Tommy Bravos on the Acceptance of Change and Rebirth in His New EP
- jmilazzo620
- Apr 5, 2024
- 18 min read
March 12, 2024
By: Jada Milazzo

Photos courtesy of Brittany Sowacke
J : So, I to begin, do you want to introduce yourself?
Tommy: Yes, my name is Tommy Bravos, and I live in Chicago, and I make transcendental pop music.
J: Before we dive into the new music that you're releasing, what's your background within the music industry and music in general?
Tommy: That's a good question. I grew up in a very musical household. Neither of my parents are musicians, but they are both very creative and were very nurturing of me and my siblings’ creativity. We were in piano lessons, we sang in the choir at our Greek church, and you know, were in school musicals and choir, in the dance troupe, so we were always creating in some way. And just somewhere along the line, I began writing music, and that led to me studying composition and western classical voice in college. I knew that there was always this pull towards pop music, and I wanted to be able to understand why I was writing the things I was and how to take it to the next level. So I ended up using my composition degree to start orchestrating pop music and that led to me moving to Chicago and getting myself into the music scene here.
J: Great. In saying moving to Chicago, where were you from originally?
Tommy: I'm from a suburb called St. Charles. It's about an hour and ten minutes away from the city, but it's at the very edge of where the suburbs meet the country. So it's a nice mixture of that urban feel with, at the time, it's a little bit more industrialized now, but there were corn fields everywhere. There were some spots that definitely felt suburban, but everything else on the outskirts was a little bit more rural.
J: So moving into the city definitely gave you more of an urban vibe and aesthetic, and just a multitude of different people and experiences to influence you.
Tommy: Absolutely, I wouldn't call it a wake-up call but it definitely was like a little fish in
a big pond.
J: Yeah, definitely something to like adapt to and change in a way which is great you know you always need that as an artist and as a creative in general, I think it's a way of pushing out of your comfort zone and creating something new that helps you figure out who you are and who your artist persona is that you want to explore more.
Tommy: There was definitely a huge change/metamorphosis after releasing my first project, while in the city. I put out an album in February of 2019, but it was all music that I had written before I moved here. I'm happy with it and proud of the work that I made, but very much it's like, “Oh, okay, this is not who I am now, and I need to figure out who I'm going to be before I keep creating and what that looks like”. It's all a process. It's all about change. Life is, you can't stay the same.
J: Oh, for sure.
Tommy: That's actually a big theme of my newer work, so it's cool to recognize how what I'm talking about now has impacted my past.
J: Yeah, I know when we had talked previously you had mentioned that this new work was a lot about the idea of rebirth and reinvention, which going back to what you said about the process, it has a lot to do with just growing in life. You're always changing, and therefore your process is always going to be changing, and who you are is always changing as well within your creative outlet, so to speak.
Tommy: Absolutely. Yeah, this whole EP is all about recognizing when something is no longer fully bringing you joy and that becomes the catalyst for “Oh, well I'm not happy with my life, and I'm not really invigorated by who I am anymore, I'm not happy with who I am anymore, but I can be anything I want to be let me figure out where I would like to go and plant the seeds to make that happen”. And then also knowing that this process is going to be repeated again and again and again.It's not a one-time thing. Just recognizing that constant rebirth. I mean, every year the flowers die and the leaves fall. And then every year they come back a little bit different.
J: And I think that's something essential to being creative, is recognizing that “I made this three years ago and I'm different now. Things look different, things come out different, my process is different” and I think understanding how your process works and being able to recognize like who you are and how you've changed impacts what you put out in general and within your own life and how you express yourself to people is different than how you would years ago. And therefore it reflects within your music or your creative outlet.
