Sitting Down with Saint Idiot
By Geoff Davies
This week, we spoke with Saint Idiot (aka Edmonton-based art pop musician, AKA Pass the Mic Reading Series author, AKA Tomáš Andel, AKA Tom) for this interview exploring his written work, his new music, and why we need to think more deeply about the relationships we all rely on.
Q: My first question for you, Tom, is who is Tom and who is Saint Idiot? And where is the line in-between?
Tom: Thomas is some just Slovak kid that came over to Canada when he was 10, got uprooted from, you know, all his friends and the kind of culture he is familiar with. I think he has been looking for belonging a lot of his life.
A friend told me about an exercise about how to define your heart in one word, and the first word that came to me when I thought about it was ‘belonging.’ So I think I‘ve always grappled with belonging in some way.
And I think maybe an idiot is like…well, it’s a mask.
But when you wear a mask, it’s permissive. You get to forget who you are for a little bit and play with some different energies.
Q: So you have your song Bubblewrap, which as you say is about anger. As you incubated and developed that song, that art, how do you and your relationship with anger start changing?
T: Yeah, that’s what I mean. It’s like the song or article or whatever I make, I set out to try to have it change me. Like, I try to grow through it. That’s what happened with Emotional Archeology, the article: I feel like in draft one, I came with a certain understanding and it was very much like I was projecting a lot of things onto other people, trying to hand down advice that I wish was true in my own life.
And then I realized, “Right, I’m projecting,” and actually the transformation between draft one and the final one is like me coming up with good intentions. So I learned so much in the writing itself, and this is kind of what happens with the music as well.
Q: In your article, you made a great point, about the emotional labour of figuring out your inner world and how often we force that work onto our partners, especially our romantic partners. I guess that’s the same kind of idea?
T: Yeah, exactly. It’s like how, in this article, I sort of say we need to be cautious against renouncing the responsibility for our own inner work. We still have to actually put in the work and not just outsource it on other people.
And then, not paradoxically, but sort of counterintuitively, in my song Warp and Weft, I’m talking about how you need to have a dialogue that’s truly two-ways. That you’re doing the work yourself, and there’s someone with you, helping you.
They’re mirrors, they are support systems. And so we have to talk about how, if you can task one person with being that for you being that the only touchstone for this kind of work.
First of all, if you don’t, they’ll buckle under the pressure.
Q: I want to ask you more about this idea of the emotional labour; you know, hanging on intensely solely to one person for this emotional connection, and about the opposite of that—the fabric, the interwoven social connections.
To throw a Next Gen Men lens on top of that, I’m thinking about how we like to talk about how—especially for men, and young men—the friendships we make now, the energy we invest into them, pay dividends for life, and help protect as against all the hard, bad or ugly stuff that comes up through life.
T: They also keep us in check over a long amount of time, I think.
Like people, when they get to know us intimately over time, they know our goals, they know our dreams. And so when we deviate from that, but we can’t see it because we're in the moment or being swayed by, I don’t know, money or something…and we’ve strayed from our broader mission in life…these friendships can actually remind us of that.
It’s almost like externalizing a part of yourself, saving it on a hard drive somewhere. I don’t know, like as a backup file.
And then this person comes and says, don’t you remember that you had this goal in your life?
Q: What motivates you to be a self-described masculinity explorer—and to keep exploring?
T: I think my reflexive answer is that I’m scared that I’ve hurt people in my life—and that’s true.
But I think it’s even simpler and maybe even more selfish than that—it’s that I know that it has hurt me too.
I’m only starting to untangle how it has actually, straight up, just kept me confined in ways that have been—not to shift blame—but at least part of why I ended up hurting other people.
So I figured, hey, you’ve got to be proactive at some point.
From the Future of Masculinity weekly newsletter, where our community’s hearts and minds come together each week to do the work, tell the stories, and build the blueprint for a future where men and boys experience less pain and cause less harm.