Tom Jones does not have time for your nostalgia. He might perform "Delilah" to keep the crowd happy, but he’d rather talk about slapback echo, experimental production, and that one song he stashed in his back pocket for 50 years—just waiting to be old enough to sing it.
His new record, Surrounded By Time, is his fourth with Ethan Johns, but this one comes with a twist: “This one sounds different,” he says plainly. “There’s more variety of material. It’s more up to date.” Co-produced by Johns and Mark Woodward (his son), the album lets Jones indulge in more “ethereal sounds,” which he clearly relishes. “I’ve always loved the sound of music,” he says. “When rock and roll first began… why did it sound so good? So different from R&B? That’s what always interested me.”
Jones, who has apparently aged into a living recording console, goes off on the magic of individually mic’d instruments, the crisp rhythm section of early rock, and Sam Phillips’ echo. “I think music has got to be more interesting now sound-wise than it was a few years ago,” he adds. Translation: he’s still evolving, and if you’re not, kindly step aside.
And then there’s Dylan. Always Dylan.
“I would love to do a Dylan album,” Jones admits, though for now, he’s settled on “One More Cup of Coffee.” Why that one? “Because we’ve all got that,” he says. “Let me just have one more... whatever it is in life. You might be in a place you shouldn’t be, but you think, well, maybe I’ll just have another little taste of whatever that is.”
Surrounded by time, indeed.
He leans into the metaphor: “You’re on the clock from the day you’re born,” he says, recalling his paper mill days. “That’s another 12 hours off my life. You’ve got to make time count.” An old man once told him to go chase his singing dreams—“Make sure they’re good memories. Don’t have any regrets.”
Jones didn’t. And now he’s the oldest artist in UK chart history to debut a new album at No. 1, knocking Bob Dylan off the throne. “I’m gonna be 81 next week,” he grins. “I was 80 when I did it. Dylan was 79.”
Mic drop, Dylan.
The album opens with “I Won’t Crumble If You Fall” and closes with “Lazarus Man.” “There’s the crumbling and the rising,” he says. The core, though, is a long-held song called “I’m Growing Old.” He was 32 when someone gave it to him. “I thought, I can’t do this yet. I’m not old enough. But I held it. I held it till now.”
He compares the strategy to Clint Eastwood. “He had a Western script when he was young and said, ‘I’m not old enough yet.’ And he waited. Same with me.”
For a guy who claims not to be a songwriter, Jones knows how to make other people’s songs his own. Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ “Pop Star,” once a sarcastic jab at fame, becomes something triumphant in Jones’s hands. “When I played it for him, I said, ‘Look, I know what you were saying. But to me, it’s real.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I hear what you’re doing.’”
He treats every cover like a role. “I’ve always looked on singing like acting. You pick your roles. You say, I could get into that. I could do that. Then you act it out different to what somebody else would do.”
That explains why Jones, the man who once hypnotized Vegas, is now casually dropping Todd Snider’s “Talking Reality Television Blues” into his set. “It spoke to me. Hank Williams did an album as Luke the Drifter, where he spoke the songs. And sometimes the spoken word hits harder. I mean, when I say, ‘Come gather round, I’ll sing you a song’—boom. It’s different.”
He plans to tour as much of the record as he can. But yes, he’ll still do “It’s Not Unusual.” “You have to,” he says. “If I went to see Jerry Lee Lewis and he didn’t do ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ I’d think something’s wrong.”
Still, there’s a lot more left in the tank. “My voice is still there,” he says. “Not just the power, but the flexibility. As long as it stays with me, I’ll keep punching them out.”
And if it wasn’t clear already, yes—he has absolutely earned that one more cup of coffee.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
