A Chat with Tom Peyton (23.07.26)
Following the release of his new album Thank You For My Name, we caught up with Los Angeles-based singer, songwriter, producer, and visual artist Tom Peyton to talk about the making of his most personal work to date. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Peyton has spent the past fifteen years building an acclaimed career, writing and producing music that has amassed more than one billion streams, with credits including Pitbull, Panic! At The Disco, Camila Cabello, Lizzo, Christina Aguilera, and Robin Schulz. Blending humour, honesty, and heartfelt storytelling, Thank You For My Name is a poignant reflection on loss, love, identity, and personal growth, offering a deeply human listening experience for fans of artists such as Bo Burnham, Father John Misty, Paul Simon, Dawes, Medium Build, Harry Nilsson, and Randy Newman.
OSR: You’ve spent years behind the scenes as a songwriter and producer for major artists. What was the internal shift that made you feel like Thank You For My Name had to exist under your own name rather than through someone else’s voice?
Peyton: One thing that is great about working behind the scenes is that you don’t bear the burden of going out and doing the work of getting people to pay attention to the music you’ve made. That’s on the artist. And you can work with lots of artists all at the same time to give you lots of chances of a song that you work on connecting somewhere. But that same stuff has a downside too. Working as a writer or producer on someone else’s art means that you very rarely have final say on which ideas actually make it to the audience’s ears. It can also feel like you’re just throwing incomplete ideas around all over the place.
I knew that I wanted to really invest in ideas that I was passionate about and have full control over what it would look like to realize those pieces of music. One of the great joys of doing this work over the last few years is that if I think something is great, I know that I can play that all the way out without needing to convince anyone else. And then there was also all kinds of life stuff converging at the same time, like my mom dying and falling in love and doing writing and producing as my job for over 10 years to where some ways of working had gotten stale and the pandemic happening and me having an incredible amount of time to myself to work and sit with all of these things that were happening in my life.
OSR: The album is anchored by a very personal loss. When you revisited those early moments of grief in writing and recording, did the songs feel like documentation, processing, or something closer to reconstruction over time?
Peyton: Wow, those are three great options, and I think it’s actually a combination of all of them. For sure, with almost every song on the album, when I initially wrote them, I was at a basic, fundamental level just trying to deal with and manage what I was feeling. I ended up feeling very intense relief in having a space to touch and work through some of this stuff besides just inside of my head. But yes, in some cases there would be years between writing something and then making the final recording with my way tight bud and production partner, Ethan Shumaker. I started to notice this really challenging thing happening when we were revisiting the songs. Whatever song we were working on for the day, the week, the month, I couldn’t avoid going through and facing all of the emotions that inspired the song all over again. I had hoped that the writing was enough catharsis to have processed the feeling and I could just go about working on a nice recorded version of it. But even beyond just revisiting the feelings of the past, somehow new equivalent experiences and vibes would find their way into my life at the time of working on the recordings. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it necessarily, but I almost had reverence for the fact that these things needed to be back in order to make sure that this literal record of the song had these feelings in them, not just in the composition but in the act of playing the instruments and using my voice.
OSR: You’ve worked across huge pop records, but this album often feels intentionally restrained. What did you have to unlearn from commercial production in order to let these songs breathe in a more fragile, human way?
Peyton: One thing that really surprises me about working in pop music and production is how many different rich, nuanced, unexpected lessons there are to learn from it. One of them that is really potent that I think you are alluding to is its power to be big and bold and bombastic, which I have experienced and utilized many times. But another side of pop that has made just as big an impression on me is how precise and refined it can be. Making something great is often about holding everything to a high standard and accepting that you work until it feels right. So there are definitely ways in which I very willingly let the first lesson melt away at times. But I tried to make sure the second lesson stayed at the center of the work all the time. And then for sure I wanted to let my love of all kinds of music sort of flow through that filter.
OSR: The piano plays a central emotional role throughout the record. Was that instrument always the core of the album in your mind, or did it become the emotional ‘language’ of the project gradually as you wrote?
Peyton: It was fundamentally central from the start. I wrote the first song that became a part of the album, ‘Thank You For My Name’ (the song), on my mom’s piano the week after she died. At the time, though I had played lots of different instruments, I could barely play the piano. She played that piano all the time when I was a kid, and my earliest musical memories are of hearing her play and practice for a choir that she was in. So over the next couple of years after I wrote ‘Thank You For My Name’ (the song), I learned how to play both from an online course and from learning songs and pieces I love and writing my own stuff. The piano really was the conduit through which all of the ideas and the shape of the project flowed. And it ultimately was a way of staying connected to my mom. Or I guess an opportunity for my relationship with my mom to continue to evolve even though she was gone.
OSR: There’s a clear tension in the record between humour and heaviness. How consciously did you balance those tones, and do you see humour as a coping mechanism, a perspective shift, or something else entirely in your writing?
Peyton: Yes! That relationship between humour and heaviness in the music matters to me a lot because I am very conscious of dealing with those two things on a daily basis. The emotional waves that I ride every day, just as a human being that is alive, continue to amaze me. So seriousness and silliness are very present in how I live my life, and it came very naturally to me that the music should move between these spaces easily. I’ve thought a lot about how laughing and crying are starting to feel so intertwined and so related in their nature. Like both are a way to get a very big feeling inside on the outside, and I so value the release and catharsis of both. But inherent in humor is a certain amount of self-awareness and perspective. So I think you’re right that there are ways that I am using humor to detach a bit and get some distance from things. And then dive back into hard stuff where you have no option of detachment; you have to just be with it completely.
