Wichita’s Tommy Newport embodies a new brand of digital-native rock star
In this age of social media supremacy, young and completely unknown musicians can upload a track to the internet and become a chart-dominating star quite literally overnight.
That’s not quite what happened with Oliver Milmine — it’s harder when you’re making guitar-based music — but the Wichita teenager does have social media to thank for the shot he’s been given to make music professionally. His Toronto-based management team first heard him on Instagram, where his songs, digital prowess, and instincts for branding added up to something resembling a Generation Z indie-rock star. He’s now known as Tommy Newport (itself a blended nod to two well-known brands — Hilfiger and the cigarettes), and singles from his 2018 release, Just To Be Ironic, have landed on Apple Music playlists and Complex blogs.
Newport has been touring North America of late — he’s in Kansas City on February 10 at the Uptown — but he’s not living that Drake life quite yet. When I checked in with him by phone recently, he was back in Wichita, doing carpool duty.
The Pitch: How was high school for you? Would you rather have been home making music? Newport: Yeah. I liked the social part of high school, but I wasn’t much of a studious kind of kid. I would always kind of leave school early and make music and things like that. But there were enough kids around that were like me for me to enjoy my years in high school.
Is your family nervous about you not attending college right now and going out on tour? I’m sure they are. They don’t really project it, but I was in college for about a semester and I just couldn’t focus, so I decided to take a break, and this is what I’m doing. So yeah, they’re probably nervous, but they support.
I’m sure the phrase “gap year” is proving to be helpful here. Yeah, gotta justify it. [laughs] I was at Wichita State. I was gonna do business and marketing, but I’m on a gap year that might last longer than a year.
How did you first get in touch with the management you have right now? I got a message on Instagram from Chief [Bosompra, manager] and he was asking me what I had going on and if I had any other projects going on. And I think I didn’t respond, just because I wasn’t sure who he was. And I left it for a week or two, and then he got back to me and I responded and he told me more about what he did and the people he was surrounded with. I think after that it just kind of sparked some conversation and phone calls and they set up this whole schedule to roll out a project with them. So I signed a contract to work with them.
What’s that situation like? I have two managers. Chief is more of a marketing [person] and event planner, and he was friends with 4th Pyramid and knew that he was looking to work with someone. 4th Pyramid is more of a hip-hop producer and artist, so he was intrigued to work with me, and we could both push our boundaries, and I was OK with that. And it turned out with the album I just put out, that’s what we did together.
Do you know what song they heard and how they found you in the first place? Yeah, it was “Emerald Bay,” that was on my [Milmine] album. [Chief] was in Toronto and some of the girls he followed had put it on their story, so he figured he would check it out, and he did, and he really liked it. He thought that I would’ve been an artist that had a big following by the way the song sounded, and when he went to my page and saw that I was not a big act, he wanted to make it a big thing. And that’s where his intentions came from and how he found me.
It’d be a stretch to call any of the material on Just To Be Ironic hip-hop, but I do get the sense that there’s some hip-hop influence on there. Is that right? Yeah, I don’t think I’d personally do any hip-hop or rapping, but what [4th Pyramid] and I do now, we make beat packs and tracks for artists like Jazz [Cartier] and artists in his circle, or anyone they have connections with. We’ll make a file of five or 10 tracks that are hip-hop tracks without vocals and send those out to artists. If they bite, then that’s cool, and we’re able to produce tracks for hip-hop artists, but I don’t think I’ll ever embark on my own hip-hop album.
What was your experience with the Wichita scene like before you were picked up by your management? I kind of put my music out there for myself. I didn’t really expect anyone to listen to it, and then people did. I only made it for me, really, and my friends. I kinda just wanted to see it on all the platforms and be able to play it on iTunes, and I didn’t expect any of this to happen. That’s why I went to school. But after I got picked up by my management, I figured it would be a good time to take a break from school and see what we could do with that.
There’s some great local acts around here. The music scene is crazy around here. There are so many kids making music and playing shows and things like that.
I thought “My Woman” and “Black Wedding” sounded really cinematic. Do you draw any inspiration from movies or want to work on soundtracks? That’d be really cool, actually. I don’t pull much inspiration from movies, but probably subconsciously from Tarantino movies and stuff like that, but I’ve never thought about scoring any type of film, which would be really cool. But yeah, I just love the way that strings sound. I like to incorporate orchestras and stuff like that.
“Mr. Angel” also leans a lot on the piano and other instrumentation that isn’t really common in pop music right now. Was writing that song a lot different than any of your others? Yeah, it was kind of like a satire of making a pop song. I knew when I was making it that it sounded like a pop song, and at the time I thought it was funny and that I’d never release it. But I felt that it worked well with the way I structured the album and how the mood changes from the start to the end, and I wanted to throw all the more poppy stuff at the start to throw the people off a little bit. But yeah, “Mr. Angel” is super poppy. More modern pop than anything I’ve done. At the time I found it kind of funny, but the story behind it is more the exact opposite of a pop song. I wrote it as “Mr. Angel” being kind of a drug and someone being addicted to it. But it was in the form of a major key pop song.
You said that you’d been sitting on this set of songs for a long time prior to the album’s release. What sounds are you working with on your newer material? I have an EP that should be done by May, that I wanna have out before summer that should have five or six songs on it. They’re all a lot different than the album. The album I just released has a lot of different songs on it; some of them are funky, some of them are poppy, some of them are more rock-y, and it was kind of just a waiting game to see which tracks people were more attracted to. It was important to me that I keep doing the things people are attracted to, and that I enjoy doing as well.
You’ve only played a handful of live shows so far, so what’s your mindset going into this big tour? We’re ready. We’re ready to go, and I think we’re gonna kill it, so I’m excited. I haven’t really felt too nervous. I think we’re just gonna go out there and do what we rehearsed and it’ll go really well. We got to play at the Fonda [Theatre in Los Angeles, this past June], which was a good way to really shake your nerves, because there were 2,000-plus people in that venue, and we were just thrown into that situation and it was a great way to shake the nerves, so I think we’re all ready to go. I’m excited for it.
♦
Tommy Newport
Sunday, February 10
Encore (at Uptown Theater)
Just To Be Ironic is now streaming on all platforms.
