Quannum Projects’ Lyrics Born (AKA Tom Shimura) once again returns to Adelaide but this time he has a new album in the bag Everywhere At Once.

Lyrics Born’s I Like It, I Love It

With his new album Shimura remained dedicated to the Australia-perfected ‘serious business of having a good time’, but in making Everywhere At Once, he pursued the art with a live band. Shimura says the process has been fun and rewarding, but making funky music ‘the old fashioned way’ has presented the LBs with some serious challenges.
“My musicians always tell me that playing my music is incredibly hard. And I ask, ‘Why? It’s just the same loop over and over again!’ And they said that it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to play the same thing over and over without overplaying, that’s a real challenge.”
Lyrics Born will be touring Australia with a live band and he says another challenge he had when approaching the new album was a way of getting deeper and putting more of himself into the record. Something he’s attempted after realising that, as hard as they bumped and swung, his previous records might have lacked personal depth.
“A lot of my favourite artists really put a lot of themselves into the record, which can give you the perspective of ‘Wow, that guy had a lot of challenges, but he came out the other side victorious’. And that’s really inspiring to me… So getting personal was a way to show growth, to challenge myself.”
Naturally, the depth that’s Shimura has tried to put into Everywhere At Once comes from the issues that he’s been struggling with. When I speak to him, one of the big ones that recurs is the idea of leaving a mark, building a legacy.
“I feel like I may be multi-talented and may be capable a variety of different things, and I may even be able to do some of them well, it would take away from my primary course. I’ve been approached to do clothing lines, movies, all that kind of stuff. That’s cool, I have done some of it, and I would like to do more, but I have this picture in my mind of where I wanna be and the legacy I wanna leave.”
For Shimura, the idea of the ‘legacy’ provides a way of clearing all the debris off the ‘primary course’.
“When that’s clear in your mind, everything just sorta falls into place. And when that happens, all the names you’ve been called, it doesn’t matter – it all falls into place, when you have this kind of goal. If you’re trying to make history, trying to leave a legacy, then all the difficult conversations, all the criticisms, it doesn’t even matter, it just becomes small by comparison.”
Peter Chambers
Lyrics Born plays the Electric Light Hotel on Wed Aug 6. Everywhere At Once is out through Shock.