In a music industry that urges competitive young artists to go big or go home, 30-year-old British composer Tom Odell is taking quite a chance with his new fourth set, Monsters. Having already won a BRIT Critics Choice Award and been inked by Lily Allen’s posh ITNO imprint, the Sussex-bred keyboardist hit the ground running with his 2013 debut Long Way Down, which debuted at #1 on the U.K. charts. With each ensuing release, like 2016’s soulful Wrong Crowd and its more rocking followup in 2018, Jubilee Road, his piano-anchored sound got grander, more expansive and closer to his most influential recording from childhood, Elton John’s definitive Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Winning a coveted Ivor Novello Award along the way didn’t exactly pump the career brakes.
But on Monsters, everything grinds to a halt sonically, in skeletal, bare-knuckled reflections like the opening “numb,” which functions on a metronome-simple percussion loop and a melody that feels like a kitten skittering across the keys; Odell’s unadorned singing voice, at once frail but full of fight, echoes the song title (and, in fact, the depressing closeup album cover shot, as well) with worrisome lyrics like, “I hold my hand over the flame / To see if I can feel some pain.” The hushed approach underscores the singer’s new vulnerability, as—in e.e. cummings, lower-cased tunes—he confronts societal ills like alcoholism (“problems”), the pandemic (“lockdown”), homelessness (“Me and My Friends”), and his own personal demons in “monster v.1” and “v.2,” and “don’t be afraid of the dark,” a song he’s already decided he wants played at his own funeral someday.
So yes, says Odell, less is most definitely more, especially when you’re attempting to examine your own mental health, which a recent spate of debilitating panic attacks forced him to do. So getting the Monsters minimalism right was crucial. “When we were recording it—and we did it half in the studio and half at my house—it was always about the vocal,” he notes. “That’s all I cared about, really, was getting the words across and making sure the voice was clear and unaffected. That was the most important thing to me.” He sat down recently to discuss his introspective transformation, which wasn’t totally tied to Covid-19.
Paste: When last we spoke, you had just acquired a house in the suburbs, a girlfriend, a cat and a dog, and a Gladys Kravitz-inquisitive interest in your neighbors. W’happen?
Tom Odell: Ha! Well … I don’t have the dog anymore. I have the cat, still. I have a different girlfriend, and we’re engaged actually, to be married. So that’s all going swimmingly. And apart from that? Yeah, I guess quite a lot has happened since then, both personally and internationally.
Paste: When did you first notice that you were having panic attacks or any kind of anxiety? And how did you deal with it then?
Odell: Well, I knew when … I had this weird sort of thing in the summer of 2018 when I started getting these, like, two seconds where I would sort of black out. Or not even two seconds—for like half a second, I would just black out. And it got worse and worse and worse, until finally I was in the shower one morning in Munich while we were doing a concert there, and I just collapsed in the shower—I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing a million miles an hour, and I genuinely thought that was it. I just remember thinking, “That’s it.” I thought about my parents and I was sad—you know, just a whirl of emotion. But it turns out I wasn’t dying, but I ended up in hospital and they said, “You’ve had a pretty big panic attack.” My body had gone into shock from it, and I then was sort of like off work for a month, and then I slowly crawled back to work and started having therapy and all this stuff. But I found that whilst I thought I was dealing with it, I wasn’t, and to avoid dealing with it, I just worked even harder.
And I then began to realize that this restlessness and this sense of duress that I’d constantly been running from my whole life actually had a name, and it was anxiety, chronic anxiety. And it helped for it to have a name, actually. And I’ve tried to deal with it since then, but actually there have been moments when it’s been bad, really bad. But I realized that I’ve probably had it since I was 14. I probably had when I became obsessed with songs when I was 15, in a way that was kind of weird. There were moments when I would lay there in bed, obsessing over single thoughts, and I couldn’t sleep at night. And I just thought that was me. I don’t know if I’d call it OCD. I think the very same qualities or characteristics that have made me make three or four albums—and it takes a lot of drive to do that throughout your 20s—that same quality that has driven me to do that is the very same quality that causes my anxiety. I put all of my nervous energy into something, and it’s usually music.