- 2022-10-31
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MUSIC
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Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ Tom Odell Releases New Album “Best Day of My Life”: Streaming
British singer-songwriter Tom Odell released his fifth studio album “Best Day of My Life” along with an animated video for “Just Another Thing We Don't Talk About” on October 28, 2022.
It is his first album as an independent artist after leaving Columbia Records.
The album comprises 12-track, produced by Laurie Blundell, Max Clilverd and Tom Odell. Written by Laurie Blundell, Max Clilverd, Rick Nowels and Tom Odell.
This time, he made the album with just a piano and his vocals.
“Economy is the thing I'm always searching for. The wonderful thing about the piano is that there is so much precision,” Tom Odell talked to American Songwriter about the album, “It focused our attention on what was going on, what I was playing on the piano. Really, I sort of got out of the way of it. Probably more than any other album. I didn't consider it too much, I just kind of let it happen. And when I got to the end of it, I was really fucking happy with it. In hindsight, I'm really proud of this album. It feels uncorrupted, in a way, by my own mind and my own worries and paranoia.”
He worked with Manshen Lo for some animated video for the album.- He worked with Manshen Lo for some animated videos for the album.
He shared on social media, “here is the final animation (Just Another Thing We Don't Talk About) we have made for the album. you'll notice the character on the right has been in the other three films we've made. Manshen Lo and i spoke at length about who we wanted this character to be. we arrived at a name of An, which translates in chinese as Peace. it was important to us that An has no specific Gender, or Nationality or Age. this was important because the things that most inspired this album are the things that affect us all, where ever you are in the world, whenever you were born, whatever clothes you wear, whoever you choose to love, choose to identify as, choose to be. beneath these many identity's that distinguish us from one another, there is a shared experience of being a human. and the more i live the more i realise it's more beautiful and more complex and more fragile and more shared than i could have ever imagined.” -
Tom Odell explained track-by-track for the album via Apple Music.
“Best Day of My Life”
“This was one of the first songs that was written for the album. It was originally titled 'Worst Day of My Life,' and the original idea was evidently somewhat more depressing. But I changed the title to 'Best Day of My Life,' and it somehow kept its sadness but became more poignant. It's about the euphoria you feel after really getting to the bottom. It's the sunrise which you suddenly stop and notice, the joy of small things. You are suddenly rooted in the present, and it's this beautiful relief. It's this weight coming off your shoulders.”
“Sad Anymore”
“This was Laurie [Blundell, producer and collaborator] and I's first adventure into minimalism. I've been interested in minimalism for a while, but this is when it really began to peak. l really started to delve into Erik Satie, Nils Frahm, and Philip Glass, and explore the wonders of limitation. I've been meditating for five or six years, and a big part of my meditation is mantra—repeating a mantra over and over again. This is a mantra-based song where the mantra is, 'I don't want to be sad anymore. I don't want to be sad anymore.' There's subtle development in the piano part—the thing with minimalism that's fascinating is you change one tiny bit, and it feels like an entire orchestra is coming in, one change of a note.”
“Sunrise___”
“This was inspired by a moment the morning after we went into the first lockdown, in March 2020. I was in Dungeness in Kent, staying in this little cabin on a beach. It was a pretty fascinating place for that to unravel. I didn't sleep at all and got up at 5 in the morning, strolled down to the beach, and watched the sunrise. I videoed it, and it was just an interesting moment which stayed with me because it felt like the sun was coming up on a completely different world.”
“Just Another Thing We Don't Talk About”
“I think there's a great tradition in the UK of people—particularly men—not sharing any emotion with each other and hiding stuff away. I've begun to learn that the things that you don't discuss are the ones that become most destructive to any friendship or relationship. I read this book by Kazuo Ishiguro called The Buried Giant, which is touching upon similar themes about this collective guilt. I think it's interesting when we look at the past because it's how we mature as a society. Terrible things happen, and things that we feel ashamed of happen, and it's like, 'How do we continue with that knowledge?' I don't think the answer is burying it.”
“The Blood We Bleed”
“I have a good quote for this: 'How many scars did we justify just because we loved the person holding the knife?' This is a song exploring our close relationships and how it is often those that we're closest to that we hurt the most. It's an exploration into inherited pain, like what someone does to you in a relationship, you might end up doing to someone else in another relationship. I think the same applies to what your parent might do to you, you might end up doing back to your parent or to your child. I'm interested in the implications of cross generations of what we do to one another and how it continues to echo through generations.”
“Giving a Fuck”
“I had the piano motif that's in this for a while. My aunt always loved it. I sent her the song, and she's so annoyed about it. She's like, 'What the fuck have you done to it?' It's really abrasive. The whole album is meant to have a sense of journey throughout a day. With this song, it's almost like there's an unshackling, reaching a nihilistic point where you break free of all of the things that perhaps defined you and you cared about, and there's this wonderful liberation to it. There was a period in which I did feel paralyzed by expectation, and this was the moment that I felt like I liberated myself from that.”
“Librium”
“I was reading a book called Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. I got a bit obsessed about the OxyContin crisis in America. The drug that preceded OxyContin was Librium, an extreme type of Valium. I myself have had a point where I was becoming a little bit dependent upon Valium. It's awful how it makes you feel. That story felt relevant to me, and this track felt like it marked a point in the journey in my past which I wanted to put in this album.”
“Flying :))”
“This one was really hard to keep just limited to piano and vocal. It's incredibly fast, and it's got this crazy energy. When I was first writing it, I was really hammering away at the piano. I wanted this big, energetic moment. My dad was a pilot, and my uncle is an aeronautical engineer, and I was always obsessed with flying, understanding how birds fly. I was also fascinated by the euphoria of being in the air and seeing the world from the air. I feel like there's a dreaminess to it that probably is quite childlike. It takes me back to what it felt like to be a child.”
“Enemy”
“[For] anyone that's struggled with their head, there's a horrible moment when you realize that perhaps you can't completely trust your mind. It's scary—if you can't trust that, what can you trust? I think there's a horrible moment with mental illness when you think, 'God, am I crazy?' Interestingly, when we finished the song, I also felt that the song could also be about the end of a relationship.”
“Monday”
“The lyrics are inspired by this situation I was in, tragically, where you're in London and the tube station gets shut down because someone's killed themselves. It always happens early in the morning on a weekday, and it sets your imagination running wild. It happened to me whilst I was making the album. By this point in the album, I wanted there to be a death of something. I feel like the symbolism of this death is that, at this point in the journey, the bit of me that was capable of causing all this pain was beginning to die. In order to let that die, I had to let go of so many other things as well, and this song is touching upon that mourning.”
“___Sunset”
“It's the closing of the day. I guess this is similar to 'Monday'—it's the twilight.”
“Smiling All the Way Back Home”
“I always knew this song was going to end the album. My own experience is that when I finally let go of a lot of this pain that I was holding, and when I finally stopped trying to sedate myself, the most amazing thing happened: I met my girlfriend, and she had gone through a very similar experience at that time. It was the thing I least anticipated, and it came at a moment when I least expected it. The conclusion of this album is that the joy is always there. You have to open your eyes and you have to feel it in order to see it.” - source : Apple Music
