in art. At times, art provides no relief because it’s just hellish, and you don’t want to do anything.
Art isn’t always the solution… but sometimes it is. Sometimes, it’s the perfect medicine. Listening to a great piece, or reading a great book, or a great paragraph of a book, just at a time when you really need that reaching out of a hand that makes you feel a little bit less lonely – I think that is when art is so beautiful. When I wrote (2023 single) Black Friday, that’s what it was for me: it was cathartic, and a moment of feeling in a time of maybe otherwise not feeling what I wanted to feel.
When I arrive in a new city on tour… I always, always go for a run in wherever we are. It’s such a beautiful way of discovering a city, to go for a run – just to see parts of it you might not see if you were to take a walk. When I was in my early 20s, I would discover the city by hopping around bars and drinking my way through the city. But now I’m a little more… what am I? More well-behaved? (laughs)
My favourite kind of fan interaction… is when there are no photos involved, but a lovely conversation. One of the most wonderful and greatest privileges of my job is that, as the years have passed of doing it, I’ve actually got to witness fans growing up. I’ve watched their journey of seeing them every year, or every six months, or every few years – and asking them what’s going on. They’re going to university, they get their first job – then three years later, they turn up with their partner. It is such a thrill. It genuinely is like seeing an old friend and saying hello, and catching up. It brings me so much joy. There was a guy who came to over 100 shows, and we got him up on stage on his 100th show. It’s really a wonderful part of the job, and it’s something I really cherish.
Tom Odell will perform two concerts with The Metropolitan Orchestra at Sydney Opera House on January 4 and 5, 2025.
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