Traversing 'Territories' with Tom Goss

Out singer-songwriter Tom Goss has just brought out his sixth studio album, "Territories," a vibrant collection of songs that ranges from his signature ballads to upbeat Zydeco to atmospheric, jazz-tinged work. It's perhaps his most eclectic work to date, but it's also his most unified in that the album is built around a specific theme: His life experience, over the past few years, with polyamory. (Click here to read the EDGE review of the album.)

Goss talked with EDGE in depth a few months ago about the journey he's been on, and now - with the release of his newest album - he sits down once more to serve up the tea on the stories behind each track.

EDGE: You've worked with producers over the years that have brought out different colors in your work. Much like your last album, "Territories" has diverse sounds and lush, layered production. Who did you work with for this new album?

Tom Goss: Ian Carmichael produced "Territories," and Ian Carmichael is brilliant. He did a couple of remixes for me in 2014 for "Wait." He did remixes of "Breath and Sound" and "Worst of Me," and I just loved his work. Over the years as we've become friendly, and even though we hadn't met, I was intrigued by the use of space, the shapes of the sounds that he was using, and his sparse, yet effective production choices. So when I started writing "Territories," I thought there was something interesting and I thought there was something there, but I knew I needed to bring somebody on who understood the sound we were going for – and I couldn't stop thinking about Ian. So I sent him my demos, flew to Manchester, and had lunch with him. We talked about what was going on in my life, and what was going on in his life, and the sound that I was looking to achieve – we were connecting on all cylinders. Working with Ian has been unlike any collaborative experience I've ever had. I felt so safe and protected.

EDGE: The theme of "Territories" is your exploration of a polyamorous relationship; different facets of that journey are present in every song. Have you written whole albums to specific themes before now, or was this a new process for you?

Tom Goss: No, the process for this record was very, very different from anything I've ever done before. There was a lot about the writing that was different than before. Interestingly enough, this experience that I've been having for the past three or four years now gave me enough material for a lifetime – the strange conversations that I get in, and the feelings that I have that I am not really equipped to deal with, because nothing in society is equipping us to deal with it. So it's been really intriguing to explore these ideas. I had written a whole record between "What Doesn't Break" and "Territories" that just is never gonna see the light of day. "Be Somebody" is really the only leftover from that period. Then I wrote "Berlin," "One Plus Two," and another song, which I can't remember right now.

EDGE: So, like many songwriters, you do have a trunk of songs you may not ever release or even record.

Tom Goss: Oh, hundreds and hundreds. There's a reason why they don't get released – because a lot of them aren't good.

[Laughter]

Tom Goss: That record just had not... it would have just been sad. That's not really what I want to put out in the world – a bunch of songs about my world falling apart and me being defeated. I don't think that the world needs that.

EDGE: But you've come out the other side of that and it seems like you are not defeated – maybe you're not triumphant yet... or maybe you are!

[Laughter]

EDGE: But there's light at the end of that tunnel.

Tom Goss: I'm not even sure it's a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm not sure the journey is ever finished. But I do agree with you in the sense that we are making our bed and we are lying in it, and I think that's a really interesting place to sit and explore. It might not be the resolution at the end that everybody wants, but there are a lot of really interesting questions that pop up along the way, and I think that this record is far more about the interesting questions than it is about producing, or trying to produce, any answers.

EDGE: Since you've brought up the subject of sad songs, let's talk about "Uneven," which is a very sad song – I think it might be the saddest song I've ever heard from you. Was that song one of your first responses to this new place you found yourself in?

Tom Goss: No – in fact, "Uneven" was one of the last songs written for this record. I had played this gig in Las Vegas and we were driving back from the gig, and we got into a fight. You know when you're in a long rough period with your significant other, someone that you love, and there are these fights or these discussions that seem to be cyclical. You have them over and over again, and there's never any resolution, simply because your perspective is so different. Try as you might to understand the other person's perspective, it doesn't ever really become your own. At the time, a lot of the fights were just about my husband feeling threatened about the depth of my love for another person. I wanted to write "Uneven" to speak to the sadness in how our relationship changed, but more than that to speak to how it hadn't changed. Even in my deepest sadness, I would still have deep love.

I didn't sleep that night. We got home at midnight and then I stayed up all night writing and recording that song. It was actually Ian's idea to start the record with that song because it's so simple and so stark, and such a cue to the listener that you're about to experience something different from Tom Goss. I think it's really effective in doing that.

EDGE: Listening to "Uneven," I found myself thinking back to probably the angriest song you ever wrote, "Someone Else," from your previous album "What Doesn't Break." I wonder: Was "Someone Else" a first reaction to your husband wanting to open things up? Was that, like, your hot take?

