There’s no place like home, and there’s no place like Rome.
River Tiber may take his pseudonym from Italy’s Tiber River, near where he lived for a year as a child, but for Tommy Paxton-Beesley, the music is just starting to flow.
Although he has a couple of EPs under his belt (2014’s The Stars Fall, 2015’s When The Time Is Right), the Toronto-based singer-songwriter and producer has a higher profile for the moment due to placements with Drake (“No Tellin’,”), BadBadNotGood and Ghostface Killah (the Sour Soul album), Jazz Cartier (“Tell Me”), Travi$ Scott and Mac Miller.
Paxton-Beesley credits many of those tributaries to his collaboration with Grammy-winning producer Adam Feeney, a.k.a. Frank Dukes (Eminem, Drake), either through happenstance or, in the case of BBNG (who introduced them) and Cartier, friendship.
“For the Toronto stuff, I definitely collaborate with tons of artists in the city.”
“A few of the placements have been passed through Frank Dukes, and I’ve seen the way that it’s written about,” Paxton-Beesley acknowledges, “It makes me seem like I’m more involved than I am. But the way production works these days, it’s so hyper-connected: you can send stuff to one guy and they’ll send it to another guy.
“For the Toronto stuff, I definitely collaborate with tons of artists in the city.”
While he rhymes off Kaytranada, Daniel Caesar, Wayo’s Charlotte Day Wilson and Kwik Fiks as recent studio allies, the formally trained multi-instrumentalist (he spent two years at Boston’s prestigious Berklee College, and can play cello, drums, violin, trombone, keyboards and guitar) is quietly awaiting his turn in the spotlight.
Whether it’s the seductive and soulful synth-chill throb of the recently-dropped ballad “West” featuring Caesar, or the yearning, slow-burning R&B allure of “Let You Go,” the River Tiber music unleashed on SoundCloud and iTunes thus far is only a drop in the bucket.
“A lot of the music that I have out right now is sort of synth-based, representing one or two sides of what I do, but a lot that I’m sitting on is more lush orchestration,” he says. “I’d characterize my music as diverse, but clear in the different selections of sounds and feels and overall mood. It’s hard for me to classify it outside of the fact that I’m trying to make my own favourite music. I’m just channeling my influences, really.”
Those influences – Michael Jackson, Jeff Buckley, Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix among them – are mitigated by a practical “less-is-more” viewpoint.
“I always write more than I need, then I subtract,” explains Paxton-Beesley, who will drop an as-yet-untitled, 12-track, independent album sometime this Spring.
“I tend to produce that way, too. I’ll write a bunch, hit the limit of the arrangement, and then I’ll subtract. I don’t do it always, but it’s kind of a good philosophy, especially for coming up with the track list, whether it’s one or many.”