Tourist
Poetic Parallels
Running & Embracing the Creative Process
Words by Tayler Willson
Photography by Oliver Hooson
It’s 3pm, mid-November, and I’m sitting beside William Phillips as he explains to me the lifecycle of the Atlantic salmon. We’re perched upon dainty wooden stools inside Deeney’s, a quaint Scottish street food spot in East London, only a short walk from Phillips’ house.
“Have you ever read about the life cycle of the Atlantic salmon?” he asks, sipping an espresso. “It’s one of the saddest but most beautiful things I’ve ever known. There’s something so poetic about it.”
Phillips, more commonly known by his stage name Tourist, isn’t effusing about the ray-finned salmonid without reason. Instead, he’s likening its sacrificial process — which is, basically, a salmon swimming to its own peril in order to feed and spawn — to the way he finds motivation to create music.
“In order for them to spawn, they have to die,” he explains. “The salmon swims up river to its final moments to feed and spawn. It’s sacrificing itself to create new things. I’m deep into this. It’s kind of my mood board right now."
Phillips’ dissident source of artist juice is clearly working. The songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist (not to mention father and husband) recently released his fifth Tourist album, Memory Morning, a mood-driven and instinctive collection that ebbs from nostalgia to virtual disorientation.
This recent drop follows a fruitful period of awakening mash-ups with the likes of Christine and the Queens, Churches, Wolf Alice, Swedish House Mafia and The Weeknd, and that’s before even mentioning the Grammy Award he received in 2015 as a co-writer for Sam Smith’s Stay With Me.
While the derivation of his creativity is largely down to his own genius (and the story about the Atlantic salmon), the 37 year old also pinpoints another facet of his day-to-day life as being pivotal to his continued success: running.