Tommy: Absolutely. I mean I think about the circles I was in while in college and first moving to the city and how that's changed. And embracing my queerness and becoming closer with other queer creatives and the nightlife community, that definitely played an impact in the style of my music. I wouldn't say it's changed me at my core, what I'm creating or like my own unique individual style, but I do think it translates into what I’m showing people: A little bit more forward, a little bit more energetic. I think I'm leaning even further into pop this time around. I put out an album, Adonis, in 2021, which I would call pop music, but it's a little bit more art pop, avant-garde. And I would say going into the studio this time, I was listening to a lot more Greek and Slovenian pop, so I wanted to have a little bit more of this urban and sexual feeling. But that didn't change the lyrical content. So it was cool to combine this more modern yet foreign style of music with that place of dreaminess I write from.

J: Yeah, interesting. So within the process of figuring out your own identity, like you were talking about, but also your writing never changes, is it a lot more of a change in the studio work within producing stuff, or would you say that your lyrics feel the same as they did years ago, but your sound, I guess, changed a little bit?
Tommy: Yeah, I'm still pulling from the same source. I'm a Pisces rising and a Gemini sun, so I've got this kind of chaotic but very soft emotional, you know, danger within me. I think I'm pulling from the same place, but what I'm now pulling out is a little bit more mature. I look at my first sort of project and it was very naive, romantic, and pining. I still have that closeness to my emotions, but now I want to talk about something a little bit deeper and something a little bit more universal. I know I'm not the only one who feels the way that I do on these songs that are on the EP. It's talking about the struggle of staying happy and realizing that you can be anything you want to be. That's something that is very human. But it doesn't feel like I'm taking a departure from what I've been writing before. I definitely would say that the studio process has changed. It’s become a little bit more intentional. I think in the past I didn't really have a plan going into the studio. I just kind of was like “Oh, well here's a collection of songs I finished. And they are somewhat connected, so let me see if I can assemble them in a way that tells a very cohesive story”. Whereas this EP, you know, I had the whole thing written out. The first song was finished, and I was like, wait a second, these songs I’m sketching are connected. What do I want them to say? What do I want this project to say? And that kind of influenced and changed the way the studio process worked.
J: Yeah. In talking about cohesion and creating a persona of a song that is a sibling, for lack of better words, like part of the same family; what is your idea and, I guess, opinion on the idea that an album will always have the same sound/the same sort of vibe, like one song can't be r&b while the other song is more pop?
Tommy: So I used to be of the idea that everything kind of had to flow similarly, you know. But you said family, and I think about my own family and how different I am from my siblings, but at our core we are still of the same DNA and background, but individually we are incredibly unique. I think that kind of influenced this EP, especially because there are so many different genres, and it's only six songs, and I wouldn't compare any of the songs to one another, but when you listen all the way through, it feels so cohesive.
J: Yeah, like each song is its own sibling. Like each sibling is very different in their own way, but when put all together in like a lineup, you can tell that they're all connected.
Tommy: I mean the first single I released, Until Death, is very romantic, and the first half is just like very somber synthesizers and vocals, but then the beat comes in and it's got this really like sensual, emotional feel, and it's totally different from the second single, which has this very shimmery organ and all of these balkan drums that have this loud percussive beat underneath the entire song. And then I think about the unreleased song that has a children's choir or the club beat with a two-minute outro, or the very last song which starts with this echoing drone that I chanted over before the final chorus comes in. There's just so many different things on this EP and it feels weird that they're all connected, but also it makes sense that they're all connected, because that's also the theme…is that we can be whatever we want and we're still at our core, ourselves. No matter what version of you you become or decide to be, you are still, you know, still a part of something.
J: That is like a great way of describing creating within different genres and still remaining cohesion within your artist's body of work. Within talking about each song, are the songs correlated to specific experiences that you feel related to this idea of rebirth and transformation?
