TOM MCRAE, the Mercury Prize and a Brit Award nominated English vocalist and songwriter, plays Strange Brew in the Róisín Dubh on Thursday March 11 at 9pm.
On the night Tom will be performing songs from his new album Alphabet Of Hurricanes, which has just been released by Cooking Vinyl.
The album was written over a two year period during which Tom toured extensively across Europe, North America, and the Far East. “Touring lost me my sense of home,” Tom explains. “Travelling constantly kept my feet itchy - being in motion is the best way to feel alive without actually engaging. I loved it.”
Despite this the artist admits to having “run out of steam” and found himself in New York “trying to make sense of the last few years”.
“Somehow I had to reconcile the self-destructive side of my nature and the desire to constantly smash things up with the need to feel settled in order to have a better grasp on song-writing and recording,” he says. “If everything feels breathlessly exciting all the time it’s probably time to take a break from touring.”
Songwriting was the way to explore, grapple with, understand, and overcome the issues that were concerning him. He recorded the songs at his house in Bow, London, using a banjo, ukulele, mandolin, drums, violin, an old piano and “other junk from ebay”. He dragged his band and a few friends into the studio to help and the record began to take shape.
The title ‘Alphabet of Hurricanes’ comes from a song that actually started the writing process, but will not see the light of day on the record of the same name. Each year hurricanes are named alphabetically and last year the world went through the alphabet twice, which had never happened before. Such was the huge increase in hurricanes the world over.
“There’s a line in that song,” expands Tom. “‘An alphabet of hurricanes can’t blow this drifter home,’ which sums up how I felt,” he says. “The turbulence in my life seemed stuck on repeat, but I realised if you stop fighting the wind and tides and work with them, you can call it sailing.”
Tickets are available from the Róisín Dubh and Zhivago.
