Imagine you’re a guy with an acoustic guitar. You practice a lot. You get good. You experiment with every technique you can possibly think of. You record an album, with the goal of getting gigs. It works – a bit too well. You end up touring for several years, performing in countless countries and covering every continent on Earth.
Things are going pretty well by the time you record a solo performance video for a song that, on paper, shouldn’t have commercial appeal. It’s six-and-a-half minutes long, your vocals aren’t auto-tuned so badly that you sound like Hatsune Miku, and you don’t have your hair cut in a trendy style that makes you look like an Iced Gem. But it also goes viral on the back of the fact that by now, you are a legitimate and undeniable Jedi-level virtuoso. Praise comes flooding in from every corner of the world. You win fans as diverse as Stephen Fry and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee.
When you’ve been through a journey like that, and it’s still ongoing, you could probably be forgiven for developing a big head and being a bit of a knob. Jon Gomm, however, remains a true gentleman despite social media success, global popularity, and the fact that his star remains deservedly on the rise. Whether you’re a long-time Gomm fan (Gommaholic?) or just curious, read on as Jon Gomm digs deep into the story behind his new live album Live In The Acoustic Asylum and discusses authenticity, drunk Italian dockers, and the counterintuitive reality of being a bipolar performer…
Your new live album Live In The Acoustic Asylum is out next month. What thoughts and feelings are going through your head right now?
Fear, I guess! Not so much about the album release, but just kind of releasing the songs onto the Internet one at a time – because that’s where they get the most added exposure – and then, you know, are people going to like it, are people going to be into it, is it going to be popular, and all these different things.
It’s a little like being a bird with babies in the nest, and then you push them out pretty much hoping they’ll fly, and if not they’ll go splat on the ground, and you’ll be pretty upset!
How did you go about selecting the songs you recorded for the album?
Well, at my gigs it’s pretty noticeable – particularly in the UK – that there’s generally two kinds of fans Read more…
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Posted on 12 August 2015
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