Tommy: I would say there are three songs that really came from a core experience, or a tangible experience. That would be the first and the last song, Until Death and Till Until, which were the first songs I finished. I had celebrated New Year's; I visited a situationship, and I got back and just had this very numbing feeling. I was reflecting and asked myself “Was that really good for me? Do I just keep trying to find similar experiences until they bring me joy? And when they no longer bring me joy, I'm going to leave and have to keep doing it again?” So that's where that one came from.It almost became a little bit too sappy. I had played around with writing a chorus that was directly talking to the person. I was thinking about the actual emotion that I was writing from, and it didn't make sense to make it very personal. So I wanted to have this more universal feeling, even though it came from this experience that was romantic, and curious/questioning. Then the last song, which really signified the rebirth, was from a similar situation. I was on a flight home and just realized that I had wasted a lot of time entertaining a person that wasn't giving the same energy back to me. That one was born from a place of romance as well, but the more I performed it, the more it started to change and it really cemented itself in my voice as this, like, I'm going to change. I'm going to become a new version of myself. My old self was dead and a new one was growing.
J: You were wasting your time putting energy in this place that was no longer serving you.
Tommy: Yes!!! So again, it could be applied to so many different ways, even though it came from this place of like, oh, my situationship failed, what do I do now?
J: Yeah, no, that's great. And I think talking about kind of pulling from experiences and
maybe indirect experiences and just like the overall emotion of something is a really important way to connect with your people, your audience, and also just connect with the true version of yourself that you want to be putting into your artwork. And it allows you to be very raw and vulnerable within the writing process and the studio process, both hand in hand.
Tommy: Vulnerability is something I think is very powerful. There’s a third core experience song, which writing it was kind of a wake-up call. This person had assumed my reaction to something and “I was like well I am actually no longer this version of me that you think still exists”. So it was those experiences that really made me want to be like, alright, well I'm done writing from this place of pining. It's like really personal, soft energy. And I'm going to become something new, but I didn't want to just jump abruptly into this new venture. The remaining songs in the EP were kind of like the feeling of wanting to change, captured in a different way. So those aren't actually necessarily from different experiences, more so like a general theme. Which was a newer thing for me to write about, because in the past I really was only writing when I was in a very low, sad place because of my experiences. To take my lyricism into a place where I'm thinking about a concept, it was very challenging at first, but now in hindsight it felt very easy to just put this thought into a few verses. It really came out as well as my process did before. So to tie into that I can become anything I want. It felt very fulfilling.
J: For sure. And I think as artists we tend to pull a lot of our inspiration, and a lot of our drive for our work, is pulled from a state of being extremely low and being like “How do I get out of this rut? How do I get to the point I want to be?” Or even just from bad experiences or relationships, things like that. So it's interesting to think about creating
within the intentional purpose of relating a concept as something that you might not have actually experienced, but relating that overall feeling through the way that you create is an interesting way of just creating.
Tommy: So…I'm a huge fantasy and science fiction nerd.
J: Okay, same.
Tommy: I think about one of my favorite quotes from The Legend of Korra, the last episode of the first book, and she's lost her bending, this thing that has been her identity her whole life. She finally connects with her past lives, which in a way is connecting to your past self. And she's told, you know, when you reach your lowest point, you are open to the greatest change. I think that's applicable in so many ways. You know, when you are finally at your lowest or not feeling your best, that's when you're able to really pick yourself up and decide, well, what do I need to do to make my life better? Make myself better? Not even better, but just more growth oriented. I don't know, I feel like humanity, especially with capitalism so intertwined in our society, it makes a lot of things stagnant. It makes me think, “Oh, I have to work this job for X amount of years to make X amount of dollars so I can buy this home and then retire. And my life's going to look the exact same until I retire”. And that's just so engrained. And I think it's really done a disservice to how we interact with ourselves and with other people. So that was another concept I wanted to pull into this EP was that we can reconnect to the natural cycle and to the seasons changing and that we are supposed to be different throughout our whole life and that it's actually more beneficial for us to be living in new experiences and in new places or in new ways. Because that's our human experience.
J: Yeah, and I agree with what you're saying about the idea of capitalism creating this very stagnant, almost monotone life, which I agree, I do think a lot of people go through life with the idea that “I need to just continue with this path that I'm on, even if it looks the same, because it's safe, it's comfortable, and in the long run it's going to get me that stagnant, simple idea of life, being able to have a house and just retire and just live out the rest of your life”.
