Teddy Thompson: 'You’ve got to lean into change'
Teddy Thompson’s 11th studio album, Never Be The Same, finds the now-50-year-old returning to his singer-songwriter roots after a temporary excursion down country roads.
“For me, country was one of the first things I was into as a kid,” he tells The Yorkshire Post by way of explanation for his 2023 LPs My Love of Country and Once More. “Specifically it was the Everly Brothers, which are not strictly country...they made straight-ahead pop records but the way they sang was so southern so it sounds to our ears totally country, but it’s amazing, there’s no pedal steel, there’s no fiddle on any of those records, at the time that was pop. So that’s where I began.”
During the Covid pandemic – while “not having the songs finished for this record but also not having the motivation to do it during the lockdown period when we were all struggling” – he decided to fill his time working with David Mansfield, a storied musician, composer and producer who’s collaborated with the likes of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash and Nanci Griffith, on My Love of Country, a collection of his favourite country songs.
The pair reconvened for Never Be The Same. “I was more just interested in working with him again...because he’s just an amazing guy all-round and he did such a fabulous job on the country record,” Thompson says. “When you find someone that you’re simpatico with or you work well together, you hang onto that because it’s not easy to find. So I very much wanted to try a record of my own songs with him.”
As is customary for Thompson, Never Be The Same is a record without a purposefully written narrative. “I just write songs as I go – not very fast, but I’m always writing them. But I don’t look at them as having any sort of story or pattern or even subject matter, they just come as they come,” he says. “Often it’s in retrospect once I’ve got them all that I can step back and look at them and get some idea of what I was talking about.”
The album’s title can even be read as a philosphical question that Thompson repeatedly asked himself. “Speaking of not being able to see the forest for the trees, it was only when I’d finished the whole record that I came up with the title because I was typing out the lyrics and I say that – or words to that effect – over and over in the songs: will I ever be the same? or don’t change or please change. Then of course I’m meaning it in different ways in different songs. When I’ve finished it and as I’m going out into the world with this record it’s almost a mantra for myself: never be the same, it’s OK, you have to change, we’re all changing anyway, you’ve got to go with it, you’ve got to lean into change. It’s not easy for many of us, but a good reminder.”
At 50 Thompson is still finding new ways of addressing familiar topics, such as matters of the heart, in his songs. “I think I’m writing much the same type of song about the same type of subject, but that is what most people are doing,” he says. “The great songwriters or artists who we all admire, or the great artists throughout history, I would venture to say, are mostly on the same subject. They’re mostly about love or me me me, they’re writing about what they know and what they feel.
“I think it’s fair to say that I am not reinventing the wheel – and never have tried to, I’m not doing anything radically different sound-wise or structure-wise – but I’m just trying to do it better, and I’m trying to take inspiration really from the craft of doing it, with the knowledge that there’s an infinite amount of improvement to be made, you can keep working within the same parameters and do it better and do it differently every time.”
Age itself has posed interesting questions, he’s found. “Let me just say, I’m against it,” he quips. “That’s a big part of the subject matter (of Never Be The Same) as well. The immediate change that all of us are faced with is the changing of ourselves for the first time, really, so visibly and so noticeably – the beginning of inevitable and continuing change and change that’s becoming more rapid – and there’s no choice. Until you get there you don’t know and you don’t know the next step – but that’s the genius of the design, right? If we knew what it was going to be like, we’d be overburdened by that knowledge. You only know it when you get to it, and you finally learn the meaning of the phrase ‘come to terms with’. You don’t have a choice, you can’t take it out of the equation, so you have to come to an agreement with it and work with it.”
As a songwriter, Thompson has always valued authenticity. He thinks it “fair” to say that it was ingrained in him by his parents, Richard and Linda, who are both revered figures in the folk rock world, but he adds: “Again, I have been learning this lesson along the way, and I’m not saying I had it all figured out. I have certainly been guilty of not being honest and authentic and trying to do other things, maybe putting a bit of filler in the second verse – as you’re learning you think, oh, that’ll do, but that’s just how things go. Certainly now that’s hard-wired into me.
“First of all, I assumed that if you were a musician that you’re going to be writing, so it never occured to be that there was a choice about that – you have to write songs as well as sing them. But if you’re going to write songs there was certainly a bar to measure myself against. When I was younger I didn’t feel the songs were that good, I thought there was good bits of them, but I’ve learned along the way that you’ve got to be honest, you’ve got to be authentic – and mostly because even from a practical point of view, if you’re not then people can tell. It’s just amazing. You can write or sing almost the same words and if you didn’t mean it, if it didn’t come from an honest place, it doesn’t resonate with people. It’s a magic part of music.
“The next thing is you have to sing those words for the next however many decades. There’s nothing worse than getting to verse two of a song you wrote when you were 22 and having to sing these not up to snuff lyrics and thinking, I wish I’d tried a bit harder.”
This month Thompson, who has been resident in the US since his late teens, is touring the UK. He says he’s looking forward to it – even if, he admits, there is “a certain amount of dread”.
“That’s true for anything I have to do. Even if I have to go do the laundry or pick up my dry cleaning tomorrow, there’s a certain amount of dread until I get there...But I’ll be happy to be there, I’m pretty sure.”
Having been touring since the turn of the Millennium, he’s discovered that onstage “it’s lesson about the adrenalin and more about that just being a safe space”.
“When you’re young, it’s a big, scary space, the stage, and then when you do it a lot it flips around and you’re, like, I feel good there, I feel comfortable, I feel loved, I feel like I’m good enough at what I do to know that I can do it and it’s actually where you want to be.”
Never Be The Same is out now. Teddy Thompson plays at All Saints Church, Pocklington on Saturday June 6 and Howard Assembly Room, Leeds on Thursday June 11. https://www.teddythompson.net/