Tom Odell speaks ahead of Birmingham gig

And fans think of Tom Odell as a pop star.

Yet the man himself has a completely different perception. Odell frames himself as a singer/songwriter, rather than a frontman. He's happiest when he's creating new tunes, including those that feature on his 2016 album Wrong Crowd.

Odell, who headlines Birmingham's O2 Academy tomorrow, was born in Chichester and discovered by fellow singer/songwriter/pop star Lily Allen, who signed the 25-year-old to her label.

His first album featured the singles Another Love, Grow Old With Me and Hold Me. They earned Odell the Songwriter of the Year title at the prestigious Ivor Novello Awards.

And he hopes to continue that success with his latest batch. Wrong Crowd features the hit single Magnetised, which was written in London.

"It was one of the last songs we wrote for the album," he says.

"It started off as a ballad, it was about unrequited love. It ended up as a very different thing once we took it to the studio. We put some drums on it and all of a sudden the music production twisted the lyric. It turned from a being a very sad song to still being tragic, but maybe a little more positive. I find it interesting when you can change the production on the music and lyrics and it slightly twists the lyric.

"I wrote all but two or three of the songs by myself. On the new album, there's a balance of songs I wrote by myself and songs with co-writers."

Odell collaborated with writers like Rick Nowels and Andy Burrows on his new record, which also features the blissful ballads Somehow and Constellations.

He has different methods for writing songs, sometimes starting with a piano or guitar part and other times writing titles or lyrics. "It's always different," the musician adds. "For a lot of the songs on this album, it was a phrase I had – the lyric and title of the phrase would come first.

"For the song Wrong Crowd, I had the phrase first. I had the phrase: "I can't help it, I don't know how, I guess I'll always be hanging with the wrong crowd." And then I came up with the melody, and the song would be written. With Somehow I just messed around with the melody and chords, and then a phrase like 'somehow' came into my head. I think I had 'somehow' written down in my notebook.

"For me, it's supposed to be a lyric which starts your imagination. I might start with a single phrase, and then I might have a thousand ideas in my head about what it could mean and where I could take it. I don't have to totally imagine that I'm in that scene.

"For the song Constellations, it starts in this bar. I'm in this bar and I'm telling this girl that everything's s**t and I've got these awful people around us, but I'm saying everything's going to be different now. I look up in the stars and I'm telling you things will be different. In order to write that, I had to imagine every detail in that bar – the chatting, the gentle hum of the bar, the headlights passing outside, the chair that squeaks, a look.

"But obviously you can't get all of that detail in the song. You can only pick a few of those details to sing. But in order to get those details I have to almost write so many verses to get to that point."

By Andy Richardson