English 
Rock Raconteur Tommy Stinson Returns to Orlando With New Songs.
Photo: Tommy Stinson, courtesy of Nicholas Modern.
There are a lot of reasons to go see Tommy Stinson play The Imperial on Sept. 16. The obvious ones stretch back more than four decades. The Replacements. Bash & Pop. Guns N’ Roses. Cowboys in the Campfire. A career that has put Stinson in tiny clubs, massive arenas and just about every kind of room in between.
But when Pulp City caught up with Stinson ahead of his return to Orlando, he wasn’t spending much time looking backward.
“I got a bunch of new tunes,” Stinson said.
Those songs will eventually make their way onto a new solo record, which Stinson expects to release sometime around the beginning of next year. For now, he’s taking some of them out on the road.
“I’m just kind of looking forward to throwing around some new songs and kind of getting the vibe for it all,” he said.
Still Figuring Out the Songs
Some have been hanging around for a while. Stinson said there are songs he’s worked on for years that simply needed time to become whatever they were supposed to become.
And because this one is his record, he’s giving himself permission to fuck around a little.
“I might get a little adventurous on this record because it is a solo record and I feel like I can kind of do what I want,” Stinson said.
That could mean a lot of things coming from a musician who describes himself as “kind of all over the place” musically. Stinson doesn’t seem particularly interested in figuring out which box the new material belongs in, either.
“I don’t want to get bogged down in any sort of stereotypes if I can help it,” he said.
Play the jazz standard. Play the song you wrote at home. Play whatever the hell feels right.
“Whatever floats your boat, makes you happy and is being true to your art form,” he said. “That’s kind of what I embrace as much as I can.”
Nobody Gets to Hide
The Sept. 16 stop isn’t Stinson’s first time through Orlando, and it isn’t the first time Modern Music Movement Presents has put him on a stage here.
Nicholas Modern has promoted Bash & Pop twice and says this will be the fourth solo Tommy Stinson show he’s presented.
There’s a reason they’re going back to The Imperial, too.
Modern points to the room’s eclectic character and its appeal to a Gen X crowd, but there’s another, simpler reason.
Tommy likes the room.
According to Modern, Stinson prefers The Imperial to some of the other Orlando venues they’ve used over the years.
Spend a few minutes talking to Stinson about playing live, and you begin to understand why.
“I like to be able to hear, feel, smell the people that are there,” he said.
Stinson has played arenas. He knows what it feels like to stand on a massive stage with thousands of people responding at once. But he also knows that’s a different kind of relationship with an audience.
Put him in a smaller room, and everybody gets exposed.
“In a small room, you really can’t hide,” Stinson said. “No one can really hide. I can’t hide, you can’t hide.”
He can tell when a song lands. He can tell when it doesn’t. He can get a read on something he’s still working out.
Not that he’s changing a song because somebody at The Imperial makes a funny face.
“It doesn’t mean I’m gonna change anything necessarily,” Stinson said.
The read is enough.
“It’s just a lot more intimate and, you know, it’s an honest read,” he said.
The Music Didn’t Go Anywhere
More than 40 years in, Stinson is still figuring songs out.
He started doing this before most people have any fucking idea what they’re going to do with their lives. Yet when asked what keeps him writing, he didn’t talk about career or legacy.
He talked about it like raising kids.
A new song starts small. You guide it as it grows. Eventually it begins to become its own thing. And at some point, if you’ve done your job, it’s ready to leave.
Then you start again.
“There comes a point in your life when you know you have no choice in that matter anymore,” Stinson said.
He’s had to make money other ways at different points. Life happens. Circumstances change.
The music didn’t go anywhere.
“This part of me is just not going away,” he said. “It’s in me.”
Then Stinson described the part that probably makes immediate sense to anyone who has ever spent hours trying to finish a song that refused to be finished.
It’s an obsession.
You’re chasing an idea. A thought. A narrative. Something that fits the melody already in your head. You keep wrestling with it until suddenly the words and music say what you were trying to say?
“The lust for that moment is just always with you if you’ve got it, if you really got it, man,” Stinson said. “And I’m like, I got that.”
Then he laughed at himself a little.
“Doesn’t mean anyone wants to listen to it, but it means I got it and that’s what I’m doing.”
Turtleneck Collective has some new music of their own.
The band opens the night, just a few months removed from the release of their debut, Turtleneck Sessions. Modern sees the group’s indie sound as fitting naturally alongside Stinson, which makes the Sept. 16 show an interesting mix of what people already know and music that’s still relatively new.
Stinson’s history will obviously walk through the door with him. It would be ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
But he’s not done adding to it.
Even touring still gives him something. New towns. New people. New rooms. Stinson told Pulp City that after years of buses and airplanes, he’s discovered his favorite way to tour might be the simplest: get in a van or car and watch the country go by.
“I like looking at the open road,” he said.
Come Open-Minded
And when he gets where he’s going, he still doesn’t entirely know what will happen.
Asked what someone seeing him for the first time should expect, Stinson described himself as a “pretty social butterfly.” He might be hanging around the room. He’ll play the songs. He’ll have some fun.
Mostly, he hopes people feel like they spent part of their night together.
“That they bonded with me in some fashion,” he said. “Maybe for that hour and a half or whatever, that was a really great part of their day. It’s not the cure for cancer, but a lot of people out there still need music and still love music.”
For Stinson, that’s the connection, the people out there who need music in much the same way as he needs to make it.
“As long as they want to come check out what I got going on,” he said, “I’m there.”
Which leaves one last question.
Anything Orlando should know before he gets here?
“Come open-minded.”
Then Stinson offered a pretty good explanation for why.
“The other day I was feeling like I wanted to put on a nice dress and play. Not because I want to get in drag or anything, but I just felt like a dress might sound kind of good because it sounded good to me, because I was hot and I hadn’t worn a dress in a while. So you never know, man. I mean, you never know. I never know what I’m gonna do.”
Tommy Stinson at The Imperial
When: Wednesday, Sept. 16, 7 p.m.
Where: The Imperial Wine Bar, 1800 N. Orange Ave., Orlando www.imperialwinebar.com
With: Turtleneck Collective
Presented by: Modern Music Movement Presents
Ages: 18+
Mike Synan
News | Sports | Politics
- After two decades in news and politics, Mike Synan is returning to his roots to write Sports as “The Sportsaholic”. Mike hosted a talk show for 6 years on WDBO after Magic home games called “Magic Til Midnight”, and spent years working as an in-game correspondent for both ESPN and Fox Sports Radio. His column “Synan Says” has appeared on both www.wdbo.com and www.floridadaily.com. He has a BS in Political Science from Clemson University. You can reach him at msynan@sportsmail.com
