The Tom Baxter Podcast [August 2007]

Much was expected of Tom Baxter in 2007. The English singer-songwriter had taken the public and the critics by storm. And then, on a long August weekend, he came to Kilkee for the first Cois Farraige music festival.

GROWING pains — to half the medical world a misnomer but to many an adolescent a very real and genuine torment. While they may not manifest in any particular physical affliction, the journey of the teenage boy into manhood is fraught with many hills to scale and battles to fight. There are big questions to tackle, questions that few are qualified to answer. There, somewhere between the grunt of frustrated innocence and the despair of hollow adulthood, resides Tom Baxter.

In his new album Skybound, due for release later this month, Baxter takes up where he left off after Feather and Stone. Charting this journey, the jubilation as well as the despair.

“It’s working on the same emotional values in terms of song-writing.  I think that I always write from the same place. In terms of the sentiment of the record, it is, in a similar way to Feather and Stone, recording the journey from boyhood into man hood. It’s a journey of the emotional experience and the things you have to learn yourself. So there are moments of darkness,” he said.