Tom Williams introduces his new album New Guitar

Tom Williams releases new album New Guitar on Monday (23 March) and not only can your hear the whole record in full, Mr Williams has written us a track-by-track guide.

With my band The Boat taking a break this year to pursue weddings, babies, new bands, all sorts, I didn’t fancy being sat at home on my todd. Sitting on two years of quieter acoustic demos inspired by a new guitar I had recently bought, I headed to the studio at the end of last year with a close circle of friends to record what has become, New Guitar.

New Guitar is the story of us moving down to the sea. When I met Sarah my other half, we always stayed down by hers in Hastings and St Leonards and fell in love with the area. Over the coming two years we moved house four times due to flaky landlords defaulting on payments or getting property repossessed so this song summates the wide eyed optimism at the beginning of our little story.

We saw a young girl wondering through a bad part of town one morning in the middle of the week. In her school uniform, she had hurt herself and was clearly in a bad way. We spent the day with her, getting her cleaned up, seen by doctors etc and trying to get hold of her foster parents. She kept talking about her boyfriend, telling us all about him so I wrote the song for him.

First house we lived in was next door to a great grumpy old man’s pub. This song is about hearing the pub fights through the walls on a week day morning. Our area is so rich culturally, we have members of Procul Harum, Mott The Hoople and Steeleye Span knocking about. John Martyn lived in Hastings too which is dead cool.

Second house we lived in was above a bar that had a god awful open mic night downstairs. Not lads with guitars singing covers but mainly folks in their office clothes singing over their ipods. All good and well until it’s under your bedroom floor at 11 at night.

This was one of the last tracks written for the album and features Ant from The Boat and Fie his wife, playing guitar and singing. Sarah my other half also plays piano, cello and sings all over this record. We had great fun playing some dates all over the south coast at the end of last year with Ant & Fie and they’ll be joining us on a couple of dates on this tour too.

When I’m not buying New Guitars or moving house, I teach. And when kids don’t turn up for their guitar lessons I get to write a song. I run these songwriting workshops, and the task I had set this one particular workshop was to write a list of everything. I had an absentee in the morning so this was a stream of consciousness but a special moment in the set.

Probably the oldest song in the set, in that it was in the mix of songs to pick from for the last Tom Williams & The Boat album but deemed too slow. It’s a special song for me, and our set closer every night.

For more, including details of the UK tour which continues tonight (23 March) at the Lexington in London, head to Tomwilliamsandtheboat.co.uk.