I remember the first time I heard Another Love. Twelve years ago. We were waking up after one of those long nights at Techno Sonntag, the kind that stretched our bodies and opened our hearts. Sometimes it was just the three of us, sometimes a small crowd. We lived without responsibilities and drifted through a freedom that felt endless. Feelings were expanding in every direction, and life moved through us with a kind of wild clarity. We usually ended up in the attic of a friend in a small village near Vienna, curled up in blankets while the Zwette edit of Another Love helped us land from the intensity of the night.

It was the era of Another Love, and many others. Love filled the air around us and shaped the way we moved through those years. It was also a time of tension, of learning what pulled us in and what pushed us away. I did not think much of the song back then. I secretly loved it though. It kept returning in my playlists whenever my mood tilted toward melancholy, and I let it wash over me without trying to understand it. I was living every note of it without naming the feeling.

Now the song hits with force. It feels like it has been waiting for me, or I have been waiting for it. If I ever lose my memory one day, I am sure this song will bring me back to these moments, and to the ones that unfolded after. Music feels like the closest thing we have to time travel. I cannot stop listening. Something in Tom Odell’s voice reaches straight into the place where memory and present time meet. I found the song again because he resurfaced in my world, or the algorithm guided me back. I like the idea that there’s meaning in this return. And I sense that many others feel a shift like this too, as if something in it calls them back at the exact moment they can finally hear it.

Another Love began as a song written by a young man who finally let himself feel what he had been holding back. He stayed with the heaviness and shaped it into music that came straight from the heart. More than a decade later, that honesty travelled further than he ever imagined. The video passed a billion views, the streams climbed into the billions, and the song found its way into people’s lives during their most fragile moments. Many of us move through life swallowing burdens we never name, and something in this song gives people a way to feel the weight they have been carrying without turning away.

The real reason I returned to Another Love with full awareness and presence is the Sounds Like Art concert Tom played in Paris recently. I watched the whole thing and caught myself thinking, wait, he is still making music? I had no idea he kept going. Then I pressed play and felt that familiar shock move through me. His rawness, his talent, the steadiness behind the piano. And the small fragments he shared between the songs radiated the same intensity. They pulled me in and made me listen in a new way.

One thing led to another and I ended up listening to his new album and the podcast he went on. I have no idea how I suddenly spent an entire weekend with him, but here we are. In that conversation, Tom said things that slipped under my skin and stayed there.

He spoke about Another Love as something that was never engineered for success. It was written in a moment when he stopped looking away from his own pain and allowed the feeling to move through him. He treats the song’s new life as something almost mysterious. A slow unfolding. A proof that the world finds music in its own time, and that an artist cannot direct that process. He kept returning to this idea that creation comes from the heart. You have to touch people’s hearts if you want something to live.

The podcaster, Zach Sang, saw it differently. He described it as a wave that arrived a decade late, a sudden cultural swell that pulled Tom into American life with surprising force. He kept admitting that he discovered Tom far too late and now cannot understand how he missed him for so long. His tone had a kind of awe, as if this rise came out of nowhere, guided by algorithms that know people better than they know themselves. He framed it as a rediscovery that swept across his feed and the feeds of millions of others all at once.

Somewhere between these two frames sits the feeling that pulled me back to the song. Tom sees timing and intuition. The podcaster sees a delayed wave. I felt something closer to a re-entry, a subtle return of a voice that had once lived in the background of my youth and stepped forward again with new meaning. It feels like a shift in direction, a meeting point where an old song reaches a version of me I could not access back then.

The version that looks back and thinks, yes, now I understand it. The hurt, the pain of removal, the slow breaking apart of something that once felt whole so that something new may take root. Another love forming underground while the old one dissolves. It is the same emotional terrain the song moves through, that place where exhaustion meets renewal, where the heart grieves what it cannot save while reaching toward whatever might grow next.

And I allow myself the grief, finally, as part of that movement. Sigh. And one more sigh.

Tom radiates something I feel deeply connected to. Sitting there in the studio, he speaks with a kind of calm that feels steady and human. He talks with the kind of honesty that comes from having been knocked around by the world a bit. I do not know him, yet something in his way of sensing the world feels close to mine.

He mentions a line in Billie Eilish’s TV, the part where she moves through the state of the world and then whispers, “maybe I’m the problem.” Something in that line lands in him. It opens a reflection on the expectations we place on ourselves, the instinct to shape our voice around whatever room we happen to be in. He speaks about stripping all of that back until only the feeling is left. It sounds like someone learning to trust the centre of their own world again.

We all know the world contains people who do harm, yet one of the most honest moves is to look within and see that both sides live in us. The good and the bad. The beauty and the ugliness. The light and the dark. He says this mix sits inside everyone, and his new album is shaped by that idea. A recognition of human fragility and human imperfection, and a gentle acceptance that it is okay to be all of it at once.

And something in what he said echoed in me. You can’t control what people think of you. There is no point in worrying, because people read others through the lens of their own inner world. Their perception becomes a mirror for whatever they are working through. I have felt this so many times. I used to care a lot, but I don’t anymore, and that shift feels like a superpower. The moment I release the urge to manage how I am seen, I feel something in me relax. It becomes easier to stay with my own truth, without bending myself into shapes that keep me small.

Listening to him speak about his years at Sony brought a deeper tone into the conversation. The industry runs on an industrial mindset that treats music like output, packaged and optimised, and something in his story revealed the weight of that world. A world constantly trying to box you in. The emotional rawness at the core of his songs never found real room to breathe inside a system shaped by scale, metrics, and quarterly expectations.

And then he recalled the moment the giant record label looked at him and said, “You are not very good.” A sentence like that can stain you. And it did something to Tom. He was losing confidence and felt out of place in rooms that valued formulas over feeling. This kind of honesty, the kind that sits at the bottom of a song like Another Love, lives on a different frequency than the industrial world. It asks for presence and it asks for space. It asks for people who can recognise the truth in something long before there is any proof it will succeed.

Tom seems to have reclaimed that space now. His independence moves with a sense of alignment, as if his voice finally meets a world that can hold it. He once made an entire album on his own, yet Sony kept seventy-five percent of it forever. “To be the smallest stakeholder in it is a mad thing,” he said, and that experience left him sceptical of the industry and determined to protect other artists from the same pain. His world now lives beyond the reach of the big three labels, shaped by the openness of the internet. And maybe that is why this song travels the way it does today.

It came from the heart, and somehow it keeps finding the hearts that need it, moving through the world with the same instinct that water has when it finds its way downhill. That quiet ache he described brought me back to one of those mornings in the attic near Vienna, blankets around us, music softening the edges of the techno night before, a time filled with lightness on the surface and a slow-growing pain underneath that none of us could name yet. The rawness inside Another Love never had space inside the industrial world he moved through, and the way that world drained his confidence made the song feel even more human.

I first heard the song when I felt everything without knowing why, and now I listen with a clearer sense of myself. I didn’t act from my best self back then, but I didn’t know that self yet. But I have learned to stay with the pain rather than turn away from it, because feeling it fully is part of the human experience I want to live. Tom reclaimed his music, and I reclaimed the part of me that can finally hear it. This is why the song keeps returning. It holds the feeling of beginnings and endings, and I am present for it now.

ADRIANA