Tommy: That's not to say that people who choose that route are wrong in any way, but I think we've been numbed to believing that that is the only option. And I think about my personal life and all the different ways I get involved with activism, and I've been told it's easier to just complain than to try and do something about it.
I think this is also the first time I'm trying to put a message into my work, a message that I believe in and try to live by, rather than letting my music just be an avenue to express my romantic frustration. I do think that that sort of coincided with the fact that I had entered my first long-term, very safe relationship at the time that I started working on this EP. So it felt like the right time for me to start exploring deeper goals with why I'm creating and what I'm trying to say instead of it just being “Oh, boys suck, and romance is difficult, and I'm going to make a song about it”.
J: Yeah, which I think, considering mainstream radio music, I think that's what a lot of people tend to go towards is like “Oh, I had a failed relationship”. It connects with more authentic people and a more authentic audience within the fact of making something that is actually going to bring about some sort of change. Whether that's changing somebody's mind about something or just opening somebody's eyes to something that needs to be talked about, and I'm talking about it in my music.

Tommy: Absolutely. There is one song on the EP, it's titled, in Greek, Me Ti Gi, which means with the earth. And there's a little bit of alluding to climate change and that our planet is dying, but the whole premise of the song is that the earth is changing and we're changing with it. It's got this really clubby feel and this like super sexy four on the floor beat. And even just the pre-chorus, “I'm yearning to be you and you and you”, it sounds like you're singing to a new version of yourself, but it could also be this person on the dance floor, and you're so connected that you're now becoming one version of one another. It's stuff like that, I want to be able to put a deeper message in this music that's more accessible to listen to. It's easy to make something that says something, but if you're not getting new audiences to listen to it, then it's just kind of an echo chamber, because the people listening are already on the same wavelength. I think that's what makes pop music so fun to me, is that you can get anyone to listen to it. It really allows exploration of themes and lyrics because I'm talking about climate change, becoming a whole different version of yourself and reclaiming power over your life, but then there's break beats, club and trap beats underneath it. It's easy to listen to and throw on and say, “Oh my God, that's a great song”. But then if you stop and listen to the lyrics, you're like, “Oh, this is about existentialism and trying to find joy during my time on earth”.
J: Yeah, for sure. I think that what normally attracts people to music is the overall rhythm and beat of it. Within my own listening to music, I have gotten a lot more attached to lyrics and things that I connect with a lot, which might even be from a genre that I don't particularly listen to a lot, but it's lyrics that I feel really connect with the audience. And going back to creating a message through your music, Do you think that in creating the music videos that you've been working on are reflective of the message that you're trying to share?
Tommy: In a way, yes. The first music video definitely was storytelling. In Greek culture, when someone passes, the widow wears black for the rest of their life. And so that played a role in the styling. I was in an all black to symbolize the loss and then an all white outfit to embody this rebirth. And there are two figures wearing masks, and I wanted to have a little bit of theatricality as if I were dancing with death. I'm playing this character and they’re in a dead forest and recognizing all these emotions and trying to find joy through dancing. These movements then take them into the city. I'm dancing with these characters and realizing that the cycle is just going to continue forever.
