The best storytellers and songwriters are able to take the real life trials, travails, tribulations and triumphs in their own lives and turn them into art that touches the hearts and minds of all who hear and experience their creative catharses.
This is what Hamilton-based songwriter Tomi Swick has been doing for a number of years, but has truly mastered the skill of evoking emotion in others on his latest album, The Yukon Motel, which was released earlier this month on Oct. 14th.
“I have to give a lot of credit to my co-producer Dave King. Everything on the record came from me, I had veto power on everything, but he helped me a lot on the technical and organizational side. When I came down to the music I was the last word. Dave really pushed the project when I needed it and he helped me organizing everything that needed to go into it and was a really effective partner to kind of bounce things off of. He was there to help me execute my vision,” said Swick, a native of Canada’s Steel City, Hamilton, ON, adding that what King did was encourage him to recapture the rawness of his live performances that had been shunted aside on his first two albums.
“Dave said, ‘man, I listen to those records and then hear you live and that’s not what I am hearing. You sound a lot more raw.’ And I told him raw is what I want and what he is going to help me achieve. Potentially I want to someday do records that are pretty much completely live off the floor – that’s my goal. My feeling is that the records which have stood the test of time and that everybody loves were done that way. Everything is so saturated with digital, shiny production today that all the grit and authentic energy is gone.
“It’s good to see that a lot of the bands that are seen as cooler are ones that are showing that grit again, like The Black Keys. So with this record, the process was like, ‘hey man, let’s go down to the studio and just jam.’ It’s a big barn and is in a beautiful area [Barn Window Studio in Caistor Centre] I basically spent three years out there just living there and trying these songs out and getting different players in and trying them out. I was whittling down hundreds of songs to the 14 that are on the record.”
With a very gritty, ballsy delivery, it’s common for Swick to be lumped in as a blues or roots artist, but there are way too many tinges of other styles for him to be so easily categorized, meaning his appeal is broader.
“When it comes to my style, I have never really thought about it, really. I am a meat and potatoes guy. I am a big ginger bastard. Vocally I want to be more like Sam Cooke or John Fogerty – like the guys who belt it out in the way Otis Redding did. It’s sort of a bit like what Chris Stapleton is doing down in the States. I guess it’s the idea of the white, blue-eyed soul thing with a blues element, but not in the way Colin James does it. I want more of the grit and the heart of Sam & Dave and that sort of thing,” he said.
The grit comes naturally for Swick who has overcome an incredible amount of adversity to release an album that represents the apex of true artistic and career revival. The Yukon Motel follows self-titled album that was produced by noted British producer Chris Potter, best known for his work with Verve and Richard Ashcroft. Swick’s debut album, Stalled out in the Doorway, was released in 2007 and saw him win the Juno Award for Best New Artist, among other accolades.
“I have actually been around the scene for a while and I had a lot of success early on, but I lost my voice and I basically lost my whole career. I won the Juno and then literally lost everything the next day. My voice started to go the day after the ceremony. I got strep throat and pneumonia and from then on it got worse until eventually polyps and cysts formed on my vocal chords and I had to get them removed. It ended up being three and a half years of no singing, which can be pretty detrimental to one’s career,” he said.
“But it was kind of a good thing because I had to learn how to sing a bit differently and I had a lot more time to work on songwriting and I ended up being a better songwriter in that time. So I have been around for a while, but this album is a new project and a new direction for me. After being with a major label and having a big publishing deal [with Warner/Chappell Publishing] I am now totally on my own. I don’t have people telling me what direction I should go in. I am just doing what comes naturally.
He said he was grateful for all the opportunities and success that he had earlier in his career, but overall he said the label was trying to fit a square musical peg into a round hole.
“When I did my first record, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I had never been in a studio. I was just playing shows and then I was approached by different people in Toronto and then by Warner. I didn’t know what I was doing but was like, ‘okay, I will go ahead and see what happens.’ And they had a plan for me. They wanted me to be a mix of Michael Buble, Ron Sexsmith and John Mayer and so my first two records are a lot more polished and pretty sophisticated. But I have always been pretty gnarly and pretty gritty. They were always worried about me being heavier or something,” Swick said.
“But that wasn’t it. I just didn’t want to be a one-trick pony. If I want to play a love song, I want to play a love song and if I was to play a rock song, I want to play a rock song. I write everything, why do I only have to showcase the pop songs? Why does it have to be so poppy?”
