A 26-year-old former high school jock and bagpipe player from Hamilton, Ont., with a thing for Paul McCartney's music doesn't immediately suggest the kind of act a big label will pin any bottom-line hopes on.
But every once in a while, the songs will out.
And Tomi Swick just might have them.
The songs are what convinced a bunch of Warner Music Canada execs to listen to Swick in their offices after Jen Hirst, an A R rep at Warner, caught the singer-songwriter playing his tuneful set of pop-rockers at the Cameron House in Toronto and suggested that he drop by.
"I was scared s---less," Swick remembered of the impromptu audition.
"I was thinking 'Jen told them about this kid,' but I'm 6'3", I'm 225 pounds. I figured they'd think, 'Who's this guy? He looks like he should be driving a truck or like a lumberjack or something.
But I went in and I said 'I'm here. To hell with it.' And I closed my eyes and played.
That's all I did," he said during a telephone interview. Meetings, demo requests, a Warner deal, a debut album, Stalled Out in the Doorway, and radio rotation quickly followed.
Swick said he was more interested in playing football, basketball, volleyball and soccer when he was growing up in a blue-collar family in Hamilton.
But his home was a musical one, he said, and he played piano and sang in a gospel choir. His Scottish mother was responsible for his learning bagpipes.
When he was 13, his first guitar came along to give the sports some serious competition.
The opening riff from Heaven on Their Minds, from the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, began to obsess the barely teenage musician. "I'd play it over and over and sing that first line, 'My mind is clearer now,' I'd do that for hours on end," he said. The Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical also gave him a feel for the kind of big reprise and climax you can hear in the title song of his album.
Swick's first band, Nimbus - which later became Red Echo - played music reminiscent of alternative rockers I Mother Earth, he said. Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots were the staple musical diet in those days.
The group shopped for record labels, but each one wanted them to sound like Limp Bizkit, according to Swick - and he got feisty on them.
"I basically said 'To hell with that. I'd rather not play.' I was starting to lean more toward lighter stuff anyway," he said.
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