OSR: Tracks like ‘Vases on Books (Interlude)’ and ‘The Hum of Everything’ feel more like emotional waypoints than traditional songs. How important was sequencing and interlude structure in shaping the album’s narrative arc?
Peyton: It was crucial to me. I wanted the album as a whole to flow up and down and in and out of stuff. Some of my favorite albums have a very fluid character to them, and I never wanted this album to feel like it was just a bunch of songs one after another. I wanted it to feel like a full piece of music when you listened to it top to bottom. And as the pieces that you mention took shape, I also really liked the idea of the voice being used in other ways besides singing. So there’s me talking to you. There’s me and my fiancée, Miranda, having a conversation. And then the really wild one on ‘Rejoice’ is a recording of my mom in a vocal lesson probably from the 80s. ‘My way back’, best bud Ashkon Davaran was going through old tapes of high school band practices, and it turns out we had recorded one over one of her lessons. He sent it along, and I knew it had to end up on the album.
OSR: You’ve collaborated with a wide range of artists across genres. When you step into your own work, how do those influences surface differently? Do they appear as habits, resistances, or something you actively try to avoid repeating?
Peyton: One of the biggest things I started to be able to recognize when working with an artist was the difference between someone who knew what they wanted and someone who didn’t. It always feels so good to be in the room with someone who is really in touch with their taste and can confidently identify the things they like. Being around musicians who are able to see their work that way and then finish things and get them out into the world was really inspiring. So it really matters to me that all of the music I make for myself comes from a very simple, grounded, curious place. Let the ideas flow out and then sift with a loose but forceful filter. Have a high standard and don’t get too invested in whether or not this one idea is great because I’ve had lots of ideas and I’ll have lots more. But when you think something is great, dive all the way in. So really I was trying to take excellent habits I had seen in artists I had worked with and develop those for myself.
OSR: The title Thank You For My Name carries a strong sense of identity and inheritance. What does ‘name’ mean to you in the context of this album? An identity, legacy, memory, or something more complicated than any single definition?
Peyton: Wow, inheritance really rings true given that, as I said, my relationship to the piano is inextricably tied to my relationship with my mom. I think I just really like the idea that this thing about me, my name, which I’ve carried with me every day into every situation, was something that was given. That I didn’t exist and then I did, and these two people chose a name for me with a lot of love in their hearts. And it feels like one of many things that are in our lives that are taken for granted that come from somewhere or someone. We’re just sort of collecting all of these experiences and ideas and identities and piecing that puzzle together on a daily basis. And part of my experience of being an adult is transitioning from wearing all of this stuff with no perspective at all to getting to a point where I have enough self-awareness to make some basic choices about how I want to exist in the world. So for me, the title of the album bridges a deep appreciation with an evolving, rooted sense of self.
OSR: There’s a noticeable intimacy in the vocal delivery across the record. Did you approach singing differently here compared to your work with Fast Friends or earlier projects, and if so, how did you find that voice?
Peyton: I love that the intimacy of the vocals sticks out to you. I absolutely approached it way, way differently than Fast Friends and other loud, noisy bands I’ve been in. Talk about habits, I had developed all kinds of awful habits with how I used my voice previously, trying to sound tough, trying to make sure that the ‘tude was right. So I knew the character of these songs would require something that felt much closer to me talking to you, us having a conversation. And at the same time draw inspiration from the directness of classic singer/songwriters.
I really didn’t know how to do any of that with my voice. When I showed very early demos of these songs to my way tight bud, publisher, collaborator Ricky Reed, one of the first things he said was that he thought the songwriting was on the level but that the vocal delivery had to get better for the depth of the songs to come across. So I really dug in. I would say I worked about as hard on my voice as I did on learning the piano because it is so difficult to retrain things you have done unconsciously with your body for so long. I took a few vocal lessons with this amazing teacher, Kira Fontana, who gave me these few exercises to drill, and I just did them over and over and kept singing the songs and kept adjusting my approach and kept tracking. Then the final phase was me and Ethan in the studio together spending days just searching around until things felt natural and rich and personal. The first few songs we tracked for the album were a real journey, but once we were halfway through things really sped up. I had learned how it felt in my body when I was singing the songs the way I wanted to hear them. So I could find that physical feeling more and more quickly, and that always led to good results.
OSR: Now that this album exists as a completed statement, do you see it as a closing of a chapter tied to grief and transition, or more as the beginning of a longer solo identity that will continue to evolve from here?
Peyton: I think I see it as both. I definitely feel the relief and sadness of it closing a period of my life, both in terms of the subject matter of the songs and the process of learning all these new things and making the recordings. But I also loved the process of making this body of music so much that I definitely want to make more albums! And I have sort of a similar feeling to how I talked about the sequencing of this album, but now on the next scale up. I love that I made an album that has my name on it. But I’m also excited about what it means and what it looks like to make like 5 albums that really build out a world of me making music I love.
Many thanks to Tom Peyton for speaking with us. Find out more about Tom Peyton on his Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify.
