Hamilton rocker Tomi Swick calls his own tunes Thursday, October 19, 2006 MONTREAL — A 26-year-old former high-school jock and bagpipe player from Hamilton, Ont., with a thing for Paul McCartney’s music doesn’t immediately suggest the kind of act a big label will pin any bottom-line hopes on. But every once in a while, the songs will out. And Tomi Swick just might have them. The songs are what convinced a bunch of Warner Music Canada execs to listen to Swick in their offices after Jen Hirst, an A & R rep at Warner, caught the singer-songwriter playing his tuneful set of pop-rockers at the Cameron House in Toronto and suggested that he drop by. Swick admits he was scared when he went in for the impromptu audition. “I was thinking `Jen told them about this kid,’ but I’m 6’3”, I’m 225 lbs. I figured they’d think `Who’s this guy? He looks like he should be driving a truck or like a lumberjack or something. But I went in and I said `I’m here. To hell with it .’ And I closed my eyes and played. That’s all I did,” he said. Meetings, demo requests, a Warner deal, a debut album, Stalled Out in the Doorway, and radio rotation quickly followed. Swick said he was more interested in playing football, basketball, volleyball and soccer when he was growing up in a blue-collar family in Hamilton. But his home was a musical one, he said, and he played piano and sang in a gospel choir. His Scottish mother was responsible for his learning bagpipes. When he was 13, his first guitar came along to give the sports some serious competition. The opening riff from Heaven On Their Minds, from the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, began to obsess the barely-teenaged musician. “I’d play it over and over and sing that first line, ‘My mind is clearer now,’ I’d do that for hours on end,” he said. The Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical also gave him a feel for the kind of big reprise and climax you can hear in the title song of his album. Swick’s first band, Nimbus — which later became Red Echo — played music reminiscent of alternative rockers I Mother Earth, he said. Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots were the staple musical diet in those days. The group shopped for record labels, but each one wanted them to sound like Limp Bizkit, according to Swick — and he got feisty on them. “I basically said `To hell with that. I’d rather not play.’ I was starting to lean more toward lighter stuff anyway,” he said. Unable to agree on their direction, the band broke up, leaving Swick to make ends meet by playing everything from Bob Marley to Led Zeppelin in a cover band. “I learned so much doing that,” he said. “And in the course of going out on my own, I met up with my guitar player, Andrew (Mactaggart), and he just taught me tons of Beatles and helped me learn even more.” The opportunity to put some money into a solo career came through a sad occasion: an inheritance after the death of Swick’s father three years ago. Momentum had to be built the good old-fashioned way: through plenty of gigging. “I was playing in Toronto a lot, but I wasn’t one of those guys sending out demos and calling people and bugging them. I was just playing and trying to get better at what I was doing,” he said. This is where Warner’s Hirst walked in on the story. It’s also where the debut disc comes in. Stalled Out in the Doorway is clearly a produced album, with Ron Lopata at the knobs and engineering wiz Chris Lord-Alge doing the mixing. That’s all the better to seduce mainstream radio ears — but the core of the album’s simple, jangly, melodic songs remains more or less uncorrupted. In conversation, Swick made the point several times that he and his band pack a more rocking punch in their live act than the album would suggest. Even in the studio, however, his love for the hard-driving intensity of The Bends-era Radiohead is hard to miss: check out songs like Come In 2s or Easy Company. Ron Sexsmith, whom Swick met while the two were doing radio promotion for their new discs, has given the disc a hearty — and public — thumbs-up. Melody seems to drive both singers. Swick said he considers it the most important element of the songwriter’s craft, citing McCartney’s catalogue — both during and after the Beatles — as a particular inspiration. “You’ve got to be able to walk away humming,” he said. “although a hook can grab you and not keep you forever. You have to surprise people and keep the song interesting as it progresses.
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