Tobacco Brown

This transcript has been lightly edited from the original recording for readability. Speaker labels and brief audio notes have been added for accessibility.

Transcript

Cold open

Kevin: What it means to me now is that I’ve always tried to create a sort of open-door policy where anybody can be in Tobacco Brown. Absolutely anybody. My name is Kevin. I’m not Tobacco Brown.

[Music excerpt from Tobacco Brown plays.]

Main episode

Eric Chan: I’m Eric Chan, and you are listening to Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists.

In this episode, I’m joined by Kevin from the band Tobacco Brown. We talk about where music first clicked, how a path through acting school led him to realize music was really the thing, and what Tobacco Brown means now.

Kevin: Learning how to find some notes on a little electric Casio piano with my stepfather, and showing me how to play the first few notes of the theme song to a movie called The Year of Living Dangerously with Mel Gibson. Fabulous theme song, by the way.

It’s nothing fancy, but I don’t know why, but I was like five years old or something, and there was something about those notes together on that little Casio. I was just addicted. So that’s my first memory of hearing a piece of music and kind of being like, oh.

I was very interested in classical when I was a kid. I loved listening to Beethoven and Bach and all that stuff. So those were all an influence on me.

Eric Chan: That connection to music was already there, but the songwriting side came later, and it started with stories.

Kevin: I always loved writing and I always loved drawing as a kid, and I always loved comic books and I loved cartoons. In the newspaper, you’d get two or three cells of drawings, the comic strips, and I was always fascinated by the rule of threes, being able to tell a story in a short amount of time. I was really drawn to songwriting.

It was sort of a lifelong build of drawing and creating stories and making comics, and eventually sort of screenplays. I always loved writing. Then I started playing guitar and they sort of just met each other.

And frankly, I wasn’t very good at learning other people’s songs. I’m still not very good. I was really bad, actually. So it was easier for me to make my own songs and do it that way. Believe me, I love music and I love covering other artists’ songs, but I’m so bad at it that it sounds really weird. It was easier to write my own songs.

[Music excerpt from Tobacco Brown plays.]

Eric Chan: And even now, the way he writes hasn’t completely changed. It’s still about holding onto ideas and coming back to them later.

Kevin: My first song, lyrically, I was probably older, I guess. Music, I was writing when I was 13 or 14, and then I was probably 17 or 18 when I started really writing songs with the intention of them being songs that I would write and perform.

But I’ve changed. I mean, I’ve grown. I’m definitely not the same person. I have to write things down. I have to write them in a notebook. But what has changed for me since my first EP is, I can’t lie, what I’m staring at right now and seeing you looking through is this iPhone. And yeah, the Notes app on my phone, that is a game changer for me.

I recommend that to any songwriter or screenwriter, whatever, just anyone that loves writing. I get an idea in my head and I put it in my notes, and then I can forget about it and come back to my notes and then write it in my notebook, try to memorize it that way.

I have to write my lyrics down or I’ll never remember them. I have to commit them to memory that way. It was the same with acting school, taking theatre and that, learning lines and doing plays. It’s got to be committed to memory somehow. So a few things have changed, but more than anything, it’s definitely me that’s grown.

[Music excerpt from Tobacco Brown plays.]

Eric Chan: Music wasn’t the only path in front of him either. For a while, there was another direction he could have taken.

Kevin: I think acting is an extremely noble profession. I just wasn’t very good at it, to be honest. I was way more interested in playing guitar. I went to theatre school to find out that I actually cared more about music.

It just became very clear to me. If you’re looking at two roads, I liked acting and I liked doing plays and stuff and I love writing, but songwriting, music, and performing music started to become clear to me. I was like, this feels more like a purpose for me. It spoke to me more in ways that… there’s not a part for everybody all the time.

And I was a little impatient maybe, not getting chosen for parts or realizing that maybe I wasn’t a main character in that regard. So it was like, okay, then what can I do? And that’s what I felt like I could do and I was good at. So yeah.

Eric Chan: That choice still shapes the way he approaches music. And in this current chapter, that shows up in the new song “Pretty Blues.”

Kevin: I’m really proud of my new song “Pretty Blues” that I put out with my friend Dan, and which was mastered by Marty, the legend Marty Beck. Thank you.

I’m really proud of this song. It’s a little bit different for me. I have a very eclectic style already, but I’ve never really put something out like this. The inspiration comes from my partner. She had come back from the art store and she had some markers and she said, “Check out these pretty blues that I have.” I just thought that was really, really nice.

I had a melody for a long time and I couldn’t find any lyrics that worked. And then “Pretty Blues,” that just kind of worked. So the lyrics are… there’s a lot of wordplay in regards to colour and certain aspects.

[Music excerpt from “Pretty Blues” by Tobacco Brown plays.]

Eric Chan: But when it comes to the song that means the most, he doesn’t go to the newest release. It goes back to the first one that really felt like his.

Kevin: It’s the first proper song I wrote, and it’s called “Ice Cream Sunday.” I wrote that in between my shift working as a bartender when I moved to England. I was like 18 years old.

To this day, that’s still… that’s my brother’s favorite song of mine. A lot of my friends that know that song and have heard it consistently have said that is my best song. So I won’t say it’s my best song. I don’t know if I have a best song. But that song means the most to me because it was the turning point for me where I wasn’t just playing guitar and messing around with other people’s stuff. That was sort of like, actually, no, I’m kind of doing my own thing.

And people liked it. You know what I mean? I recorded it and I had my friend Al D’Niro play harmonica on it, and it was produced by my friend Ed. It was just kind of lightning in a bottle, you know? It’s not a groundbreaking song. There’s nothing about it that’s particularly avant-garde. But it was the first time I did something and other people heard it and they came back to me and they were like, that’s not bad.

So yeah, that’s the most important one for me, I would say, the first one, because it got me to where I am right now. It kept me going.

[Music excerpt from Tobacco Brown plays.]

Eric Chan: So before he wrapped up, here’s how Kevin sees Tobacco Brown now.

Kevin: The name comes from guitar shopping with a friend one time. I had asked for the cheapest guitar they had, and my friend’s girlfriend worked at this place called Rock Bottom in Croydon, and she said that there’s this ugly-looking tobacco brown guitar in the back. So that’s where the name came from.

But what it means to me now is that I’m always trying to create a sort of open-door policy where anybody can be in Tobacco Brown. Absolutely anybody. My name is Kevin. I’m not Tobacco Brown, you know what I mean?

I like being the songwriter, but I really don’t like the lack of loyalty on that one. So I’ve always tried to have it be like, you don’t have to be at every gig, but as far as I’m concerned, this is like Wu-Tang, man. We could have like 40 people in Tobacco Brown. I don’t care. That part’s awesome to me, the thought of being able to work with loads of different people. That excites me.

So I guess, yeah, I’m a huge music fan and I’ve read a lot about a lot of people that have made a great living doing this, and I’ve tried to learn from that. All I know is that it’s not necessarily always about making the best music, but it is about, do people want to work with you? And that means more to me right now.

So for me, Tobacco Brown has been the passport that got me into some rooms and got me talking to some people, to just kind of get my name out there without it just being Kevin, which is who I am. But Tobacco Brown’s what you’re listening to.

Eric Chan: That’s Kevin from Tobacco Brown. I’m Eric Chan, and you’ve been listening to Inlet Wire, your direct line to BC artists.

[Closing music plays.]

Transcript note

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