Tom Goss: No, not at all. "Someone Else" is one of the few songs that I've released that I have no personal connection to. It's just a story I thought up. Honestly, it was me trying to figure out how to use my brand new loop pedal. I found this riff, started looping and just started singing over it. Simple as that.

EDGE: Let's talk about your video for "La Bufadora." The song itself struck me as being about jealousy, but the video is about domestic abuse within a same-sex relationship, so I wonder how those two themes got melded together.

Tom Goss: It's interesting that you say that because the song really is about jealousy and a lot of perspective-shifting that was happening in my writing of the song. When I was making the record I sent the full record to Michael Serrato, who directed that video and who has directed a lot of videos for me ("Son of a Preacher Man," "Breath and Sound") and we've made some really powerful work together. He's definitely my most trusted visual collaborator. I gave him the choice of what he wanted to do, which story did he want to tell, and which song did he want to use to tell it? He quickly fell in love with "La Bufadora," and we started working on it. I remember we were at a party; it was a Friday night; he said, "I love 'La Bufadora,' " and I said, "Before you say anything else, we have to go to Mexico. I have to show you this place." And he said, "Okay, when?" I said, "I can go on Sunday."

[Laughter]

Thirty-six hours later we hopped in a car and I took him down to Mexico, and I showed him those ruins that you see all over the video. We were staying next to those ruins, and I was showing him all of the places that inspired "La Bufadora." Everything in the video visually was based on places I had been, and he immediately fell in love with Mexico. We started talking about the song; the song really is about the explosiveness that you have with a loved one – the ebb and the flow and the anger. I think that Michael's interpretation of it is easier to digest; it's easier to understand than the exact [meaning behind] how it was written because he essentially takes the narrative and puts it into the first person, which I think [makes it] a more cohesive story. And, frankly, it's a story that needs to be told. Both Michael and myself have always wanted to be true to the stories of our community, and we've also wanted to tell the stories that nobody else was brave enough to tell, and that's what we set out to do with "La Bufadora." I think we did it really well – I'm proud of the video we made.

EDGE: You recorded a Spanish language version of that song. Do you speak Spanish, or did you have to get the lyrics translated and then kind of do your best with singing them in a different language?

Tom Goss: I don't speak Spanish. My brother is an interpreter... both of my brothers are interpreters, and they are both married to Latina women. One's from Guatemala, and one's from Colombia. And so I worked really closely with my brother – we talked a lot about interpretation, what each interpretation meant, and landed on a version we thought fit best. It was beautiful to be a part of. Then I went into the studio when I was home for Thanksgiving. We booked a studio in Milwaukee and I brought my brother and his wife. We spent three hours recording a three-minute song because my accent was so bad!

[Laughter]

Tom Goss: It was a lot of recording one line at a time and adjusting my accent and pronunciation., I loved doing it – I had wanted to do a song in Spanish for so long. I'm grateful to have been able to do that and more grateful to have been able to do that with my brother.

EDGE: But with some practice, maybe you'll be able to offer the song in Spanish at live shows? Is that something fans might have to look forward to?

Tom Goss: I sang a bit of it in Spanish at my Chicago show last week where family was in the audience. I thanked my brother and sang the first verse and chorus in Spanish. My mom loved it, she was yelling from the audience to do the whole thing in Spanish.

EDGE Let me ask you about "Berlin." That song tore my heart out, Tom! Was that the reaction you wanted with this song? Is that how you were feeling when you wrote it?

Tom Goss: I'm not sure I've spent a lot of time thinking about what reactions I want from the listeners. I think I wrote this song because at the time I needed to write it and I had never heard anything like it. I wanted to be true to the experience that I was having.

You know, look... when you realize that your significant other is being unfaithful to you, our society tells us that you do one of two things: You lock it down, you put him or her on a leash, you question all of their motives for the rest of your life, and you live with resentment. The other option is you cut all ties, and you move on to another person. Neither of those options seemed viable to me. What did seem viable to me was to try to understand where my husband was coming from – to try to understand the journey that he was having, both emotionally, personally, and sexually – and try to be a supportive husband through that journey.

Now, that also meant that I was also going to be sent on a journey of my own, and I didn't really know where that was going to take me. I didn't have any idea what I wanted. I thought (and planned for) that I was gonna get married and we were gonna have a family, and we were gonna live happily ever after. I think that's probably what most people expect. But life is complicated, and that's why the majority of relationships end in divorce.

