Swick turns to music after football dreams dashed

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This article was published 08/02/2007 (7102 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

UNDER different circumstances, Tomi Swick would have been playing in stadiums instead of arenas.

The 26-year-old Hamilton singer-songwriter thought playing football was his destiny until an injury during a high school championship game ended his career.

“I led the league in sacks, I was on the all-star team and was going to go to university and play, but then I blew my knee out and had to change what I was doing,” says the self-described jock. “I had to drop out of high school because I was in rehab so much. It took me over a year to walk normally again.”

The time away from football allowed him to work on his guitar-playing and songwriting skills. When he was physically healed, Swick played in some cover bands around his hometown before his original group, Red Echo, started garnering major-label interest.

“We were more like I Mother Earth, groove rock, but they (the label) said we should look to bands like Limp Bizkit and Project Wyze and I said, ‘Are you (expletive)?’ and quit,” he said.

Swick started working on his own and played acoustic sets in Hamilton and Toronto. Soon Warner Music took notice of the six-foot-four 230-pounder and offered him a demo deal after an impromptu set at the label’s headquarters.

The deal turned into a recording contract and Swick released his debut album, Stalled Out in the Doorway, last year.

His earnest pop-rock has drawn comparisons to musicians like Tom Cochrane, which Swick takes as a compliment since he has a lot in common with people from the Prairies.

“Hamilton’s a tough place. It’s a real working-class town,” he says. “That prairie-rock thing, for lack of a better word, it’s a blue-collar thing.

“My father and grandfather worked in steel mills and I worked construction for years, so when you grow up in a working town, seeing people battling and working to pay rent and buy food, it sinks in.”

Swick’s days as a construction worker are long over, but he’s got a different type of job cut out for him — working to win over music fans as an opening act. His stint warming up for the Barenaked Ladies at the MTS Centre Tuesday will be the third time he’s been in Winnipeg as an opener, with appearances last year with Stabilo and the Goo Goo Dolls.

He’ll be back later his year on his own headlining club tour, but until then he’ll enjoy the opportunity to play hockey rinks, he says.

“When you pick up a guitar, that’s the aspiration — to get up on an arena stage,” he says. “It’s extremely intimidating, but the mind frame you have to be in is you deserve to be there. If not, people aren’t going to think that, either.”

— Rob Williams