Swick is a child of the 1990s and was influenced by the music of that decade, but his musical upbringing belies the diversity that would come to typify his own compositions, especially the songs on The Yukon Motel.
“I come from a very musical family. Everyone on my father’s side and everyone on my mother’s side were musical. I come from a very Scottish family so they are very hard, tough people, but there was always a lot of music in the house. Music was a celebration for us, for the most part. I feel I grew up in a really cool home: I played bagpipes when I was a kid and I started playing guitar at 12,” he said.
“I always sang. I even sang in a church choir for a few years and right around the time I started guitar I started kicking around my own songs. And I was very influenced by the music of the early 1990s: bands like Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Filter – all those bands that were breaking out at the time. The first really important rock album I remember, though, was Lenny Kravitz’s Are You Gonna Go My Way. I must have listened to that record 800,000 times as a kid. I loved the guitar on it, the harmonies and the soul on that album. I remember being super drawn to that record. But it was when grunge really started that I wanted to play guitar and write songs.
“But it’s interesting that I was never actually a grunge guy. I loved the guitar playing and the melodies from the songs, but I wasn’t actually writing grunge songs. But hearing these young bands doing the music they wanted to do encouraged me to do the same thing. I also then started to get into people like Tom Petty, The Band, Neil Young and the Beatles too.”
The songs on The Yukon Motel are well-crafted stories taken from the real-life encounters, experiences and emotions from Swick’s own recent past, including the remarkably evocative title track. Swick was dating a woman who was part First Nations and would spend her summers back in the Yukon helping her family run their hunting and fishing lodge. So one summer Swick dropped a boatload of cash and flew up to be with her.
“The town she was in had a place called The Yukon Motel and I would go eat there from time to time. When I was there we started having problems and I realized not long after arriving that she was with a guy up there and everyone knew and I was a donkey to be all the way up there for nothing. It was an awful time. So I started really thinking and wondering what the f*** I was even doing there. I started to really pay attention to my surroundings and that there were so many different weird people up there in that town. There were American tourists in their RVs, retirees; there were fishermen, trappers, and bikers. I remember in The Yukon Motel itself there was a gay native waiter. He was getting beat up all the time, but he was the nicest guy in the world and obviously had a hard go of it,” he explained.
“And all of this made me think of a song. I went back to the fishing resort and I had my own little room and I was pissed off and didn’t want to see the girl I was supposed to be visiting. It was a joke, really, to even be there. I smoked a joint and there was this linoleum tile all over the place in this weird little cabin and they had hooks on them and stars and that is basically the first line of the song – that image.
“I wrote that song from all the crazy experiences that I had up there. When I came home I had those images and those characters in my head so when this record started coming together there was all these different reasons for the songs. I wasn’t really thinking about any overall theme, but I liked the idea of The Yukon Motel for the title and the idea that as a hotel it’s a place that houses all these different characters and I started thinking of the individual songs as the different kinds of people and different kinds of stories and they all had a room in this hotel. That’s how the concept came about.”
As well, Swick lost his mom to cancer during the early stages of putting together the album. He has also lost his father, step-father, best friend and even his dog in recent years. So it’s little wonder that many of his songs reflect the sorts of tumultuous emotions anyone would be feeling after enduring such loss, not to mention the near-loss of his career.
“The song Bad Things is probably my favourite song on the record and it’s a little more country-ish. That one came shortly after my mom died and I was walking along on Hamilton Mountain. I was up there just walking along the escarpment and thinking about how it’s easy to have thoughts really creep into your head when you are anxious and stressed. I wrote about how you’re bombarded and overwhelmed by thoughts and can’t slow them down. It was about my own thoughts and being hit from every direction about life and death and mortality and stress, all swirling around in my head. So that’s what that song is about,” he said.
“Sunshine Sweet Liquor is a little more upbeat. I came home one day from the studio and had a bottle of Tullamore, which is a whiskey I really like and I had some of that and I sat down with my guitar for a whole. I messaged Dave King at about 3 a.m. when I was drunk and I sent him this song and said, ‘hey, is this stupid or is there something here.’ He went, ‘holy s***, you just wrote that? We’re going to record this one for sure.’ He said it was a bit of a respite from the melancholy.”
Swick said he is enjoying his artistic freedom and is already planning the tone and tenor for his next album.
“It’s a process and I think I am always evolving as an artist. I know with the next thing I do I am going to rock even more.”
For more information on Swick and The Yukon Motel, visit http://www.tomiswickmusic.com,
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com
