The Reinvention of Timothy Lanham

I meet with T Truman, aka Timothy Lanham, six months after I interviewed his partner in crime, Justin Young. It’s an oddly analogous moment: I met Young on his girlfriend’s birthday and upon the release of his two-piece debut with Lanham. Similarly, I meet Langham as he sits in the car outside his Grandmother’s house in Brisbane, having just dropped her off after her birthday. Lanham is here to talk about his own solo career as T Truman — his deviation from the whirlwind of The Vaccines and Halloweens. During my hour with Lanham, I delve into the idiosyncrasies and novelties that Halloweens and T Truman realise within their own respective side projects.

As I discovered in March with Justin Young, the pair met in Italy 2015 at a wedding in which they played in the same band. “I was on an email thread with a bunch of dudes, including Justin, talking about what songs we were going to sing at this Italian wedding. It was an amazing full weekend out there, and we had a great time. Then probably only two months later, they needed a keyboardist for the English Graffiti record tour. It was an interesting sequence of events that just changed my life in a lot of ways.”

Of course, Lanham isn’t only talking about working with the noughties indie-icons, The Vaccines — the band that brought us “If You Wanna” in 2010, and later cemented themselves in the hearts of the British public with English Graffiti and latest album Combat Sports. He’s speaking to the gorgeously tongue-in-cheek, retro alt-rock of Halloweens’ first record, Morning Kiss At The Acropolis, created with Young. Young had said that the Halloweens songs “belonged in a different world to The Vaccines,” and Lanham easily echoes the sentiment. “I think that some styles just don't suit everything. You got to kind of fit you and fit your music within the parameters of your band, and we were writing good music that just didn't seem to fit in the world of The Vaccines. It felt like the right thing to do to give this music a home.”

Yet, while the understated textures and neo-nostalgia of Halloweens felt like a far cry from the chorus heavy Brit-rock of The Vaccines for Justin Young; Halloweens is a much closer comparison for Lanham's solo project. “That is definitely right. They feel like they come from a different place and I guess they sound similar because that happens to be the kind of music that I'm making as well. They've kind of bled into each other but a word that keeps coming to mind with Truman and that doesn't come to mind with Halloweens is ‘sleazy.’ I think the sleazy piano lines and over the top referencing to being like Elton John… I don't think Halloweens does that,” he says

“I love seventies piano singer/songwriter pop, I guess. This is kind of just me letting it all out. And it's been really good fun.”

This first mention of Lanham’s affiliation with the piano brings us neatly to discussing how he got into music in the first place. The Australian musician was classically trained, receiving his first keyboard aged eight. “I was obsessed with it. I played every day. And I loved figuring songs out — I think ‘Silent Night’ was the first song I figured on the piano, for some reason. I did all my classical exams, but I don't really think I got into contemporary music until I was fifteen or sixteen. It was The Strokes and Interpol that I was first into and I thought were really cool bands and wanted to learn their parts and copy their guitar sounds and that sort of thing,” he tells me, still from the front seat of his car.

From here, Lanham joined a selection of what he dubs “adolescent bands,” before moving to England in 2011 with three fellow Australian bandmates. “We lived the 20-year olds’ dream — going to parties and making music. And then when they [the bandmates] left, I stayed on and played in various session musician capacities and as a piano teacher as well. I met numerous musicians on the way and it just led to where I am now.”

Then there was the Italian wedding, the English Graffiti tour and five years of touring and making hit singles “I Can’t Quit” and “Put It On A T-shirt,” followed by the aforementioned Halloweens side project. I’m curious as to why, with all the obvious musical and personal links to the UK, Lanham has ended up back on the Sunshine Coast?

“I'm not here in any kind of permanent capacity. I just came back.” A pause, “Well, I came back in March for a wedding, then COVID hit. I love London but for the time being, I don't see the point in being there. I've got every intention of going back, starting next year. To be honest, I would prefer a sunshiny beach with mobility than to be stuck in a blurry city,” he tells me.

And I can’t blame him, as I sit in rain-washed London amidst tier-2 lockdown. Although the reception through the handheld call is bad, and the windows of Lanham's car are coated in a generous helping of grime – I can see that he is more at ease with the Australian laid-back living than the high intensity fast-paced, shit faced lifestyle of London. White shirt open to his chest, hair in his eyes and rings on his fingers, Lanham is laid back but directional; passionate but unconcerned as he speaks about the tribulations of his career — mannerisms quite at odds with his tight t-shirt wearing counterparts of Brit-rock.

