The Tom-Tom Club

“I wanted to see if moving somewhere with 365 days of sunshine would infect the music with a slightly happier feel, which obviously it didn’t, but it was worth a try.”

Tom McRae is reflecting wryly on the reasons behind going to Los Angeles to record his third album, All Maps Welcome.
The string-soaked, melancholic melodies aren’t a radical departure from his previous two efforts, but McRae stresses that this is his most personal record so far: “It’s the first time I’d ever consciously or unconsciously written about love.”
Some of the songs, like ‘Packing For The Crash’ or ‘My Vampire Heart’, are particularly heart-rending. I wondered if McRae only writes songs when he’s feeling down or is he just miserable all the time?
“I’m pretty much a miserable sod all the time,” he laughs. “For me, the sadder things are just easier to write about. When I’m happy, I’m having a great time so why would I stop being happy and pick up a guitar? The things I choose to write about are the things that make me ache because that’s the part of me I like to express in my music. Either fortunately or unfortunately, I seem to have an endless supply of things that hurt right now.”
All Maps Welcome was recorded in part of the Paramour Estate, an old mansion in the LA hills, which is rumoured to be haunted by one of its previous owners, the wife of a silent movie star from Hollywood’s golden age. There were a number of strange goings-on in the studio, while McRae and his band were recording: “All of us would be in the control room, with no-one downstairs in the studio, and suddenly you’d hear the piano playing a couple of chords. At one point, my producer saw me walk into the control room and sit down. He started talking to me but when he turned back, I was gone. Then he realised that I’d been down in the studio all the time.”
Spiritual shenanigans aside, McRae was quite happy to record outside the usual studio environment: “I didn’t want to feel like we were making music in a dentist’s waiting room, which is what most studios are like.”
He assembled a motley crew of musicians, including some members of Beck’s band, which came about after Tom had bumped into Beck’s old drummer Joey Wannemaker on the street in LA.
Wannamaker wasn’t the only ‘celebrity’ spotted by the affable English singer during his time in the City of Angels: “But my biggest celebrity spot didn’t impress anyone else: I saw Tim Allen once. Everyone knows him from bad sitcoms but forgets that he was the voice of Buzz Lightyear, so I was happy about that.”
McRae has just moved from LA to New York, but he won’t get to spend much time in his new home, as he’s about to set off on tour for most of the next 12 months. I wondered if he’s ever bothered after gigs by scary fans looking for advice on their love lives, considering how much his songs seem to connect with people?
“I do get the odd bunch of girls dressed in black clutching poetry books,” he chuckles. “I get strange things which are sometimes upsetting and sometimes really cool. For instance, people who are ill or who have been ill, who have lost relatives or loved ones and have used my music in some way as a consolation in their lives.
“For me, personally, that’s incredibly heavy when they tell me their stories: it just makes me want to cry. But why would you make music if you didn’t hope that people would take it and use it in their lives? I just wish sometimes they wouldn’t write to me about it.”
If this album were to strike a collective chord and Tom McRae was to go from cult hero to mainstream success, would he be ready for both the adulation and the intrusion?
“So we’re living in the world of fantasy,” he laughs. “I’ve got to be honest: I want to find a big audience. I haven’t yet and I’ve tried to make sure that the most important thing is how I feel about my music. I haven’t wanted to compromise that in order to find a bigger audience. But I’d love to be playing my quiet little songs in front of thousands of people in huge arenas, so I’m not going to complain if it happens, but I think it’s probably a little way off yet.”

All Maps Welcome is out now on Sony/BMG