How Everyman Poet Laureate Fred Thomas Learned to Express Himself

Most musicians consider cubicle jobs to be soul-crushing ventures. But Fred Thomas is not like most musicians.

The 40-year-old Michigan native has always been an endearingly verbose songwriter, but an obvious evolution in his songwriting took place between his 2012 record, Kuma, and 2015's All Are Saved. Thomas spent that time writing and editing artist biographies for the Ann Arbor-based music directory AllMusic.com, and he admits that getting paid to write about music full time may have had a lot to do with that evolution.

"Before I started that job, I actually had a really hard time speaking," Thomas says. "I kinda had almost like a speech impediment-grade inability to express myself. That disappeared when I was in the practice of writing hundreds of words every day and trying to figure out the best words and the economy of what I wanted to say."

After releasing a slew of lo-fi bedroom-pop albums that gradually positioned Thomas as the everyman poet laureate of the Midwestern DIY circuit, that economy has critics hailing his latest album, Changer, as his best. Like the Hold Steady's Craig Finn, Thomas mostly eschews conventional singing for stream-of-consciousness ranting, a preference that seems born from having too much to say and not enough time to say it. The vocals on Changer's best tracks feel like a harried acquaintance riffing on the tribulations of daily life before running off to catch the bus. When Thomas does sing, it's mostly to accent whatever point he's making, which is sometimes unclear but usually relatable. Even if you've never dealt with the kind of entitled street punks that talk shit to Thomas outside a venue on "Open Letter to Forever," you'll have no trouble sympathizing with his plight.

Thomas' approach to the actual music behind his signature sing-talking has grown as well. By his own admission, early tracks like "Holland Tunnel" and "Wet as a Cloud" are obvious indicators that Thomas was going through a Neutral Milk Hotel phase, while the reverb-soaked clatter of "Unfading Flower" may be the best Panda Bear song that wasn't written by the Animal Collective member himself. On Changer, his synthesis has become much more subtle, which finds him coming into his own and sounding a lot like, well, Fred Thomas.

"I'm just ripping people off in subtler ways now," Thomas says. "I think the goal of any artist is to get to a point where the collage of influences just sounds like them all of the sudden."

Written around the 10-day period in which Thomas got married then moved to Montreal, Changer embraces the equally droll and abrasive realities one must accept to reckon with the idea of adulthood. Now that an adult job has uncorked a wellspring of inspiration in him, Thomas is ready to embrace it.

"Life is gonna keep going after you get sick of Neutral Milk Hotel and you have to figure out something else," Thomas says. "Or after college, or after your big breakup where you have to go live in a cabin in the woods for 10 days. All that stuff is these little stations that have a lot of dead space in between, and I feel like I finally started embracing some of that space and getting down to the root of what I actually want to say." 

SEE IT: Fred Thomas plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., with Tyvek and Skin Lies, on Wednesday, Feb. 8. 9 pm. $10 advance, $12 day of show. 21+.