Accepting imperfection in a performance-obsessed society, interview with Tom Odell

There's an acoustic guitar, his voice, those of the colleagues who contributed to the creation of the project, and little more: in his new album Black Friday, Tom Odell explores the world of emotions and human relationships in a completely honest manner in both lyrics and composition. He does so by incorporating even the musical moments that are oftentimes erased from recordings, making the end result feel as raw as possible. In the track Nothing Hurts Like Love, Odell sing against the noise of what sounds like rain drops hitting a window; in The End, he sits at the piano to narrate a ruthless story that mixes feelings of nostalgia and pain. «A lot of the time, it was just me sat on a sofa with the guitar and singing, almost as if I were speaking words rather than singing, trying to make it seem like a dialogue rather than a performance,» the artist told us. Tomorrow he will take the stage at the Alcatraz in Milan, the Italian leg of what he calls «the biggest tour we've ever done.»

Odell wrote the song Black Friday on November 24, 2022. As he was celebrating his birthday, millions of people were diving into megastore shelves on the occasion of the international day of big autumn sales. «Black Friday seems like a bleak time, depression is often called the Black Dog,» he explains. «I was interested in the semantics of the phrase, in what it makes you feel when you remove it from the consumerist holiday.» Odell's new project bears the name of the shopping day to undergo a process of deconstructing the concept of consumerism, both in its sound, which the artist wanted to keep intact in its imperfections, and in the themes addressed, from the sensation of dissatisfaction to that of insecurity that comes with living in our society. «Much of the desire to keep the album in a state of unfinished-ness is a reaction to how our lives can appear online,» he adds. «As well as to the facade of consumerism, which feels, even at best of times, very shallow.»

For an artist who accumulates 28 million listeners per month on streaming platforms, going against the term "commercial" might seem counterintuitive, but since the release of Another Love, the debut single with which Odell continues to climb the global charts, twelve years have passed. Now 33, he reveals that listening to his old songs is like rereading a "public" diary, like observing the tattoos that are still imprinted on his skin but belong to the self of ten years past. «Sometimes I hear something that feels very familiar, but other times I barely recognise the character that's singing» he confesses. «As I get older, I become less sure how much of us remains the same person.» The introspective turn our conversation takes leads us to ask Odell if he ever thinks about what his life would have been like without the success of Another Love, which launched him to the top of the industry at just twenty-two years old. «I'm incredibly lucky that my music resonated with people in the way it did from the get go, but like all things, there's good and bad in it, it was quite paralysing at times,» he says, before adding an extremely thoughtful comment: «I think there's a sort of disillusion, we think we're masters of our destiny, I don't believe that at all. I think we are at the mercy of the billions of lives around us and the hundreds of thousands of lives that have come before us, so I don't know if it could have been any other way and I like that. I have to be disciplined with myself, because I find that daydreaming can lead to a lot of suffering.»

The depth of the words Odell chooses to describe his success is the same we can find in the lyrics of his new album. Despite each song revealing his maturity, in tracks like Black Friday, space is left for the insecurities that govern the mind. With "I want a better body, I want better skin/I wanna be perfect like all your other friends" (which at first listen might seem like a reference to Radiohead's Creep), the feeling of inadequacy that characterises contemporary society is expressed, trapped in a constant cycle of self-celebration and self-denigration. «Much of that song was a reaction to how one feels online and in the modern world,» Odell reveals. «Going back to the individualistic culture, writing about our deepest insecurities felt very liberating.» And it is exactly with this sincerity that the singer tells us about the fears that are tormenting him ahead of the tour, so gigantic as to both excite and discourage him at the same time. «It's exciting because it's another expression of music, I do feel slightly daunted by it, but I'm excited to sing these songs live.»