the time he moved to L.A. and got his heart broken. He played slow because it was the only way he could; he sang like a guy trying because he was. The Bigfoot show isn’t that, and not just because Tobias is dressed as a Sasquatch – it’s a cabaret sound: more professional and slick, but more ordinary also. More than that, he’d arrived at a point where he was covering other people’s material. This, from a guy who was so desperate to have his music heard he reluctantly decided to sing the songs himself because nobody else would. “As a songwriter first, I don’t know how to describe it,” he says. “I imagine what I do in a very specific way – songwriting is all I like and all I care about. If I was to describe myself, it would be as a songwriter, there would be no ‘singer’ attached. No ‘singer’ slash…, no nothing; it would just be ‘songwriter’. So I feel that there’s a very specific way to showcase that to the world. It’s definitely an indie thing, it’s not a mainstream thing – it’s for people who appreciate songs, for their structure and their lyrics. And I think that playing solo is the ultimate way to hear a songwriter play. “I was a big fan of Girls, but I would really, really hold onto a Christopher Owens show, of just him. I got a little lost along the way, and it was like, the shows are going to get bigger, so we need the sound to be bigger… and I was so insecure about playing shows that we added a band. “It was great for my confidence level, but it lost a bit of that identity. I was like: ‘Wait, now I’m trying to be a singer, because I’m trying to play with a band, and my voice has to be as powerful as this band that’s backing me up’, so the sound has to grow so we need to rearrange the songs, and at that point everything I’ve tried to hang onto as my core, the core is hollow now and I’m trying to be an act.” He sounds exasperated at the explanation, like a man who had stopped respecting his own songs in an attempt to fall in line with how he felt half of the audience were feeling. Whilst he had been petrified alone onstage, at least he knew that the people in front of him were there for the songs, because there really wasn’t anything else to be there for. Once you’ve got a kick-ass show band, the songs themselves, say Tobias, are buried under a hundred other elements that people can enjoy almost in isolation. He says it felt like there were those who’d come to hear the songs, and
those that were there enjoying the band. “And I guarantee that the people who came to see the band, if they saw me solo they’d be disappointed. I’m not interested in those people because they are not my fans – they are not the people who are interested in what I do and what I’m about. Those are people who just like a sound that comes from a full band – it could be my songs, it could be anybody’s songs, and that’s not as special to me as someone who says, I just like his songs. That’s someone who I want as a fan because that’s someone who I am as a fan.
“There are those people who are just like: ‘Oh, I heard this on the radio…’” he says. “All the power to those people, I love them, but they’re not the kind of people who make me feel good about what I do – they are the people who think I need singing lessons, secretly.” I ask him if he’s now considering reverting back to his original plan of writing songs for pop stars and retiring from his brief career in front of the music. God knows that the Adele effect would allow it. “The songwriting thing is
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something I feel great about,” he says, “and it’s going to be very important to me and my happiness, but there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to give up on the touring just because I didn’t have a good run of it the first time around, because I didn’t write good songs for the first four years of my life. Every time I cancel a show I’m burning a bridge, though, I know that much. But who knows, I’ll give it some time, and it’s better than suffering.” “Do you know what my ultimate would be?” he says. “That if I had a steady job playing at the same place
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