Shannon Fowler is somewhat of a musical chameleon, morphing his sounds to fit his musical surroundings. As Tom Lark, he has been on a continuum of sonic change since 2011, moving through indie pop before re-emerging more than a decade later with ‘Brave Star,’ his award-recognised psychedelic folk album. Released in April, the sophomore Tom Lark album, ‘Moonlight Hotel’ develops his sonic palette, sounding both softer and tougher. He talked about it with Amanda Mills.

Ōtautahi-born Shannon Fowler has always been drawn to music. Childhood keyboard lessons led to guitar, and he played in his school’s guitar group. 

“My brother’s friends started playing. They had a band and I was like, ‘Oh woah – you can do that?’” he smiles. His own early songwriting was influenced by musical comedy acts. 

“A lot of the reason why I started writing songs is probably due to Flight of the Conchords. I think I saw them on an episode of Lion Red Sports Café. I started writing jokey songs that you could just sing with your friends, then that became more serious!” 

Early bands included Sunburn (with his brother, his cousin and a friend) which took influences from contemporary British music. Jasper Sweeney was next, but this time they had student radio success and supported Steriogram on tour. Jasper Sweeney were recording an EP of new material at The Sitting Room in Lyttleton when the 2011 Christchurch earthquake struck, destroying the hard drive which held the recordings. 

It was following that experience that Fowler created the first ‘Tom Lark’ EP, a collection of eight tunes composed in his bedroom within the quake ravaged city. The EP enjoyed student radio support nationally, which led him to recording sessions in Berlin. On returning Fowler moved to Tāmaki Makaurau where he established his own central city studio, Okie Dokie. 

Following an Australian east coast tour in 2012 he took the first iteration of Tom Lark as a band to the CMJ festival in New York. in Australia’s Triple J playlisted two Tom Lark singles, Go Get A Job (2012) and Something To Tell You (from the 2014 second ‘Tom Lark’ EP). Fowler toured there again on the back of the radio exposure, opening for Gruff Rhys from Welsh band Super Furry Animals.

A prolific artist, Fowler not only performs as Tom Lark but also as Shannon Matthew Vanya, a solo pop music project he started in 2019. He is also part of The Fuzzy Robes, a psychedelic Christian music band – and not as much of a curveball as you may think. Fowler agreed to join the project after being told the Bishop of Canterbury wanted to make music for young people using the bilingual Anglican ‘New Zealand Prayer Book’ for the lyrics. 

“I thought it was crazy,” he recalls with a smile. “We just tried to come up with these sort of monastic melodies or whatever, that would be almost like Gregorian chant or something! So then we just made psychedelic beats around it, and it kind of took on this weighty thing.”

The artist Tom Lark is a very different, determinedly indie beast. After various iterations over more than a decade the project has evolved, and at the same time returned to earlier goals. 

“Tom Lark obviously started out as a bedroom project thing, but then I had great fortune of having really cool band members for a really long time,” Fowler says, acknowledging how important the band was. “I think my musical approach probably got rounded out, sanded down and refined by playing with those guys. Being able to come back to something that you were kind of doing earlier, with a new knowledge and experience is cool.” 

He is a strong melodicist, alongside other songwriting strengths. 

“You try and come up with a little chord movement, or even just a couple of chords that can inspire some sort of melody… then it’s just fleshing it out I suppose, or trying to expand on whatever you get. I think when you first start writing there’s like an element of you’re always waiting. I guess it’s that thing of waiting for the muse to strike you. But then the more you write, and the more time you spend teaching yourself how to write,” he laughs. “It’s like problem solving or fixing little puzzles!” 

When not writing for his own various projects Fowler has been in demand as a producer, engineer, and collaborator, working with (among others) Fazerdaze, Randa, A.C. Freazy, Body of Work, Rick Shrimp, and Merk. Currently he’s working with Mainard Larkin (Randa) on a country album. While all three of his musical projects are diverse, he says he mostly writes with something specific in mind. 

“I’ll have an idea for a project and then just try and make something for it. I’m always just looking for things that will be entertaining and surprising. If it keeps, you know, plucking away on your brain, then you’re probably onto something!”

