Swansea born Tom Emlyn is one of the most prolific and inventive songwriters to emerge from Wales. Tom crafts honest, swirling evocative songs; tall tales, and dark jokes that cut straight to the bone. His current solo work maps an alternative Southwalian landscape, a hallucinated community drawn from psychogeography and local history. Written on foot and by bus, his observational, poetic lyrics and simple 60s-folk-influenced melodies explore what it means to belong to a place. Tom has been comapred to Bob Dylan or Elliot Smith.

Emlyn says: “This was a song I wrote after I came back from traveling in about 2015. It was a bit of a prototype for some of my other songs like Empire or Under the Weather, which try to use the Welsh landscape as a metaphor for a breakup. It’s not really as biographical as it sounds, there’s a lot of fiction in there too. It also deals with the choices you make in life and realising that there are many ways to look at a situation. It’s quite conversational and imagistic.”

Tom also announces details of a new album to be released on the 5th of May, ‘Return Journey Revisited: Scaredycat Vol. 15’. This album is a treasure trove of captivating songs dating to between 2016 – 2018.

Of the album Tom says:
“Abandoned work is a normal part of the music-making process, but I felt these songs deserved a second chance. I also wanted to release it as a (small) protest against certain smoke-and-mirrors aspects of the music industry. People will tell you to wait and wait, hold back all of your material for the “right time”. I can’t do that anymore; for me, a song is only new when it’s just been written, although it can be remade in live performance. I find it quite agonising to sit on this material for so many years. I’ll be thirty in 2023. That’s why I want to get this sizeable backlog of unheard material out there, so I can move on to new things, and that’s why this is the third album I’ve released in a year.”

“There were many people involved in these tracks – different engineers, studios, producers, and musicians in Swansea and Cardiff. I think the album has a unified feel despite being a bunch of stuff that was recorded in various studios and spaces, before being rescued from the cutting-room floor. It’s a bit of a lighter, ironic affair, full of magic realism and surreal images of the natural world, half-acoustic and half-electric, with an eclectic, eccentric, sprawling feel. Scraped from the bottom of a very deep barrel – but somehow holding together.” 

Emily Marsden – Editor
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