Knocked sideways by commercial success, Tom Krell chats to Danny Turner about rediscovering his lost sound on sixth album, I Am Toward You
Hailing from Boulder, Colorado, ethereal songwriter Tom Krell has experienced all sides of the commercial pop terrain. After posting a string of anonymous digital EPs in 2009, critics picked up on his stunning falsetto vocal and melodic, evocative ambience of his debut album, Love Remains. Signing to Domino imprint Weird World Records, Krell’s career took an immediate upward trajectory, with dreamy electro-acoustic pop albums Total Loss (2012) and What Is This Heart? (2014) achieving significant commercial success, dragging Krell into label boardrooms where it ultimately became almost impossible to fully control his artistic direction.
By 2018, How to Dress Well had toured in almost every corner of the globe, albeit rarely staying anywhere for more than 24 hours, and by the time he’d released his fifth album, The Anteroom, Krell had performed 150 solo shows in two years, leaving him exhausted. The follow up, I Am Toward You, has been four years in the making – a period during which Krell reoriented his approach to music-making through meditation and the use of psychedelic medicines. Free of the cynicism residing on some of his earlier material, I Am Toward You is Krell’s most poetic album to date, combining dense guitar distortions, healing synths and meaningful lyrical observations that transcend modern pop tropes.
Your albums have never been just a collection of songs but designed to be more experiential. What set you on this path?
“Initially, my music was very experiential, almost performing a virtual/spiritual function before I started to think about songwriting as a product. The first record, Love Remains, was in that world of experience over commodity, but then I needed to start touring and found myself having to include a couple of big songs on every album, which is when records like What Is This Heart? and Care started to become more song-driven. These days, people have short attention spans and don’t have the bandwidth for an artist with a long career, so my fifth record, The Anteroom, was a really intense return to that experiential method or approach, whereas IAm Toward You is more in the middle. There are definitely songs on the record, but a lot of care has been put into their micro arrangement and the sonic details are overwhelming. The song No Light could be analysed as a pop song, but its sonic characteristics are so intense that it’s more like listening to how much distortion you can put into a beautiful sound without it breaking down.”
What makes you think people are fatigued with artists who have longevity, as opposed to those who si
