About two years ago, Tom Scott finished work on a new album. Called “Average Man”, it was to be the first released under his own name. The award-winning and outspoken frontman for Home Brew, @Peace and Avantdale Bowling Club believed he’d captured the kind of raw, unfiltered snapshots of the life he’s become known for. When he played it to his manager, the late Lorraine Barry, she told him he’d made a masterpiece. “She was like, ‘This is the greatest,’” Scott says.
Then Scott played it to someone else. At the time, Scott’s relationship with his wife, the mother of his two sons, was in trouble. His new album addressed what they were going through, making constant references to the mistakes he’d made. “It was these love songs, not just singing, but a bunch of shit about infidelity, trauma, holding the relationship together,” he says. Scott’s wife had a different opinion to Barry’s. “She was like, ‘I [don’t want] to hear that,’ and rightfully so,” Scott says.
Out of deference, Scott put the album on hold. Then he embarked on the hardest two years of his life. His marriage fell apart. He got sober. He started seeing a therapist and began to unravel his past, learning why he was the way he was. Along the way, he realised his ex was right: the album he’d made “wasn’t done well”. It didn’t capture what he’d really been through, and what he’d learned over the past two years. Now, he says, he’ll never release it. “It let heaps of people down [but] at least it didn’t shit all over my ex,” he says.
So Scott recorded a different album. This one, called Anitya, the Sanskrit word for impermanence, comes from a different place, capturing an unseen side of Scott. It’s brutally intimate, full of insights from his new reality – one that captures the hurt that he caused but also includes time to examine new love. “This album, there’s a bit more thought to other people’s feelings,” he says. It’s a jarring listen. Scott sings far more than he raps, sometimes sweetly, often sadly. One song tells his kids why their parents can’t be together. Another apologises to his ex. “When I come to get the kids, I’ll just beep,” he mourns, forlornly, on the first single, ‘Till Then. “Promise you I won’t call you no more.”
Anitya was such a difficult album to make, Scott wondered whether he should just keep it for himself. It felt too personal. “When you start writing these things, it’s really scary. It’s like you’re opening Pandora’s box. This is more ownership of my behaviour than ever,” he says. Finally, he decided it scared him so much he had to put it out. “I was like, ‘Will other people want to listen to this?’ That’s when it felt I’d done something right,” he says.
To promote it, Scott decided he’d play just a handful of shows. At the first, for about 80 people crammed inside Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studios, Scott sat on a stool and warned the crowd, “I’m not going to rap.” He told them his new songs were like “gazing into a house fire … it’s everything I’ve been through”. The following hour was a searingly intense and emotional experience for everyone in that room – including Scott, who admits he felt terrified about singing his new songs for the first time. “Certain things are so strong [they] zap me back to that place,” he says.
After the show, he felt so overwhelmed he disappeared immediately. No one could find him. He’d run out of the studio, jumped in his car and gone straight home, a man alone, feeling all the feelings.
Scott is telling me all this with a baseball cap jammed tightly on his head while slumped in a chair. We’re sitting in the middle of Auckland’s Civic Theatre which is otherwise empty. Scott talks softly, almost in a whisper. “I know how to be loud, I know how to get attention,” he tells me. At some point it feels like a cheat code, it’s so played out.”
In the past, Scott has been the loudest in any room, on any stage. His past is littered with headline-grabbing antics, like the time he took a goat to the Aotearoa Music Awards, released a song called Kill the PM, walked out of an interview with Kim Hill, or leaked his DMs with then-prime minister Jacinda Ardern. Controversy was part of the package. My ears still reverberate from his antics at Womad in 2023 where, at a family-friendly festival, Scott demanded the speakers be turned up to piercing levels, then fired shots at the night’s headliners, Fly My Pretties.
Yet, with all that agitation, there have been accolades for his impressive catalogue. Scott holds the record for the most Taite Music Prize nominations for best album – six – an award he finally won in 2019 for Avantdale Bowling Club’s debut, which also took home Album of the Year at the Aotearoa Music Awards, ahead of records by Marlon Williams, The Beths and others.
He’s had three No 1 albums, and still regularly tours and makes music with his original group, Home Brew. That includes the introspective and acclaimed 2023 album Run It Back, made around the same time as the album Scott scrapped.
Scott achieved all this by being ferociously aggressive, pushing boundaries, and challenging himself, often while drinking heavily. (Of last year’s Home Brew song Drinking In the Morning, Scott says the title reveals “how that song came to be”.) Scott tells me he’s more than 600 days sober, remains in therapy, and has arrived fresh from a yoga class. It’s only now, he says, that he can put the past two years into context, to look at the wreckage with fresh eyes. “You’re not supposed to look up until you get to the other side of the tightrope,” he says.
These insights are from Scott’s therapy sessions, where he has dated his attention-seeking behaviour back to his childhood. He believes he’s wielded it like a weapon ever since. “We all find ways to be seen. It’s a skin. It’s a formula for one part of life,” he says. Now, he doesn’t feel the need to do it any more. “You get to another stage of life and you’re like, ‘Actually, what I need to do most is give up, to let go, to tell yourself It’s enough now,’” he says. “I’ve been seen. I don’t need that defence mechanism any more.”
These sound like the words of someone thinking about moving on. Is Scott saying he’s done with music? He considers the question while staring at the stage he will soon perform on. He doesn’t want to say the answer out loud in case he can’t change his mind. Finally, he admits “transitioning out of this gracefully” is a thought he’s having a lot. “That’s something I’m definitely dealing with,” he says. “Am I supposed to keep going? Is there another thing I’m supposed to be doing? Is this exactly where I’m supposed to be?”
He doesn’t answer his questions. They sit there, hanging in The Civic’s dead air.
The past two years haven’t been all doom and gloom. After the break-up, Scott found love and is in a new relationship with Sarvi Dousti, a local soul singer who performs under her first name. Recently, they shared photos from a world trip that included a Lakers game in Los Angeles, watching sunsets in the desert and dancing together. Scott captures this on the second side of the album, which is far more upbeat than the first. He hums and he coos, often. The music, supplied by an ensemble of 30, is silky and smooth R’n’B. “Baby, let’s have a baby, before Trump does something crazy,” he whispers at one point.
Soon, Scott will display these dual storylines on The Civic’s stage. There, he’ll play Anitya in full, the one and only time he says he’ll do this. That’s because he believes this is the pinnacle of what he wants from his music career. “This does feel like the climax,” he says. “I don’t know if it ever needs to get bigger than this.” His words trail off. “If you can’t tell yourself that’s enough at this stage.”
Afterwards, Scott’s not sure where he’s going. He suggests he could work with at-risk youth, write a screenplay or be part of a team, something that doesn’t have his name, his reputation and his baggage front and centre. “I could keep competing against my previous accomplishments, look for a bigger theatre, but also it’s time to just chill,” he says.
Scott is sitting forward now. He seems lighter, as if a load has lifted. His arms fold over the seat in front of him and, for the first time in our interview, he raises his voice, as if he wants his words to be remembered. “I don’t know how this interview turned into a retirement speech,” he says. Scott pauses and gazes around the room again. Then he says: “I don’t think that there’s anything after this.”
Anitya is out now; Tom Scott plays The Civic Theatre, Auckland, on November 1.