True, blue-collar rock It's still early days for Tomi Swick, but the Hamilton rocker is encouraged by the way things have gone since the release earlier this year of his major label debut, Stalled out of the Doorway. The disc has spawned a couple of radio hits, "A Night Like This" and "Everything is Alright." A third track, "Sorry Again," is poised to join the rotation. Not, the 26-year-old insists, that he's letting any of this go to his head. And even if he did, Steeltown friends would soon set him straight. "I can't go there and have any kind of ego because they'll knock me right down," says Swick. "They'll say, `Hey man, we all know where you're from.' That's the kind of place it is. It really has an effect on your mentality. "I come from a very hard-working, blue-collar family. My mom's side were Scottish immigrants who came and worked at Stelco. And my father worked at Stelco his whole life. There are other cities that have a blue- collar aspect, but you don't see it as much. In Hamilton, the majority of the city is like that. Honesty is a word that gets thrown around so much that it gets to be a cliché, but I feel that I come from a very honest place. "I very easily could be working at the mills, which is honest but extremely hard work. I'm very lucky not to be doing that. I'm far too lazy to get up that early to go to work every day like that. And once I started on the music, I knew that's what I wanted to do." Swick is due to make a pit stop at home Sunday for the third annual Hamilton Music Awards at the Dofasco Centre for the Arts. Although the singer's five-piece is currently on the road, opening for the Goo Goo Dolls on a tour that stops tonight at Massey Hall, Swick and guitarist Andrew MacTaggart are making time to perform at the awards ceremony, between dates in Montreal and Moncton. `I'm not some Canadian Idol cast-off. We come out and play ... No gimmicks' Tomi Swick, on his five-piece band The rookie recording artist has five nominations, tied for the most with Burlington-bred singer/songwriter Sarah Harmer. Other nominees include electronic pop outfit Junior Boys, singer/songwriters Kathleen Edwards and Melissa McClelland, and rock and roots group Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. "It's a slow-moving thing, but there's a scene emerging," Swick says. "There used to be a huge grunge scene in Hamilton, but that kind of faded out. Now there's a lot of metal and hard rock, but there's also alt-country and singer/songwriters coming out." As a young teen, Swick spent a lot of time hanging out at all-ages shows by local bands inspired by Nirvana and Pearl Jam. He started playing in bands at the age of 13, but it wasn't until he blew out his knee playing football at local high school Cathedral four years later that music became a priority. After a stretch of playing in various groups, Swick started performing under his own name three years ago, briefly as a solo act and eventually fronting a band. He signed with Warner Music after representatives of the label caught one of his sets two years ago at the Rivoli. Listening to Stalled out of the Doorway, Coldplay is an obvious reference point, but there are echoes of other influences cited by Swick — from Paul Simon, James Taylor and the Beatles to U2 and Radiohead. "A lot of bands that get signed now, get signed on one song," Swick says. "So when they go into the studio they try to recreate that song 12 times. And it becomes a very monotonous record. "I had 30 songs going into recording this album. I like to rock out. And I like to sing ballads. I'm doing everything I can not to be pigeonholed." And to remember where he is from. "I'm not some Canadian Idol cast-off. It's not about that. We're a very no-nonsense, hard-working band. We come out and play the music. No gimmicks."
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