"The album was really a way for me to work through my flaws without it being overwhelming, you know?" says musician Tom Scott. Photo / Michael Craig
Homebrew frontman Tom Scott built a reputation on living fast and burning bright. Now, two years sober and studying a master’s degree in counselling, he’s learning how to pass on the flame, writes Greg Bruce.
We met in fancy Titirangi cafe/restaurant Deco, which struck me as incongruous given he grew up on the tough streets of Avondale, once made a song called Kill the PM, took a goat to the New Zealand Music Awards (where it shat on the red carpet), and dropped an f-bomb live on RNZ before walking out of an interview with Kim Hill.
But life moves on.
Tom Scott is now 41, has two young children and lives in Laingholm, the St Heliers of West Auckland. He is one of only a handful of New Zealand musicians able to make a living entirely from music, with his band Homebrew having made the smart commercial play of buying back the rights to their music after their first album and holding onto them ever since.
Just this year, Scott began studying for a master’s degree in counselling. On the day we met, he had just been to an interview for a job placement. At one point, he says, the interviewer asked what jobs he’d done in the past.
“I was like, ‘None, bro’.”
He’s not doing it for the money. He’s doing it, he says, because he wanted to do some good in the world, something with purpose. As he’s gotten older, he says, he feels like he’s “holding on to fire”.
“You’ve got wisdom that could warm people, or it just burns you. You can get old and washed and bitter and jaded. Or you can use your wisdom and pass it on.”
So this is him, passing it on.
He thinks that, maybe, our constant attempts to fix our problems are the underlying cause for some of said problems. He roleplayed for me an imaginary discussion between two people at the imaginary founding of Buddhism.
Buddhist 1: “What’s the first thing we should write down here, you reckon?”
Buddhist 2: “Just write down that it sucks.”
Buddhist 1: “Oh yeah? That’s the first one is it?”
Buddhist 2: “Yeah. Life is suffering.”
He brought up Buddhism more than once during our interview, so I asked if he meditated. He said:
“Not with my legs crossed on the top of a hill, but I am definitely more aware of things, cognitively. Like I try not to even say, ‘I’ve been thinking’ anymore. I try to say: ‘I had a thought’.”
He thought for a second, then said: “I might even try to stop saying, ‘I feel like’. I might just say ‘I had a feeling’, cause I think a huge part of my f***ing depression, or whatever it is that makes my brain tick the way it ticks, is that it looks for these absolutes. You know? My brain likes absolutes. I’m maybe a romantic in that way.
“I want to feel melancholy, like I want to feel all the depression. I’m going to walk in the rain if something goes even slightly wrong: ‘Let’s self-destruct and sabotage this whole thing’. Instead of just like, ‘Yeah, well that was f***ed up, but you can still…’ You know?”
He says he struggles to admit that life can be nuanced. He’ll tell his partner he loves her and she’ll reply that she loves him too and he’ll reply: “NO BUT I LOVE YOU MORE THAN THE SUN AND THE STARS AND THE MOON!” He says it’s hard for him to admit how nuanced life can be, that his thoughts tend to the extreme and that he has a tendency to catastrophise. He knows, he says, that this is where he has to do the cognitive work.
If he sounds like a philosopher or a psychologist, that may be because, in his early 20s, he got a degree in philosophy and psychology.
Philosophically, he describes himself as “a bit of a determinist”. He says: “I don’t really even know if you can be anything other than what the pool balls have already set you out to be. You know?”
By his own admission, his new solo record ANITYA, which he released in October last year and which he’s touring in May, is less controversial than his previous records, with fewer hot takes and more feelings, of which he has had many since breaking up with the mother of his children three years ago.
“As cliché as it sounds, the album was really a way for me to work through my flaws without it being overwhelming, you know?
“For me, music has always been therapy. There’s nothing that’s changed. If you listen to my music, you’re going to be hearing what I went through. I’m just an autobiographical f***ing writer. It’s all I have to pull from, really.”
He says he was unfaithful to the mother of his children and was responsible for wrecking their bond. In seeking validation from other women, he was, he says, trading one addiction for another: “Searching for something to instantly make me feel good”.
He sought pleasure wherever he could find it, which he now believes was a mistake. “The seeking of pleasure to avoid pain is the fool’s route.”
Holding up his phone, he says, “These things are like f***ing dopamine slot machines, dopamine dealers in your f***ing palm, you know? You can just instantly get a little fix if you check your fake praise, that’s always there on tap if you want to tap into it. I was a pleasure seeker in every way. I think I realised, like, ‘Okay, just because you got clean doesn’t mean the wiring’s gone away’.”
“I haven’t written an essay on my last two years – just an album – but I think part of the conclusion would be something like: ‘You don’t need the validation. You can only give that to yourself.’”
He has two sons, aged 8 and 6. He is worried about the manosphere and its influence on young men.
“These extreme figures create these extreme circumstances that we then idolise and glamourise and romanticise.”
He says the thing he wants most for his sons is self-awareness, maybe because he’s aware he didn’t have enough of it. Understanding the world starts with understanding yourself.
“As much as I thought I was a rebel, I was still being led by big alcohol. I didn’t know alcohol was a pimp until two years ago.”
It was then, a year after his separation, that he got sober and came to understand alcohol’s power over him.
“You just don’t know who’s pulling the strings. So I would just hope that my kids figure out who’s pulling the strings sooner than later and just know themselves enough to not follow things.”
One of the songs on ANITYA is called message 2 miles and it’s a message to his son letting him know the breakup of his parents was not his fault. He lets his son know his dad is flawed and outlines in sometimes painful detail, some of those flaws (“I gotta go and get high every time I get low / That’s my flaw / Soon as s*** gets hard, gotta go and look for a cure / Name it, been hooked on it all”).
The song, he says, is not a “poor me” thing. He is “just trying to break cycles of bulls***”.
At a high level, the creative act of a musical performance or recording sometimes seems like a magic trick; the years of hard work and training subsumed into a few minutes or hours.
Recently, he says, he’s been enjoying demystifying the magic. When working with rangatahi, he says: “I tell them how bullshit it is, tell them that the magic happens with the first thing you write, and maybe you chase that dragon for the rest of your life and you’re never as happy as that first moment”.
He says most people, when learning, want to do the most amazing magic trick they can. His friend, a music teacher, tells him his students always want to learn the hardest guitar solo, the highest trills and so on.
“We’re not happy with: ‘I just got up and wrote today and it was kind of cool and I got it out and it was neither great nor s***’. But that’s where the beauty is, I think, man.”
He tells a story about his sons having to watch him play the video game Street Fighter.
“I’m getting quite good on the online Street Fighter. I’m playing these guys in Japan that are pretty f***ing sharp, so they’re beating me. And I watch my kids watch their father’s invincibility shield fade, you know? And I’m kind of happy that they get to see it early. I want them to know, ‘Bro, your dad’s human’. I want them to know that early, because I remember watching it with my father, the hero that I’d painted him to be. He could not live up to – no one could have lived up to – that expectation.
“It’s all about that magic act that we all want to believe as humans, eh? And that’s again maybe our expectations leading us astray, man. Life is suffering bro. Life ain’t magic bro.”
Tom Scott plays solo shows in Hamilton on Friday, May 1 and Wellington on Friday, May 8. Homebrew plays the Auckland Town Hall on Sunday, May 31.