Tom Walker says he nearly quit over stress of writing second album

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Tom Walker says he nearly quit over the stress of writing his second album. The 31-year-old from Kilsyth, Stirlingshire, had his breakout hit Leave a Light On in 2017 and went on to score a No1 album with debut What a Time to Be Alive and win a best breakthrough act Brit in 2019.

Ahead of Tom launching new single Burn tomorrow at 1pm at ­Glasgow’s Princes Square he reveals how close he came to extinguishing his career. Tell us about the torrid birth of Burn? I had just done seven days of rehearsal in a row, straight into a UK tour, then into two weeks of writing and the label came in to listen to these songs I’d said weren’t ready and of course they s*** all over them, saying it wasn’t good enough and I lost it.

There’s only so many times you can get hit around the head with a baseball bat before you decide maybe I should call it a day. For real? I was just wondering maybe I’m not cut out for this, maybe I should be doing something else.

I didn’t know what it was going to be. But I thought about packing it in and doing something else for a bit. To make these people happy – it’s making me ­miserable. How did Burn come about? At the end of the week I came up with the chorus of Burn, “Set me on fire just to watch me… Burn”.