So, "Berlin." I had met this guy, and he was really sweet, he was really wonderful. And he lived very far away, and I lived very far away, and it was never my intention to engage in any sort of long-term relationship with this person, obviously, because I'm married. But we had met once in Washington, D.C., and six months later we were in Toronto at the same time, and he invited me to Europe for a weekend. It seemed like an outrageous idea to me, but my entire life was an outrageous idea at that point, and so to me it felt like, "If we're having these outrageous experiences with other people, and we're exploring what relationship could mean, and what sexuality could mean, and what our lives actually look like, then why would I say no to this offer?" You know?

I talked about it with Mike, and a month or so later I boarded a plane to Berlin and I spent probably not even forty-eight hours in Berlin before coming home to Los Angeles. A ten-hour, eleven-hour flight.

[Laughter]

Tom Goss: And I fell in love that weekend. We spoke briefly about how this album was written differently [from my earlier work] – one of the ways it was written differently was the lyrics were written first. The story was almost always written first. And I remember writing that song while I was in Berlin having this experience and writing the final verse on the Uber ride back to the airport and knowing that I had just experienced something that had already changed my life and was about to change my life even more. And that's amazing! It's amazing to realize, in the same way that my husband had a realization that he needed something that wasn't being provided in [our] relationship, whether that was emotional or sexual or whatever that was, it was amazing for me to have that same realization that there was something that I could glean from this open relationship. I could learn things from other people in a very deep and real way, and that's really what the song is about.

EDGE: No Tom Goss album lacks tenderness, and on "Territories" the most tender song, I think, is "Eve." It's a gorgeous love ballad – is it for Mike? Your lover? Or maybe for yourself?

Tom Goss: Ah, that was that other early track! So, I had written "Be Somebody," "One Plus Two," "Berlin," and "Eve." "Eve" is me starting to explore the questions around the situation. I love that you asked me who I write that song for, because that's exactly what you're supposed to get when you listen to that song. You're supposed to have no idea who that song is for. It's supposed to be rife with conflict; it's supposed to be rife with unknowing. Yeah. I love it.

[Laughter]

Tom Goss: It's written for everybody: It's written for my lover, it's written for my husband, it's written for me. It's written to tell everybody the situation, that this is great and this is beautiful, but this is completely fragile and I am completely fragile.

EDGE: Let's talk about the diptych of "Regretting" and "Not Regretting." These are two sides of the same coin, obviously - the compositions are complementary, and the lyrics seem like a set to explore the very fine divide between... well, just as the titles suggest, regretting and not regretting. Why did you write them as a pair rather than as a single track?

Tom Goss: That was really Ian. I wrote this song, "Regretting," which really isn't about regretting, it's about not regretting. I would never dream of regretting. I had written a much more straightforward song, and Ian really didn't like it. But he sat with it and he played with it, and we started talking about song structure. He said, "I don't think this song needs to go beyond the first chorus." And I said, "Great – then let's turn it into a 90-second song. I'm totally fine with that!" I think the way that we chopped that song in half really made that song powerful. And by chopping that song in half, we ended up with more material!

[Laughter]

Tom Goss: For "Not Regretting," Ian was up really late one night playing with some David Byrne-like drums and it turned into that. It really was his creation.

Some of those other tracks – "Irreplaceable," "Uneven," "Siem Reap," "Regretting" – I felt they were important for the cohesiveness of the record because without those tracks it's just a bunch of songs about being sad or being confused. I think those tracks really speak to my husband – to say, "I would never dream of forgetting. All that we have worth remembering. But all that we've got is more than I could ever hold in my head." Like the fact that we have had so much love, and so many memories that there's no way I could ever remember them all. I could spend all my life and all my energy regretting the mistakes that we have made, and that we currently are making – but why? These mistakes and hardships are what I need to grow, and what he needs to grow, and what we need to grow together, and that's what those two songs are about.

EDGE: That idea of making mistakes and having it be a positive thing in the long run brings to mind a line from another song on the album, "Quebec" – "There's another us to us." That encapsulates what you're saying about these experiences. It might not seem obvious, but maybe this is what you have to do in order to grow into who you're supposed to be.

Tom Goss: Well, and every day that changes. "Quebec" was very sad. It's funny – you can ask what these songs are about, but these songs are pretty much exactly how things went down. I didn't really hide anything. So, "Quebec" is very much us walking down the street in Quebec and Mike breaking down and saying, word for word, "We are not us. There's another us to us. We are not special – we are no longer special." The words in that chorus are the words that he said to me. If you can imagine your husband saying those words to you... it was the saddest thing I ever heard in my life. I probably will die knowing that was the saddest thing I heard in my life.

EDGE: It's a challenge to the ego to hear you aren't special, or even worse, that you once were special but you no longer are.