As for Like No Other, the song has a different meaning to it. We’re able to become anything we want; you know, this concept of “I'm unlike anyone else in this world” so I wanted to play around with different aesthetics. That one featured a little bit more of that sensual allure, and a little bit of camp as well. There's a clip where I'm playing chess against myself. I'm able to access all these different versions of me and my past. I’m doing some traditional Greek dancing and wearing a lot of the folk costumes that I used to wear in my troupe, referencing a past I'd like to reconnect to. But I would say so far the music video for Me Ti Gi is the one where a little bit more of the themes are coming in. I made a newspaper that featured the lyrics and the headline is, The Earth is Dying, which is the very first lyric in that song. I wanted to capture a little bit of that sense of urgency, how people are reading the news and hear all these terrible things happening, and then we just kind of ignore them. So I wanted to have a little bit of campiness in that as well. That one also featured choreography. I worked with a good friend of mine, Xenia Mansour, and we had a small ensemble of dancers and then a bigger ensemble for a party scene. In that, she’s becoming me and I'm becoming her to play around with that more literal meaning of being on the dance floor and connecting with someone; the feeling when you're so close to someone it’s like you start becoming them and vice versa. But then you have the greater theme of the earth dying and people partying their lives away while everything is crumbling around us. So that one became a little bit more literal. I’ve created a visualizer for the song featuring the children's choir and then a short film for the last song on the EP as well. That one really tells the story of rebirth and the last line on the EP is,”I will be the greatest love I've ever known”. So that really is told visually.
J: Yeah, and I think it's interesting to see how an artist personifies their song through the visualizing aspect, because it's hard, because as a music artist, you're, at least in my mind, very focused on the sound and that sense of your creation. Then the visualizing comes after. So I guess in creating the EP, did you think a lot about the visualizations of the cover art and all of the content that is gonna be released to go along with it?
Tommy: Yeah, that was definitely something that came together throughout the process. After I had finished the second song in the EP and seen all the different ways I wanted to bring stuff to life, that spurred me to apply for a grant from Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, which I ended up getting. And that was very fulfilling. It kind of felt like I had a little mini-label budget to work on all these things. The application was very in-depth, and by the time I found out that I had received it, I was already in the middle of the process of, you know, I had made a music video, I'd already been collaborating with the graphic designer for all the cover art, which, if you have seen, is very collage-focused. I wanted to convey that theme visually, of, you know, multiple things coming together to be one solid work or individual.
J: Like piecing yourself together, sort of.
Tommy: Absolutely. It actually was perfect because the person I've been collaborating with is a trained landscape architect, who is now a graphic designer. So it just felt very fitting to tie in with all the natural people that turn around this EP. But I never really had a goal with the visuals. I think it was more of just, what are the different ways each of these songs can come to life? I didn't necessarily want it to be a through-composed film or visual EP. I just wanted each song to sonically exist on their own. So I kind of wanted there to be an individual existence for each video. You know, still able to look connected, so there are some outfits I've repeated throughout the visuals but they’re very much their own little scenes. A thing I think about a lot is that pop music is just theater, and theater is just opera, and opera is just mythology and you can have this one story with all these small characters but there is this one aesthetic that covers the larger story. Rather than make everything look the same, I wanted everything to connect to the themes, because at its core that is what this EP is about, the central theme of life, death, and rebirth; and there are so many different ways to bring that to life.
J: For sure! To finish off, what are you hoping people can take away from the EP and this rebirth of your artistry?
Tommy: I would like people to feel empowered and empowered in a mindful way. I think so much of self care right now is focused on the individual, and there’s this “Oh well I need to protect my peace, I need to look out for me”. I think that has kind of etched its way into a one way thinking. I think a lot of this EP came from recognizing I’m stronger when I’m connected to other people, and that’s the version of myself I wanted to become through making this. That’s why I put so much emphasis on collaboration and not having to force myself to do everything alone and make these decisions by myself. I’m creating something bigger than me by working with other people. But I think thematically I want people to become a greater version of themselves to continue this theme and improve the lives of the people they are connected to. We’re not as single minded as we like to think, so I want to be inspiring people to do their best through collaboration.
J: To not be afraid to connect with others.
Tommy: Exactly, and that they can inspire the same message to other people by living in a way that is change centered and to make a difference. It’s a little sappy, like “What if we all loved each other”, but it’s the idea of hope. Hope is a muscle … It’s one of my favorite quotes. It’s cheesy to think that way and it’s easier to be pessimistic, especially with the way the world is right now but we have the power to change it, and I think that starts with changing ourselves.
Comments