Tom Walker: "I often find that writing songs is the best way to get your feelings, and how you add things up, on the page"

Tom Walker has leapt from strength to strength across his platinum-selling career. His chart-topping debut album What A Time To Be Alive, coupled with the widespread success of such singles as ‘Leave a Light On’ and ‘Just You and I’, saw the Scottish singer-songwriter become the biggest selling UK signed artist of 2019. Now, Walker arrives at the ‘second album’ crossroads that can inform an artist's trajectory and their staying power. But his sophomore follow-up is less concerned with this trend, even if it succeeds in it. At its core, I Am a personal triumph, having toiled through years of grief and heartache, coupled with the joy of falling in love and the growth that comes with it.

Fresh from a busy summer of festivals and endless gigs, Tom Walker shows no signs of slowing down with his newest album I Am. For the rest of the year, he’ll join The Script on their UK and EU tour across dozens of cities, which includes three shows at Dublin’s 3Arena from the 14th to the 16th November. Such a schedule would beget an looming sense of burn-out in the best of us, but Walker is unperturbed. In fact, he’s incredibly excited to reunite with The Script having opened for them on a US tour in 2017.

“The Script are one of my favourite bands that I've ever had the pleasure of touring with,” he tells me. “They’re really lovely, and they’ve treated us with a lot of respect. In my time, there have been a few bands that have not been so nice to us, but The Script were just lovely. They’d constantly check in on us to see if we needed anything and we went out for a couple of nights out with them, which was loads of fun. That tour was just amazing.

“It was actually my first time touring America and we couldn't really afford a truck, bus or anything! So the lads took all of our musical equipment with them, which saved us a load of money and allowed us to do the tour. They went above and beyond for us. And in the meantime, we drove across America in a Chevy Suburban, and the drummer and the tour manager were all taking turns driving.”

The record encapsulates the power of Walker’s songwriting. While previous releases saw the Scottish singer-songwriter pen dynamic accounts of other peoples’ lives, I Am is different. It’s a declaration of agency, a collection of his own struggles and anxieties, creative paralysis and looming moments of despair. If anything, the album enacts a honestly raw statement of Tom Walker in a present snapshot, hence the title I Am.

“I tend to write about things that really happened in my life and moments that kind of defined me as a person,” Walker admits. “My first album was all about my friends and my family, and about what was going on around me.

“I Am is much more introspective and talks about my life over the last five years. I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. I finally married my partner after 10 years together, so I’ve got a wife now. But my friends and I also had to deal with grief after we lost somebody in our friend group suddenly and very unexpectedly. So there’s been a lot of highs and lows over the last few years and I’ve tried to reflect that in the album.”

The album came together somewhat piecemeal, with Walker trying to get everything right after long stretches of going back and forth to the drawing board. After writing, and binning, a plethora of new tracks, an exhausted Tom subsequently headed out to Los Angeles to write with the McDonough brothers, Toby Gadd, Ryan Daly and Castle, whose credits between them include the likes of Beyonce, Joji, Khalid, Benson Boone, Mimi Webb and John Legend. The trip reignited Walker’s excitement for music and kicked off a personal mission to try new things.

“I've been writing I Am for a long time," he reflects. "I wasn’t really enjoying the process in those early days. I threw a lot of songs in the bin. It wasn't until the last year and a half where I found my stride with the production and the songwriting and then it all magically just came together so quickly. After what felt like a very long time, I tried to find what I wanted the album to sound like and what theme I wanted. I returned to writing with the McDonough brothers, Daly and Castle.

“I really found a rhythm with those writers and those producers and I just absolutely loved making music with them. They had this real infectious energy about them. It was lovely to get to that point after a long time of not really being sure what this album was going to be. Everything started coming together and bouncing into place when we had songs like ‘Lifeline’, ‘Burn’ and ‘Holy Ghost’ written. By then, I really felt like it was all suddenly coming together and making sense.”

The results speak for themselves, with Walker proffering a 13 track collection of guts-revealing torchers and heart-rending slow burns, each enacting glimmers of honesty and confession, resentment and frustration, and comfort and love. The emotions are tendered differently from Walker’s previous work, however. Take ‘Holy Ghost’ for example, for which the Scotsman took the familiar contours of love and revamped them to create a track that sounds like a Hozier song produced by Labrinth. He wrote 'Holy Ghost' for his wife, Annie, about 11 days before their wedding, and wanted to create a sound that mirrored the weight of that moment.

“I wanted to write a song that was not a traditional love song, the kind that sounds so sickly sweet, should we say. I wanted the lyrics to reflect the kind of love I've got for my wife, but I also wanted the production to be massive with this kind of stadium fill-in sound.”

In terms of the sonics, I Am is perhaps larger than anything Walker’s created, trading his soulful pop scapes for stadium-ready pop-rock sensibilities. It’s a natural step for a fast-rising, meteoric star like Walker, guided by premeditated plans for bigger global tours. The album’s sound needed to represent the momentum and fill the space of those venues. As the singer tells me, “I’ve been on track to do arenas for a while and I was really hoping to get the opportunity with this album, which I have because we’re supporting The Script.

“I had that arena sound in the back of my mind and I wanted to create something that felt like it was going to suit a big, open room, rather than a bunch of acoustic-sounding songs.”

I Am officially dropped in September and Walker tells me it’s been the most fruitful period of his career. Following a turbulent few years, punctuated by several ebbs and flows, the Scottish songsmith found a way towards healing, with the creative process offering him a kind of therapy to work through the agony and the ecstasy of life, as well as the good and bad of emerging on the music scene so rapidly.

“I've spent so much time overthinking to get to the point where I was really happy," Walker admits. "I obviously started music as a passion and a hobby, but then it kind of turned into a career and the rate that it all kind of went off caught me off guard. I don't know where my life has gone since I've signed my record deal and put music out. It just seems to have really flashed in front of my eyes.

“There are a lot of personal stories on the album for me, and a lot of venting and getting my frustrations out. It’s been very therapeutic for me to write like that. I often find that writing songs is the best way to get your feelings, and how you add things up, on the page. Just seeing the work in front of you can be very therapeutic to work through your own issues.

“I think getting to this age is one of those things where you get what you want in life and then realise that maybe the thing you’ve always wanted isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything. I Am represents that exact journey through adulthood, and my own journey of getting from the last album to finishing this one - when you get to the thing you’ve set out to do, thinking it would be the answer to all of your problems, and then realising that maybe it’s not. The album title, I Am, is about all of this. It’s about all the things that I am to myself, and the journey I’ve been on with my record label, taking up a profession that is also my hobby and everything that comes with it. ”

I Am is out now