Arts & Entertainment
Tom Goss preps new album for Aug. release
‘Bears’ singer has edgy, experimental project ready
Out singer/songwriter Tom Goss veers into unchartered creative waters with his new album, slated for an Aug. 2 release. (Photo courtesy Venfield 8)
Tom Goss new album 2016
Tom Goss should be a familiar name to D.C.-area music fans. The LGBT singer/songwriter/guitarist was a longtime mainstay of the local scene before relocating to Los Angeles last year.
We last heard from Goss earlier this year when his haunting reimagining of the Dusty Springfield classic “Son of a Preacher Man,” set to a stirring and provocative video in support of the Trevor Project suicide prevention initiative, went viral and received enormous acclaim. That success set the stage for “What Doesn’t Break,” Goss’ sixth full-length album and his first since 2014’s excellent “Wait.” He returns to the region for a show at Iota Club and Cafe in Arlington on Sunday, Aug. 7 (details here).
“What Doesn’t Break,” slated for an Aug. 2 release, is a departure for Goss, who is known for his often buoyant acoustic-guitar based power pop. The new album is a progression into deeper and more personal material with an edgy and experimental vibe. He collaborates with producer Marr Zimm, who helps create a complex and dense soundscape of electronic elements, brass and strings weaving through the layers of Goss’s excellent guitar-work. The ambition of the music is matched by the intensely personal songwriting and powerful vocal performances. “What Doesn’t Break” exhibits clear artistic progression for Goss while retaining the genuine heart, sincerity and strong melodic sensibility for which he’s always been known.
Goss expresses raw emotion and vulnerability on a level far beyond what he’s presented previously, and it wasn’t always an easy process.
The album opens with the jittery “Wake Alive,” with Goss singing the verses in his resonant lower register before breaking into an anthemic arena-rock chorus. “Thirteen” is a harrowing stare into the rearview at sometimes painful youthful turmoil and how those experiences shaped the man he is today. “Holes in the Wall” is a heartrending break-up song set to shimmery strings, keyboards and a lushly beautiful choral vocal arrangement.
The ominous “Someone Else” is a tense and piercingly direct rocker seething with rage and venom. In a bit of inspired sequencing, he follows the angriest piece on the album with perhaps the loveliest and most heartbreaking, “Mama.” Goss delivers arguably the album’s finest vocal with a song that begins as an exquisite acoustic ballad with soaring strings before exploding into a propulsive, wrenching catharsis that explores the painful reality of the vast distance that can engulf families over divergent beliefs and an inability to come to terms with love as it’s meant to be.
The synth-driven “All My Love” is a late highlight, an achingly devotional ballad layered with sublime vocal harmonies. The biggest sonic departure on an album loaded with them is the electro-pop finale “Long Way Back Home.” It ends the collection with a philosophical and nostalgic bent, appropriate for the poignant musical journey that has unfolded over the course of these 10 songs.
Some fans may be startled by the intensity and restlessness that Goss delivers here, but the emotion is so real and the songs are so expertly crafted that it’s hard to avoid getting caught up in the album’s dramatic sweep. It’s a triumph for Tom Goss, a leap forward that’s both intimate and exciting.
The 2026 Capital Pride Parade was held in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 20.
(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key, Robert Rapanut and Landon Shackelford)
Theater
‘Feeling Afraid’ explores life of a neurotic stand-up comic
Navigating sex, work, and possibly love in London
‘Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going to Happen’
Through July 12
Studio Theatre
1501 14th St., N.W.
$55-$102
Studiotheatre.org
Wordily yet rightly titled, solo show “Feeling Afraid As If Something Terrible Is Going To Happen” dives deeply into the world of a neurotic stand-up comic as he navigates sex, work, and possibly love in London.
Busy arranging hookups and dates on “The App,” the 36-year-old gay funnyman juggles a full dance card; still he’s never been in a romantic relationship. While he’s willing to give love a shot, he’s not pressed about it. As he says, he harbors no fear of dying alone.
Currently making its American premiere at Studio Theatre, this darkly humorous Edinburgh Fringe import features terrific out English actor Steven Webb as The Comedian who’s about to explore what it means to spend all his time with one man.
At Studio’s intimate Mead Theatre, Kat Heath’s minimal set says standard comedy club (fluorescent tube lighting, the mic with a long cord, a single stool backed by a rose-colored curtain), but gay playwright Marcelo Dos Santos has conjured something much more than a live comedy set.
Yes, The Comedian bounces onstage in his red Converse high tops, jeans, and pink shirt with a huge mouth emblazoned on the back, but he delivers more than jokes. At times hilariously self-deprecating, then dark, and occasionally a lesson on what makes standup work, this is a layered, well-acted piece.
With Webb (a keen caricaturist of types and voices) playing all the parts while conducting The Comedian’s hilariously frenetic interior monologue, “Feeling Afraid” takes us through a summer of love. It seems after six chaste dates with The American, our nervous hero has found Mr. Right. The American is earnest, smart, hesitant to initiate sex. He’s also well built with a beautiful smile. And strangely, he’s been medically advised not to laugh aloud.
The Comedian delights in the joys of new love: dates, first kisses, sex, and then suddenly spending all of his time with the adored. Visits to art galleries become fun. Eating home cooked meals followed by grim documentaries is a thing. The Comedian is beguiled as his own boyish figure fills out, but something isn’t right. He can’t entirely relax.
Along the way we meet the Aussie doctor, our protagonist’s longtime hookup; a young runner with some exceptional body parts; the random third in a failed threesome; grumpy working comics, male and female; and an ineffectual counselor.
Webb gives a lightning-fast performance that boggles the mind (in terms velocity and virtuosity). He can be impish, very impish. He’s nervous energy incarnate, flashing jazz hands, grimacing but handsome when still. He’s likeable, a necessity when delivering a hilariously rude joke just feet away from two stone-faced audience members. (Perhaps they were laughing on the inside? At any rate, they stayed through the end the show.)
Produced by the team behind Fringe hits “Fleabag” and “Baby Reindeer,” small stage works that were developed into major TV screen successes, “Feeling Afraid” is funny for sure, and it’s also highly confessional, sexually explicit, and raw.
Written by Dos Santos during COVID lockdown, the piece was a smash hit in the 2022 Edinburgh Fringe before finding further success in London. Its depiction of a youngish queer guy navigating the big city rings entirely true. Like so much Fringe stuff, the one-man show is delightfully lewd and standup inspired.
One little moan: the show closes cleverly but too abruptly with its star dashing offstage without sufficiently basking in the admiration and applause of his thoroughly chuffed audience.
They say third time’s a charm, and regarding “Feeling Afraid,” I’d agree. After two performance cancellations (first for laryngitis and the second involving faulty air conditioning on an especially muggy June evening), I made my third trek to Studio where I found both the actor and AC in very fine fettle. And truly, Webb’s work was more than worth the wait.
The 2026 Baltimore Pride Festival, “Pride in the Park,” was held at Druid Hill Park on Sunday, June 14.
(Washington Blade photos by Linus Berggren)
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