TOTAL TOMMY

Girl, Interrupted 

Sometimes we can get caught in a cycle with vices that give a temporary dopamine hit but then make you feel like trash the next day. Maybe it’s a substance, or a person you use for a quick fix and then discard because you never had the capacity to commit. That whole ‘shadow side’ of our personalities that can be quite dark and confronting to admit. A nod to the film, of course. Love you Winona. 

Pretty Little Mouth 

Pretty Little Mouth is a play on the saying ‘butter wouldn’t melt’. I wrote the line ‘smoke wouldn’t leak from her pretty little mouth’ in reference to a love-bomber. It’s about falling easily but ultimately getting hurt just as quickly when you get spat back out. This happened to a friend of mine recently, and this song is my dead-pan, not so serious take on it all. 

Trapezoid

Trapezoid is the title track of my album and was the song that unlocked the entire theme of the record. I love the double meaning of the word. Anatomically, it’s the smallest bone in the hand, and without it we wouldn’t have grip or dexterity. The smaller things make up the bigger picture kinda thing. It’s also a shape, parallel but tilted. I’ve always been meticulous with symmetry and things being perfect, but have slowly learnt to let go in the last year or so. I’m leaning into the off-kilter, and trying to let go a little more. For me personally, this meant accepting the things that make me who I am, and not forcing myself to change them. 

Gutterball 

My wife and I wrote Gutterball over a weekend away down on Sydney’s south coast. It was raining and we were drinking wine, dreaming about the adventures we wanted to take together but the timing wasn’t aligning for us with our own priorities in that particular year. There was a sense of frustration on both sides, each wanting a bit of a shake up from our daily lives but knowing we both couldn’t just yet. ‘You’re a perfect strike and I’m a gutterball’ is in reference to the voice of reasoning that makes you stay focused and on course, and the other voice that makes you want to sway completely. It’s a little self-depricating – the impulsive character thinking they know it all, and the balance of the more grounded and sensible one. 

Winona Forever

Winona Forever was written on my last day in London on a writing trip with my friends and long time collaborators John and Mark. We only had four hours in the studio before I had to head to the airport, and this time pressure actually worked in our favour because the lyrics just had to just come out and I had minimal time to finesse and reword them. I was missing home and was sick of timezones and talking through a screen. There’s a picture of Winona Ryder that I’d seen earlier that day where she’s on a bike outside a block of high rise buildings, and the imagery of that inspired me so much of how small we all are in the expanse of a city. How it’s easy to lose your identity quickly when you’re not surrounded by the people who really know you. I think I was feeling a bit lost on this particular trip, but I’m glad this song came out of it. 

City of Mannequins

I wrote this song about feeling like you’re in a city of shiny babes who have no substance. I was starting to feel a little bored, watching cool places close down all around me, friends moving to other cities, and lock out laws killing nightlife. Sometimes major cities trick you into thinking you’re falling behind if you can’t keep up with the pace. There’s a chaoticness in energy to this song, the way societal pressures can make you feel. 

Bloodshot

This song is about our ability to compartmentalise hurt and how certain sounds can trigger memories. I wrote Bloodshoot with Es.cher and he started fingerpicking the most insane mid-west emo kind of riff, which somehow took me right back to a really wild experience I’d had but never properly dealt with or processed. I hope this song encourages people to open up to their friends more and also check in with them. 

Nosedive 

There was a time last year where I was drinking a lot and got stuck in a bit of a cycle. I wrote this song during a time where I felt like I kept letting myself down and the people around me. It feels like a spiralling lullaby, a work in-progress DIY project or something. I can hear now how I was trying to work through everything and the inner monologue I was having as I grappled with myself. 

Tearjerker

Tearjerker goes hand in hand with Nosedive, which is why it felt important to put them next to each other on the record. It’s that same cycle of drinking, swearing you’ll stop doing it, and then un-doing it all again. But hey, I broke the habit. That’s called self-improvement. 

Out of Frame

Just a little love song, ya know. This one is very lesbian-coded, and how hard we can fall so quickly. It’s a real skill tbh. That all-encompassing syrupy, sticky kinda love. 

Tailgate

A couple of years ago, I jumped in an Uber on the way to a wedding, and the driver told me she was a psychic. She then proceeded to ‘read’ me, glaring at me in the back seat from the rearview, telling me all of these crazy things that would happen to my family. Complete unsolicited advice. I left feeling so spun out and violated. All of the things she said sometimes still come into my mind to this day, but this song makes me feel like I’ve taken some of that power back from her.