There’s a particular kind of phone call that can change your life, and Jamie Wollam can tell you exactly where he was when his came in. Driving up to Beverly Hills for a recording session, his phone buzzing with a familiar number. “You want to be in Tears for Fears?” his old friend Charlton Pettus asked. Jamie’s first instinct wasn’t excitement. It was doubt. “I don’t know if I can do that gig,” he told him.
We talk to a lot of accomplished people on the PULSE Podcast, and so few of them will tell you about the moment they doubted themselves. Jamie came up playing Kiss and AC/DC records in his bedroom in Southern California, a rock kid through and through. Tears for Fears, with all their synth-driven new wave sound, felt like a different language. Sixteen years later, he’s still in the band, and he figures his rock background is exactly what they liked about him.
Jamie didn’t end up on Salt Spring Island by plan. He was going through a divorce, trying to get sober in Los Angeles, and packed a suitcase and an acoustic guitar not really knowing which way was up. His mom had retired there years earlier. He went to visit. He never really left.
He calls his recording studio there the Monster House, mostly because from the outside it still looks like the old shed it used to be. Inside, it’s a different story, world-class gear tucked into what was once a one-bedroom add-on with no running water. He built a lot of it himself, picking up carpentry skills working at Windsor Plywood during the pandemic when touring wasn’t an option. He now offers drumming lessons in person and virtually, between gigs.
Jamie’s is candid in a way you don’t always get from musicians at his level, about the music, about the sobriety, about the long journey from LA traffic to a quiet shed on a Gulf Island where he finally found his footing.
You can hear the whole conversation, including which Tears for Fears song is still the hardest to play live after all these years, on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP40PulsePodcast.
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/