Tommy Palmer

I wasn’t terribly close with Jeff on a personal level, but he’d been endlessly supportive of my endeavors over the years, along with other friends & artists, and I’d always considered him one of the driving forces in Boston-area music. Not to mention he had the best radio voice ever. Since my @home pipeline this year, we’d started messaging on a pretty regular basis, dorking out on rare musical finds and lesser-known gems we thought the other might like.
appearances: March 6, 2012; Dec. 8, 2015; and May 19, 2020 (with Babydriver)

Breeze liner notes (from Bandcamp): I’m really not sure how many times Tommy Palmer has come down to the studios at WMBR. Babydriver has been on the air twice and his old band even made an appearance. However, it often seems like he shows up as a sideman for someone or other a few times every year.
     With his last album five years old, Tommy had some new songs to share with us. This session even led to lighting the fire underneath him to finish off a new song just of the occasion. Sure, not as much fun as heading into the studio to record these with a band, but the results are superior to most demos we ever hear.
     Tommy tried to bully me into letting him do a Steely Dan song for his cover, but thankfully, I held my ground and instead he took on Donna Summer’s biggest hit that she wrote herself (it peaked at #2 for 2 weeks on Billboard). This is the perfect example of why we are giving folks tunes to cover, as this creates a sense of fun and opens doors that artists didn’t even know were there for them to step through.

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