Philcon 2006 » Guests » Tom Smith
Personal website: www.tomsmithonline.com
For over two decades, Tom Smith, The World's Fastest Filker, has been breaking hearts, crippling minds, and dropping jaws across the country and around the world.
Sometimes it's with the slow, gorgeous stuff (“Starlight & Saxophone”, “Storm Dancing", “A Dragon's Lullaby”). Sometimes it's the dark and dramatic (“Hellraiser”, “PQR”, “Bullet Time”). Sometimes it's the flat-out rockin' (“Bermuda Triangle", “Rocket Ride”, “And They Say I've Got Talent”).
But mostly it's the puns. And the godawful jokes that make you choke on your own laughter. And the audacity with which he throws 'em around. “Smurfin' Safari”, “Five Years”, “I Want To Be Peter Lorre”, “Domino Death”, “Sheep Marketing Ploy (The Ballad of Fenton)”, “Divine Irregularity”, “Telly Taley Heart”, “Honey-Glazed Ham”, “House At Cthulhu Corner”, “Psychic Voicemail Hotline”, “Dead Potters”, “Badger Pajama”, “The Illuminati Polka”, “Talk Like A Pirate Day”, “Spoiler Alert”, and so forth and so on. And on.
To his credit Tom can count eleven albums, dozens of additional unrecorded songs, twelve Pegasus Awards for Excellence in Filk, one animated music video (“Enterprising Man”, from the second Babylon Park video), a spot in the Filk Hall of Fame; and thousands of stunned, delighted onlookers staggering in his wake.
Tom's concerts are always high-energy, and because the news of the day usually has him cranked up (or off) about something, he'll have two or three new pun-filled ditties up his sleeve, and if he doesn't he'll make something up on the spot. His turns at late-night filks are even more insane: his philosophy is, if you've been up all day at the con the last thing you need is some monotonous, gore-filled dirge to put you to sleep; so he drags out the really bizarre stuff, and he starts doing voices, and call-backs, and quotes from cartoons or The Muppet Show or Rocky Horror or MST3K, and... look, trust us, it just gets wild. Join the fun, live the madness, and catch Tom Smith live!