American dreaming

T
om McShane has long been one of our more thoughtful and literate musicians. So, when presented with an age-old problem, it’s no surprise to find he comes at from a unique perspective.

A songwriter since he was 12 last year, McShane was confronted with a series of lifeless recordings that, for the first time, led him to seriously question his vocation. If he was bored by his music, who would anyone else be interested.
But while most of his peers would go knock-kneed when finding themselves similarly stranded Tom, armed with his passport, guitar and a burgeoning love for Charles Mingus, used it instead as an opportunity to launch off into the unknown.
"I put out the ‘Fighter’ 7 inch with Escape Act and went straight in to record another record,” he explains over a pot of tea, "but I really didn’t enjoy it – it felt very stale and cold and all wrong. When I listened back to the results, it made me very sad. It was entirely my own fault – I wasn’t there. So, I started to think of ways in which I could re-engage and one was to take myself off to London, with no band, and play a few open-mic shows. And it was great.”
Emboldened by the experience, when the chance arose to repeat it on a larger scale, Tom took eager advantage.
"Shaun from Oppenheimer was getting married in New York and South by Southwest was taking place at the time, so I thought I’d head from Austin to New York,” he reveals. "Take my guitar on the Greyhound and just see where I’d end up. There was very little planning. I left myself open to chance.”
While Tom used the visit to play ad-hoc solo shows in Memphis, Nashville, Chicago and New York, he also speaks of the trip as a kind of restorative pilgrimage: stopping off at Sun Studios and RCA Victor Studio B in Nashville, where he found his imagination re-lit.
"I was coming off the back of a really destructive experience and cheesy as it may sound, it was just what I needed. When I got home I decided not to worry any more about all the extraneous stuff – I realised that I actually enjoyed playing songs to a room full of people. That’s where the joy rested. And I wanted to somehow transfer that to the studio.”
Taking Charles Mingus’ Town Hall Concert as an inspiration, Tom has come up with a novel idea to bring some air and light and magic into the studio. On July 3 at the Oh Yeah Centre, he plans to record his next album in front of a live audience. This isn’t a ‘Live Album’, please note (– "it isn’t a gig”, he’s quick to point out). Tom intends the day to be a rather more novel, interactive and loosely imagined affair.
"In pop there’s a tradition where you go into a studio, work until you have a product that’s been polished into acceptability, then take that as the definitive article, and tour it, trying to replicate it as close as you can every night. I want to try it another way. I think the performance should be the definitive article – the spirit that is created between the musicians and the audience on a good night.”
Perhaps because there is no established etiquette for this kind of event, it’s bound to sound vague. Tom, though, is in no rush to clear things up.
"I’ve been to a few BBC recording sessions and we’ll probably use that as a model. We’ll have an MC there keeping people informed, but apart from that we want it to be completely free and open. I don’t know how it’s going to pan out – whether the reaction will be positive or negative. I’m excited by that, not scared. I want to embrace the freedom rather than run away scared from it.”
"I’m not saying I’ll never use overdub again,” he continues, "but if I like how it turns out, it’s conceivable that it’s how I’ll always work. But the whole point of the exercise is that I don’t want to be constrained by any rigid approach. I’m trying to keep my options open.”