Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life by Ann M. Martin

Usually, when I’m writing I have ten or twenty songs running at once, and I’ll just keep circling around these songs playing them until one day I realise they are finished, and then I will record the song and stuff. It was recorded over a period of time, I’d write a song, record it and then move on to the next song. How did you record ‘The Cure’, it is just you and your guitar with some extra instruments played by yourself? I’m still feeling it so I will keep doing it. I don’t know what it is, I wish I could stop, maybe I should stop, I just keep writing songs so I guess I will stop when I stop writing songs. It is just what I do, it is something I’ve always done. You seem to have increased your release rate with ‘The Cure’ coming just two years or so after ‘Crows In The Corn’, what is driving you? I’ve doing good, just hanging in here and keeping on in this crazy world. Finally, many critics have commented on the similarity between Tom’s vocals and Bob Dylan’s, but he lets slip that the first Dylan album he listened to was ‘Nashville Skyline’, and he declares an abiding love for Dylan’s ‘Self Portrait’, probably the most atypical Dylan albums in his whole catalogue. This is how he feels he should really engage with people, rather than simply trying to sell himself and his music. So far so normal for a typical interview, but Tom then took the opportunity to turn the latter part of the interview into a discussion on his personal values and approach to music, and on where the music industry may be heading.

Tom Ovans also explains how his use of 4-track recording, with no whiff of Pro Tools, helps give his music a timeless quality, while his lyrics are relevant to the concerns and issues of the 21 st Century. Americana UK’s Martin Johnson caught up with him at home over Zoom to talk about ‘The Cure’, the influence that his hitchhiking years had on his subsequent career and why he is still driven to write and record songs, there are seventeen new ones on ‘The Cure’. He may call Austin home now, but Tom Ovans grew up just outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and left his working-class home in the early ‘70s to hitchhike around the US to expand his life experiences and develop his musical and songwriting skills. One artist who has maintained his integrity during a recording career of over 30 years, releasing fifteen albums, including his latest, ‘The Cure’, is Austin-based Tom Ovans. Integrity is a rare thing in music, and it is something that artists who have it can easily lose as the challenges of maintaining a musical career are faced. If you are born to be a musician and singer-songwriter you just keep doing what you do.

Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life by Ann M. Martin