“Born To Be” How it happened…
When you're a dedicated songwriter it's inevitable that some of your work, subtly or overtly, will be autobiographical. Born To Be, Tomás Doncker's new album, goes a step further, doing double-duty as an autobiographical album and a protest album. Adding another layer to be peeled back, Born To Be is also (in part) a covers album, with multiple versions of three songs (acoustic and electric) that evoke vastly different moods.Considering they're culled from the same source material, these songs add an enigmatic aura to the entire project that sets it apart from any of Doncker's previous work. Blending multiple versions of originals and covers into the musical equivalent of a unified field theory is no small task, but Doncker proves more than up to it. "This record crept up on me," he relates. "I wasn't really thinking I was going to make an album, but being an old school record nerd I just think songs should live somewhere in real life. I had an array of songs, some I'd recorded over the past year, some brand new. I had been looking at them all as individual singles, and I then I realized there was a common thread that ran through them — they're all protest songs; they all belonged together as an album, they needed to be on vinyl. And, on top of that, the inside joke is that with acoustic and electric versions of songs, I've covered myself (along with The Specials, Patti Smith and Bob Dylan)."
Bookended by two different versions of the title track (electric to start and acoustic to finish), Doncker achieves the unique feat of having multiple versions of songs on the same album complement each other, making each more impactful on their own AND together.
"I was thinking about how the hopeful groundswell of early 2020 had just died," he notes about the song. "Black Lives Matter was gone, and it looked like we were right around the corner from Trump2 or someone like that, and I was just pissed. I'm having this conversation with myself in my head… 'you're a middle-aged guy and you still have the thoughts of an angry young man.' And then - boom! - it was like a lightning bolt, it was almost complete. It's a very clear protest song against the powers that be. We recorded both versions the next day. Quite often, the original versions of my songs are acoustic. I'm a guitar player at heart, my acoustic is rarely more than an arm's length away."
Videos
Tomás Doncker Extends Dylan’s Metaphor with Culturally Significant Video for ‘Maggie’s Farm’
American Blues Scene
Tomás Doncker’s ‘Born To Be’ morphs into a sobering, darkly comedic statement on pandemic era self-care with new video by Alice Teeple
Tomás Doncker relocates Bob Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’ from Big Pink to the Dockery’s Plantation with new single and video…