Hello I'm Fern Cotton and this is Happy Place, the show that acknowledges both the really

exciting and the more difficult parts of life. Today I'm chatting to Tom O'Dell.

I hate the term perfectionist because I feel like it's so often thrown around and I think people use it as kind of like a compliment often or a good quality.

But when you're slightly obsessive character, it can be really quite torturous.

And, you know, I've had moments like at the end of finishing an album, you know, the mixing process,

I'll like, I'll kind of lose my mind slightly because I can't I'll be on like mixed 78 and I've changed one thing 78 times and it's just like being able to just let go of it.

Tom released his debut EP, Songs for Another Love in 2012 and in 2013 won the Brits Critics

Choice Award.

Over a decade later, his new album Black Friday

is the result of a new-found sense of freedom

and creative control.

He recorded it really simply, just Tom in his studio with his instruments,

singing these songs with the same gorgeous authenticity they were written with.

Tom came onto the podcast back in 2019 and it's an episode that really

stands out because he was going through a really tricky time of very extreme anxiety actually,

something that

deeply resonated with me that's for sure and we talked really openly

about it about his visit to the hospital because of it and his real block with getting on stage the thing that he loved the most and it was an

episode that really stayed with me so I was really keen to have a catch up with Tom to see where he was at. It was so lovely to be able to speak to

him all these years later because his life has changed a lot. He left his record

label, he's got married very recently, and as we chat about he also pretty much got on top of the physical side of his anxiety and panic.

So we connected over anxiety obviously, but also over perfectionism and being

...