Tom Goss: How do you cure that? How do you defend against that? How do you just sit with your husband when he says that, and he's obviously so wounded, and try to understand his perspective? I didn't, and I don't, believe it. I don't believe it! I believe that we are us, and we will always be us. We are special. We are wonderful; we are beautiful. We have created centuries' worth of love that will reverberate throughout the universe. I truly believe that. But in that moment, he didn't – and I had to hear that.

EDGE: You turn that around in some of the other songs. You say, essentially, "Even if you're not here – you are here, in your absence." In that way, you remain special as a couple.

Tom Goss: Exactly, and that was a really interesting revelation. I was on a weekend away with my lover and every place I was at – I was watching the sunset and I wanted Mike to be there. I was having this amazing dinner, and I wanted Mike to be there. It wasn't like I wanted Mike to be there and not my lover; it really was, I wish we were all here. I don't want to take this experience away from the person that's giving it to me, but I also want to be having this experience with my husband. Every experience in my life, I want to share it with my husband! And that's the truth.

EDGE: I really, really love "Zedel." What is Zedel? Is it a nightclub?

Tom Goss: Zedel is a restaurant and entertainment venue in London. So, my lover lives in London, and we were out to dinner at Zedel and watching this jazz band... Actually, it wasn't a band, it was a duo. It was a piano and a tuba! It was so weird. But they were amazing! We were sitting there watching this band, obviously on a date. I'm using air quotes for that word. But we're obviously there together, we're obviously loving, we're obviously having a good time, and at some point in the song, my lover sends a drink up to them. So when they were on break they came and talked to the two of us – you know, "How are you guys? Thanks for the drink." It was my first trip to London with him, so I was feeling very out of sorts and I didn't know how to act, and I didn't know if I should hold his hand or what I should do – what's appropriate? What's not appropriate? All of a sudden, I am somebody's mistress in this moment, and I don't know how mistresses are supposed to act. What am I supposed to be honest about? What am I supposed to hide?

And we're sitting there, like, holding hands and this guy is talking to him, and my lover is like, "Oh, you guys are really great. My husband performs here sometimes." And he starts bragging about his husband while holding my hand, and this guy is kind of a little, like, "Whoa, what, wait a second." But he's keeping it all together. And that opens it up for me to then talk about my husband, and how amazing my husband is! And all the while we're still sitting there, holding hands, obviously on a date.

My mind was just blown with the idea that I could be the mistress – again using air quotes – and I can be open and I can be honest, and I don't have to be ashamed. That was a really wonderful, beautiful gift that my lover gave to me in that moment. I've always been open and honest, and – I'm not going to say always unashamed, but as unashamed as I can possibly be – while navigating this situation I'm in.

EDGE: That's hilarious. It also sounds like a great idea for a rom-com.

Tom Goss: Oh, totally,! I mean, every single song is, like, the weirdest thing that happened.

EDGE: You mention "Siem Reap" a while ago, and that song parallels "Zedel" in a way because "Zedel" is super-sexy and seductive, and "Siem Reap" is both spiritual and also really sexually hot. It's like you found a spiritual sexuality or a spiritual sexuality.

Tom Goss: It's interesting because like I said, the majority of this record was written lyrics first. So when I would sit down to write the actual song, it was about, "What does this place sound like?" Zedel, the place, is an art deco, giant, cavernous jazz club. Siem Reap is Angkor Wat! If there is a spiritual heart to our planet, it's living there. I like what you said about that, because it means we did something right from a production standpoint, and we sonically painted a picture for you. Angkor Wat is mind-blowing; Siem Reap is mind-blowing; they are some of the most magical and spiritual places that have ever been built.

EDGE: You have a couple of videos for this album already, "Quayside" and "La Bufadora." What other songs are you making videos for?

Tom Goss: I've already made eight videos for this record. There's a video for "Berlin," which has been released since we sat down to chat, and that video starts a three-song story arc.

Next month will be "Quebec," and the following month it'll be "Regretting." It's like a microcosm of the twelve stories told in three songs. Daniel Franzese is in two of these three, as well – he continues to play my husband. He's in "Quebec" and "Regretting."

EDGE Has making "Territories" brought you to a better place?

Tom Goss: Yeah! I definitely think so. Things were very heavy for a very long time, and I'm not complaining because there was so much material to be gleaned from that. I know that's a weird thing to say, but I hated the heaviness from a standpoint of being happy; I loved the heaviness from the standpoint of, "Wow! This is so crazy! I should write more about this!"

I feel good. My marriage is in a good place; my relationship is in a good place; I feel like if I can make it through this heaviness, then I can be resilient through most anything.

"Territories" is now available. For more information, please visit TomGossMusic.com.