"The only thing that's scary about doing solo music is that people then see you as whatever genre you're creating as a solo artist, so you pigeonhole your music."

We turn, then, to the conception of T Truman and its embodiment of Lanham

It’s 2018, and Lanham is holed up in an unused walk-in wardrobe of a bedroom, about a metre and a half wide with just enough space for a double bed and an air-conditioning unit to counterbalance the 35-degree heat. This nondescript wallpapered room in a drab carpeted Australian house is where the T Truman project first came about.

We move to discuss “Born To Be Right”, the title track and stand out glitzy piano number off the EP: “I’d just discovered these chords and I'd voice memoed it into a song. I write a lot of my music with an old writing partner of mine, Jeff Roberts, and he lives in Melbourne, but he was up here as well over the Christmas period and so I took the voice memos to him, and ‘Born To Be Right’ just happened in a few hours of us writing together, and it was just so much fun.”

He continues: “I thought, ‘this sounds so weird and ridiculous, I've never made anything like this before. I have to make a project off the back of this, it's too much fun, and I'm having too much fun making this kind of music.’ So, to start off with, it was all conceptualised in a bedroom on the Sunshine Coast.

If the music was created two years ago, what has kept Langham from releasing it, for so long? “It's really hard for me to gather my thoughts and get all my ducks in a row to release music as a solo artist. I've found that as I've been doing it, it's a lot of work. I had written songs probably over the last year and a half or two years, and they were finished before the end of 2019.

“So, I guess I could have released [it] before COVID. With all the spare time away from The Vaccines — we've got quite a long hiatus at the moment — I guess my attention naturally wanted to be taken up by something else. So, I thought it was the right time to pull the trigger on it all.

I wonder if this is why many musicians gravitate to band work or else begin solo careers after the explosion of group fame – because it's hard work, and you put yourself on the line more as a singular than as a collective entity.

“I don't think it's too scary. It's harder because I decided to self-release and do it all myself. So, especially for an unorganised creative, there’s just a lot to deal with — trying to get music out to the public and create a brand is difficult. The hardest part of the project has been self-managing because I'm allergic to organisation. There's just a lot of day to day moving parts that go into getting a record out through Spotify and all of that and having it so that at least somebody knows when it's coming out.”

Is that the scariest part? “No. I don’t think so. The only thing that's scary about doing solo music is that people then see you as whatever genre you're creating as a solo artist, so you pigeonhole your music. I was like, ‘well, I want to be That Piano Guy, when I go out on my own.’”

This brings us to a curious headway: does going solo pigeonhole the artist creatively?

Young definitely disagreed, saying, “Although The Vaccines feels like a very free-flowing environment to create in, you are still answering to each other, to an audience, to a label, PR, radio pluggers, management – and they get in your head. I would be lying if I said one of those people wasn't always an angel or devil on my shoulder.”

Yet Lanham feels differently: “That's just how I think of it because I think you can come out leftfield as a solo artist and only the people that follow you really closely even notice; but if you come out of a band – like an indie band - and then make like, a minimalist electronic record, people will think, ‘that must be what he really does outside of the band.’ And I think that's what I mean: that when you're unbridled by the band around you and the existing parameters, then you find what seems like you would do naturally. Like, this is who Tim is.”

Does he then feel that he’s finally making music that is authentic to himself; the organic, classically trained pianist? “I played piano properly as a kid, and there's not a lot of space for playing piano commercially as it isn’t a full instrument within many genres anymore, so, I kind of liked that I just went with this heavily piano-driven [sound]. And it's been a lot of fun to remember that I can play the piano. I don't just hold notes on a synth the same way.”

He continues, explaining with a casual promise that songwriting is as much as an art to the classically trained musician as piano is. “The right words don't always come quickly. I feel like you can almost tell what a song is about before you hear lyrics — by the mood of the music. To me, getting the words that fit the mood comes from a melody or emotion and is the most difficult bit for me. I also don't write poetry outside of when I'm doing a song, so I don't have a huge archive of lyrics to choose from, which I know a lot of people do.” I think here of Halloweens’ stand out tracks “Lady” and “Paris Undercover” which essentially read as a stream of one-liners and were written in this exact note-taking manner.