It was only in 2023 that he released the debut Tom Lark album, ‘Brave Star’, which took the band sound in a folkier, acoustic, more introspective direction. The album struck a chord with his old and new fans, and was a finalist for both the 2024 Taite Music Prize and Best Folk Artist prize at the 2024 Aotearoa Music Awards. The song Live Wires was also a nominee for the 2024 APRA Silver Scroll Award. That amount of success came as a surprise. 

“I honestly thought no one would care, so it was really nice that people were like, ‘Oh, great’, you know? It seems like I was almost as pleasantly surprised as people were! I just had so much fun doing it, and feeling as though Tom Lark didn’t have to be anything other than a creative outlet again… it felt more expressive, so that was kind of freeing.”

The positive reception to ‘Brave Star’ gave Fowler freedom to explore different aspects of composition and performance on his new music, using different instruments in different ways. 

“I hadn’t made a lot of guitar-based music for a while. I had given myself permission to do some guitar solos, which I never do! Five years ago I don’t think it was actually cool, and maybe it’s not cool now,” he laughs. “I’ve sort of pushed myself a little bit just in terms of playing guitar or coming up with little guitar solos or something, lead lines that are amusing to me.” 

2025’s ‘Moonlight Hotel’, has underlying themes of displacement, both for the artist following the 2011 Christchurch earthquakes, and his family in 1929 with the Murchison earthquakes. Themes about family and connection come through, and he has thought much about the importance of familial values and tropes. 

“There’ll be family sayings that come through, they came from my grandfather – those things are ingrained and like weaved through the way you go about life. It’s come from this weird way of doing things, you know, a million years ago!” 

Sonically, ‘Moonlight Hotel’ progresses the sound on ‘Brave Star,’ though even Fowler struggles to encapsulate that.

“I feel like ‘Brave Star’ is quite, sort of like small and contained, whereas on this one the songs are even softer… but I feel like it’s more bold and has more presence in terms of energy or something as well,” he laughs.

The album title is based on a real person – George Fairweather Moonlight. Born in England, he was a resident of America and Australia before settling in Murchison, where he came to be considered a local hero. Describing him as the “really dashing and tall explorer guy,” Fowler says Moonlight was a character with a knack of finding gold in the area, and set up his hotel during the busy, late 1800s period of the gold rush in Murchison.

“I just think about the riff raff and stuff that passed through it, but my great, great, great grandmother was a barmaid at his hotel,” he smiles. “He was kind of like the unofficial sheriff in Murchison as well. There was some story about him. There was some really severe flooding, and he was caught between two rivers – marooned there for like two weeks. But he survived.” 

Moonlight’s presence on the album is a metaphor for perseverance, of ‘hanging in there’ when success and good fortune have dried up, while thematically it swings between the evergreen topics of luck and love, the former especially typified on Dumb Luck, the album’s first single. 

Dumb Luck examines the idea of naivete, and how luck might not be good fortune, but the ability to find the silver lining, or to make the best of a situation. The video (directed by Sam Kristofski) for the song has Fowler panning for gold in the Nelson area, a reference to Moonlight’s story and Kristofski’s background, as his family are from the area. Fowler is joined in the video by some suspiciously fake creatures. 

“I just thought it’d be funny to have a bunch of snakes and New Zealand native creatures,” he laughs in explanation.

The album’s second single Rock & Roll Baby, examines acceptance of situations that are out of your control, begging the question of how the unpredictable nature of his own music career has shaped Fowler’s viewpoint? 

“I think maybe when you’re making music, early on you take things really hard. Like wins feel like wins and losses feel, you know, really dire. But maybe as you get older you see enough ups and downs or whatever.” 

One anecdote springs to mind from early in his career, when opening for another band at The Echo in LA. Fowler recalls the band weren’t expecting to be paid.

“At the end of the night the venue people were like, ‘Oh, hey, we’ve got the money for you for playing.’ We were surprised and said we were actually not allowed to be paid because we weren’t even supposed to be there. And they were like, ‘Ahh, well, we’ll put this money here, and you know, if it disappears or whatever, then you know, that’s fine!” 

The band pocketed the $70 payment, which turned out to be serendipitous. “We got back to the car  and there was a parking ticket for $69.90,” he smiles. “It kind of felt like that’s such a win – and a loss immediately after it. That kind of sums it up; it’s rock & roll, baby!”