No punk rocker: Chewed up by pop, Sandi Thom was a 25-year-old musician with a career obituary ready to be written. Andrew Hamilton chats to the Scottish singer-songwriter about going back to basics and overcoming the crisis of confidence which almost finished her career.
When your debut album sells one million copies, the temptation must be to think that’s that, you’ve made it. But that’s not the way the music industry works. Just two years after Sandi Thom’s debut album, Smile, It Confuses People, became a worldwide number one, the call came down the line from the top brass at Sony - “I’m sorry, Sandi, you’re finished.” A difficult second album, one which the artist herself admits was rushed, was all it took, then suddenly the best-made plans of Sandi Thom had come and gone. In the months that followed, Thom contemplated much. Hurt, and with her confidence on the floor, the idea of packing it all in was one that came up more than once. “Confidence was a big thing. I think anybody can relate to it. It’s like losing your job, getting fired - it’s the same feeling, that same sense of rejection. I think no matter who you are in life, that is something that hurts. Your pride get bruised, your confidence take a beating and that hurts. So my confidence did take a knock. In a way, you build a family around you when you are with a label for a while and if you get dropped ’s like finding yourself out in the cold. It look me a few months to come through that, to shake it off and remember why I was in this business in the first place. It took me a while to get that back again. The thing about me is that I was relatively uneducated in the music industry and when things started to happen for me before the first album I didn’t really know what to do. That was a swift learning experience for me, especially dealing with the media.
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