T Truman doesn’t shy away from parody. The central theme of Born To Be Right is around the idea of the antithesis to the rock and roll ego. Lyrics such as “Wanna be seen with an elegant lady / but I still wanna be vague baby / but I still drink scotch on the rock” embody the sense of a classic Rockstar, parodying it accordingly, and penultimate track “Rock n Roll” encapsulates all of the tongue-in-cheek ideas of rock icons, subverting them and satirising them. This alter ego, which translates into the moniker T Truman, is what shapes Lanham's sound, and his EP. Yet how closely wrapped together are the two embodiments of Langham?

“It's definitely me in some shape or form. I'm different because I'm one step removed. T Truman is like a mechanism that I just brought to the front of my lyrics, through me. Like a scapegoat. So maybe I say one thing I don't like about myself, or don't like about the character, but it doesn't matter, because it's just part of the project.

" I think maybe I'm talking about my shadow self — the thoughts that I don't like to think about myself or I don't like about other people."

“I like that I laugh at this rock and roll guy. The idea was that this character is certain of his own skills, whether it’s warranted or not, [and] blames his lack of stardom on the era that he has to live in, leading this life where it's everyone else's fault and he’s just casually self-assured.”

It sounds like giving voice to intrusive thoughts, I muse. “Yeah. Something like that. I think maybe I'm talking about my shadow self — the thoughts that I don't like to think about myself or I don't like about other people. Perhaps that kind of chauvinistic male that's died a pretty swift death in the last few years. Like the male figure that's been the face of the music industry for so many years. And I hope that that's not me, but I'm talking about that kind of a character.” I think here, irresistibly of Ryan Adams, and how the face of indie-rock collapsed when he fell from grace.

Although Lanham isn’t unique in his need to separate self from his music, he certainly is in the quiet few. Almost every musician we know has poignantly intimate songs about their own lives, some going as far as using names — Arctic Monkeys' “Arabella” for example, or their ex-partner's voice on the track (Harry Styles - “Cherry”) Langham explains that his divorce of self comes from not wanting to be held to feeling a certain way forever. “I don't want to print this big statement about something that happened in my life on a song and then have to listen to it in a year's time and be like, ‘I don't feel that way anymore.’ But if it's a little less specific, and a little less about me, in particular, it just feels as if it’s really serving as a creative release to me.”

However, the music itself holds personal meaning. I press Lanham about the context behind “Loretta”, and discover it’s a lived experience for him. Perhaps what makes his alter ego work, is that T Truman has the same struggles as the everyman, and thus doesn’t lose its relatability in irony.

“‘Loretta’ is about the notion of no reciprocation from somebody impatiently messaging and waiting for a response; and the frustration around that. And then I kind of linked it in with the idea of desperately wanting someone to join your band. So, it was like this two-edged sword between those two things. I wanted the scenario to take place in New York, so there’s a couple of references to that; but then I have also references from London, so I guess it was more this idea of a metropolitan city, chasing somebody around trying to convince them that you're the right one for them. And at the same time realising that, you know, it's a waste of time…” he trails off.

Sonically, the alter ego hardly exists. As we’ve discussed, Lanham is true to the lo-fi and guitar-indie meets piano-pop that is so popular in his other side projects. The difference is in creation. Lanham cites Todd Rundgren and “the older Billy Joel stuff” as a starting point to his conception of Born To Be Right. In relearning these songs and the particular flavour of '70s music, he discovered a new mechanism to write in, and a new type of melody – the glittering instrumentals and falsetto highs we are so accustomed to in Elton John’s finest work.

“You know, there's thousands of indie songs, thousands of rock and roll songs, and they all have the exact same chord progression. You start to get in these patterns where everything's just a slight variation on your previous song; and it felt so exciting to discover all these strange chords, and the whiff of jazz in there, which I'd never thought I'd play. It opened a whole new area of writing for me and straight off the back of that I wrote a lot of songs, which was again around the same time that we were doing the Halloweens stuff. Born To Be Right is then more my personal journey as well, where I'm really enjoying ringing that ear of all that can offer to me.”

We return, finally, to the pressure Lanham perceives with being committed to one genre of music and identity once you go solo. He’s got his work cut out for him if he is — Born To Be Right is a humble brag of an EP, restlessly creative and gorgeously written. Lanham’s use of shimmying keys and hypnotic musical textures are irresistible; a testament to his classical upbringing. The last question remains: if he is stereotyped to only make satirical piano music for the rest of his career, will he consider it an error of judgement?

“Well, the one nice thing about not being too successful is you’re not going to disappoint too many people if you change a little bit,” he tells me, and turns on the engine of his parked Sunshine Coast car.