Search - Tom McBride :: A Brief Head Spin

Tom McBride's new record, A Brief Head Spin (2011), is his third release, and his first solo full-length record. The musician, singer-songwriter & multi-instrumentalist has logged over 250 shows over the past few years, has been featured at CMJ, Folk Alliance, Dewey Beach Music Fest and in Austin during SXSW, and has had his songs played on radio stations across the country and his songwriting has received recognition within the Mid-Atlantic Songwriters Association.
The Boston native began his songwriting career while living in Nashville, studying music at a conservancy and fronting an alt-country band. Despite transferring out of the conservancy, McBride found rapid success as a front-man, singer and songwriter, resulting in him sharing the stage with recording acts like Guster, Better than Ezra and the Samples, as well as performing at Willie Nelson's Farm Aid and at the Bluebird Café - all before his 22nd birthday. But McBride s familiar story - talented, young, artist studying music, starts band & transfers out of music school - takes a detour when McBride abruptly moved out of Nashville and quit his pursuit of music as a vocation.
"I had a growing regional audience, and we were playing the Exit/Inn and Bluebird Café in Nashville and I just took it all for granted and basically stopped writing and performing. I was young, didn t really have any vision of where I wanted to go, and most notably, I didn t believe at the time that music was all that important to me. I of course found out how wrong I was about that." McBride relocated to Washington, DC and Tom found himself playing intermittent open mics and writing songs during spare time on the weekends. In short, life got in the way, as it s wont to do, and five years of the daily grind ensued until a personal tragedy re-prioritized his life and got him writing again. McBride quickly followed up his staunchly DIY debut, 2008's Headed For, with an emotionally cathartic full-band effort, Like a Lion, in 2009 under the billing Tom McBride & The Whig Party, which became the release that put Tom on the radar outside the DC scene. A Brief Head Spin, his new full-release, and first solo album, now comes full circle acting as McBride s definitive statement for now, as of where he came from and where he goes from here. For the first time, McBride had access to a professional studio to record a wholly solo effort and enlisted production help from long-time friend Sean Greenhalgh of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah as well as Grammy-award winning engineer Stuart Sikes behind the board, best known for his work with Cat Power s The Greatest and Loretta Lynn s Van Lear Rose. For the new album's title track, A Brief Head Spin, McBride found inspiration within Irving Stone s depiction of Vincent Van Gogh's creative struggles in the novel Lust for Life.