Tom Odell

With Tom fresh back from tour, it’s nice to be able to find a moment of calm to catch up with him while shooting ... We reminisce about the last time we spoke, back during the promotion of his debut album Long Way Down in 2016, and how much has changed in the world since then. One thing, however, that has stayed the same is Toms candidness about his experiences with mental health. “It’s always been important to me. My last record was based on my struggles with anxiety, in particular panic attacks, I had a very severe panic attack problem where I was getting them the whole time. They became quite debilitating, but, you know, I’ve moved into quite a good place. It hasn’t really been much of a problem in the past couple of years. So that’s been positive. But I’m not sure that kind of stuff ever goes away.”

 

With a life mostly lived on the road (minus the two years artists remained home due to the pandemic) I wonder whether his panic attacks were triggered by, and how they fed into that lifestyle.

 

“I was very lucky in a lot of ways in the lockdown because I met my girlfriend, so I wasn’t alone. I’m very lucky to have her. But I guess I had something to get on with, which was music, which I felt very fortunate about.” Although positive he tells me “It was hard at times. I think the strange thing about mental health especially stress, is you don’t always notice it at that moment. I think often afterward, you realise how stressed you were.” Looking back on the pandemic he explains “I was pretty obsessed with the news but I mostly felt lucky, I felt for people that were losing their jobs and weren’t able to go work. And I felt for those people that were alone and those who lost someone.”

 

Tom’s perspective on his battle with stress and panic disorders is something I know so many will be able to connect with and learn from. But it’s a strange, even backwards, logic. “That’s the terrible thing about when you’re going through it, you often don’t even have a name for it at the time. You just feel that something’s wrong. That’s why I think it’s so positive to talk about it because when you give it a name, you identify something that isn’t necessarily you, it takes the problem out of yourself and puts it elsewhere, which I think for me was helpful. For years, I tried to deal with panic attacks and anxiety, I just thought that was just the way I dealt with things. So working through it by writing and talking about it publicly, I think has really helped ease a lot.”