Tom was the editor of some heavyweight USA publications, working for Guitar Player and founding his own heavy metal magazine, Revolver, and the luxury, lifestyle guitar magazine Guitar Afficionado. Concurrently he was finding time for playing and producing:
“Being an Editor in Chief gives you a little bit of freedom so I was touring with some artists that I’d produced and I had a studio that I started in my basement as an enthusiast.
I was doing guitar overdubs with Matthew Caws from the band Nada Surf, when the tracks went to the mixer and he said ‘Man these are some of the best sounding guitar tracks!’ and at that point I just thought ‘well maybe I’m good at this!’
This was about 12 years ago. I actually took the same approach I took to learning guitar. I spent every weekend practicing mixing, like you would practice guitar, just spending hours learning, like, ‘what does 300Hz mean’. It wasn’t like saying ‘I’ll take up cycling, or jogging, and it sticks for two seconds, with this I was all-in. It was a pretty fast learning curve but actually started getting a decent amount of work.”
As the magazine business became “more and more dicey” he decided to try making a living producing bands.