Second album out for Shoreham-based musician TJ Walker

Halfway To Somewhere is released on October 28 and available from Tom’s website www.iamtjwalker.com.

Tom, who records as TJ Walker to avoid confusion with another Tom Walker, said: “It has been a long time coming. The first album which was called Long Game came out late 2019 and then of course we had the pandemic. We were able to start promoting the album at the beginning of 2020 but then the lockdowns happened. For this album I had some of the songs ready and written and I wrote some others during lockdown. Basically the first album was a solo album where I played every single instrument pretty much and mixed and mastered it myself. I bas ically did absolutely everything but with this album, while I was promoting that first album, I put a band together, three of us and this is three of us on the album now. Because of the pandemic we were not able to record it in the traditional way. I did demos and put tracks together and I sent them to Mike, the keyboard player, who did his bits and then we found a brief window when we could actually get together and go into the studio, though we still had to socially distance, when we were able to record the drums, the only thing that you couldn't really do at home without annoying the neighbours! So we put it together that way. It was taken a long time but it has been great.

“I would say the music is Americana country but there are a few more bluesy type tracks as well. It is a similar genre and similar style to the last album but during the lockdowns I found that I actually fell in love with playing the guitar for its own sake again. My job is playing the guitar as a freelance musician. I play for all sorts of things but I just started playing the guitar for my own sake during lockdowns. I was playing it week in week out for work but now I started just to do it because I enjoyed it. I started watching YouTube videos and it was bit like being a teenager again, just getting out the guitar and playing it because I like playing guitar. So I would say there's a lot more guitar on this and there are a few more guitar solos. The first album was very much about concentrating on the songs but with this one I think I've stretched the guitar a little bit more. I think of the songs as being a little bit like little stories, trying to tell a story in not many words. The title track is Halfway To Somewhere which is a bit of a road song about picking up a hitchhiker and being halfway to where you want to go. It is a bit like my situation as a musician really, that I'm halfway there to somewhere musically. Someone did accidentally call the album Halfway To Nowhere so I'm really hoping that's not going to be the case! One of the other songs on there is called Daddy's Girl about when my second daughter was born and just about sibling jealousy and there's another song called Small Town Bar about a musician playing in bars and trying to make it big. I don't know where I got that idea from! But he does make it big so I'm hoping that it will turn autobiographical!”