Many people would agree that life in London is practically the polar opposite from life in Los Angeles. From the obvious cultural and social distinctions to the dissimilarity in weather patterns - Southern California's year-round and temperate conditions compared to England's dreary fog and rain - the two cities seem worlds away from each other.
For the English-born songwriter Tom McRae, Los Angeles, specifically the Los Feliz and Silverlake areas, became his home for a year as the setting and recording base for his most recent album, "Just Like Blood."
"If you're an artist, you're always searching for situations where you're new, where you feel like a beginner," said McRae. "For every part of life in which you feel settled and comfortable, that's a dangerous time. You want to always push yourself into new areas and that's why I moved to L.A. for a year. I wanted to be somewhere where I would almost have to start again from scratch with different influences."
The Beach Reporter talked to McRae by telephone during his small West Coast tour while he was in Seattle where he said the northwest city, like most days, was gray and overcast.
"It's looking like it might rain and after spending a year in L.A., to me that sounds like heaven right now," he said.
McRae relocated to Los Feliz at the beginning of the year. He eventually met a group of local musicians who all decided to move into a house in Silverlake where he made the record.
"That part of Los Angeles is great. It's really hard to find places that are like neighborhoods in L.A. Los Feliz is like a little neighborhood and Silverlake is just great. There's so much going on; you can walk around to a lot of places so it almost felt like home" said McRae. "I think everything you do inspires you and sort of informs you of your next songwriting phase. I was touring a lot with the first record, and you meet different people and see different things. I wanted an album that reflected that, and reflected a slight disconnection from the world and the life I had known. It's all those feelings and experiences of traveling and leaving things behind - a world of perpetual motion, really."
McRae released his debut, self-titled album in 2000 that later won him a Mercury Music Prize, an award sponsored by the Nationwide Building Society in the United Kingdom. An independent panel of judges selects a handful of records as "Albums of the Year" and then meets again the night of the awards to choose an overall winner of the prize. Badly Drawn Boy's "Hour of the Bewilderbeast" won it in 2000. Since 1997, the Mercury Music Prize has been one of the UK's most prestigious awards.
McRae then followed up his debut with "Just Like Blood." In between works, McRae spent the majority of his time on the road playing all over Europe and America. Just in the same way London inspired the first album, the experiences on the road were what gave McRae material for his second, especially small industrial U.S. towns along with the off-the-beaten-path locales in Los Angeles, which McRae described as "... places in L.A. where it's just insane."
"Having never been to America up until that point (a North American tour that followed McRae's debut), it was a whole adventure for me," said McRae. "It was amazing to see places like L.A., Chicago, New York, but also tiny out-of-the-way places as well. Finding out about this country was all a part that went into making the record."
McRae's latest work is even darker and more romantic than its predecessor. It serves as a musical testament to his exploration into a more expansive sound and style. McRae expands on his affinity for themes stemming from displacement and unhappiness based on the yearning of escape. It's similar to that of the first album but rather expressed from the post-flight perspective. It centers on the idea of finally achieving breakout only to discover that the feeling of discontent is still present. It's the notion of chasing after something that always seems just out of reach.
"I think people listen to my songs for different reasons at different times in their life and if you write sort of melancholy music, it doesn't necessarily mean you are a manic depressive. You're expressing that part of life," said McRae. "In doing that, the same way you put on a sad album, it kind of gives you hope and I'm not sure why. Some people say it makes you feel that you are not alone. I'm not sure if that's true. I think there's something notable about hearing someone translating that sad energy into something else. You sing about it, you change it and it automatically becomes hopeful because if you were really in despair, you'd just go ahead and shoot yourself. It's all about trying to turn bad energy into good energy."
"Just Like Blood" is your standard gloom-and-doom record from a depressed singer/ songwriter and perhaps that is why McRae is so often compared to the genius of Nick Drake who gave the term despair a whole other meaning. But in the midst of all the darkness, there is something tenderly uplifting in both Drake and McRae's tunes - everyone can connect or identify with the life of a troubled person, and in some way can learn from another's heartaches. It's the age-old concept that we are not alone in our struggles.
"I think if you're happy, you're in the moment, and happiness is really nebulous and hard to pin down," said McRae. "When you try and sit down and write about those times, it never really works for me. It always sounds false, like you're deliberating trying to sound nostalgic whereas painful times seem to linger for longer and you carry them with you because there are more lessons involved."
The 28-year-old McRae grew up in a rural village in Suffolk, a town without a pub but with two operational churches and a total population of 250 people. McRae's parents, both of whom were vicars, split when he was 8 and he went to live with his mother. It became McRae's self-proclaimed destiny to leave his hometown and move to the cultural and urban hub of England: London.
"I've been sort of terrified of being in the countryside now for years," said McRae. "As soon as I leave the city and I leave anywhere that has high-rise buildings, and I start to see too much sky and too much of the horizon, I get scared. I want to feel claustrophobic and paranoid, it makes me feel at home right now."
McRae eventually moved to London as a young adult and set out to form a band. He later signed a deal with db Records and recorded his debut. On "Just Like Blood," McRae touches upon the flaws in contemporary culture and society on several songs like "Karaoke Soul."
"Every aspect of our society and culture has now been reduced to a competition with predetermined results, much like American elections," explained McRae. "Pop music is an interactive soap opera. TV and newspapers are celebrity court circulars telling us what the new kings and queens of light entertainment are up to now."
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