Spotlight on Tom Power: (Un)Common Threads 2025 Featured Speaker
You may know him from local NL trad band the Dardanelles, or perhaps his endearing "How are ya?" as he starts most chats with some of the world's most famous artists (including Ozzy Osbourne, Barbra Streisand, Dolly Parton and Mick Jagger) on CBC Radio One's Q. Whatever he's doing, Tom Power brings warmth, depth and curiosity to every conversation.
Best known for helping others tell their stories, we're so excited to have Tom as a featured speaker at our (Un)Common Threads Creativity & Innovation Summit on November 4 in St. John's, where he'll share his own story and reflections on curiosity, creativity, connection and what it means to live a creative life.
In this week's Spotlight, Tom takes on the role of interviewee as he chats about how being an artist helps him make genuine connections with his guests, his penchant for being prepared, what keeps him curious, and how Bob Dylan's pants led to a eureka moment.
(This interview has been edited for length.)
Tom Power
Business & Arts NL: People nowadays know you mostly as the host of Q, but you've been a musician long before that, performing with the Dardanelles, etc. How has your experience performing music and being an artist yourself helped you connect with your guests on Q?
Tom Power: My experience being an artist myself has greatly helped me as the host of Q. I didn't go to journalism school. I went to Memorial and I studied folklore. So the only interviewing experience I ever had, up until I hosted Q, was doing field work as a folklore student — so meeting traditional singers and meeting quilters and people who did traditional craft and traditional music in Newfoundland. And one of the things they always talked about in our folklore curriculum was how to build trust and how to not feel like you were being extractive when you were talking to traditional artists in Newfoundland about their work, making them feel comfortable and making them feel like you're not taking advantage of them. And I never really had a problem with that, because once they found out that I was a musician and that I played music, there was a common, shared language between us.
So once I got over the insecurity about not being a journalist that came when I first started doing this job, and I realized that I could talk to every artist, no matter how famous they are or what kind of arts they do, I could talk to them the same way I talked to traditional singers and musicians in Newfoundland. You build camaraderie over common shared experiences. You build camaraderie by knowing how not magical the world of art can be. It allows for us to build trust with one another a little bit earlier.
Business & Arts NL: What have you learned through years of interviewing artists, creators and change makers, and how has your own work as an artist and musician influenced your approach?
Tom Power: I did a lot of interviews as a musician, so I sort of knew what I liked and what I didn't like, and I sort of had an awareness of what it was like to walk into situations and to interviews that didn't always feel comfortable, or I didn't feel like they truly understood what I was doing.
When I was with the Dardanelles touring as a traditional Newfoundland musician, I found that it was really easy for people to put their intentions on my work and then tell me what my intention was and then ask me about it. So as young people from Newfoundland who play traditional music, it was assumed by people, especially if they weren't from Newfoundland, that we were doing it to preserve our music. So I would sit down and the first question after "How are you?" and all that would be, "Why is it important to preserve the traditional music of Newfoundland and Labrador?" And you know as well as I do that that music is just kind of within us. And there's a lot of reasons to play that music, but preservation doesn't have to be the main one. We very intentionally played the music because we liked it, because we enjoyed it, because we thought it was just really high-quality beautiful music that made us feel something, and we wanted to play it. So I knew what it was like to go in with someone not really listening, with someone having an idea of what my work was like.
So when guests come in for Q, whether they're musicians or artists or actors...I'll try to go in asking questions in a curious way about what their intention is, about why they make the work that they do. And I try not to have too many of my own ideas around it that would colour their work.
Business & Arts NL: You're known for your relaxed approach and easy-going conversational style. How do you keep nerves at bay when you're interviewing legends like Anne Murray, Dolly Parton, Ozzy Osbourne, etc? And how do you approach difficult conversations?
Tom Power: Ozzy was wicked. But you know what was funny about Ozzy is that I went in thinking that he was going to be the "out of it guy," the "out of it" character...I remember going to Ozzy and being like, "So, Black Sabbath — when did you guys go from being a blues band to being like, this Halloween, anti-Christianity, really kind of dark, gothic band. When did that happen?" And no one had asked him about it in years, and he was like, "It was intentional. We had this idea." And the character went away and he went back to being his normal self.
I would love to tell you that the answer is meditation, which has been a really important tool for me to not get nervous and to not have intrusive thoughts happen when conversations get challenging or when I have a big star in front of me. And it certainly has helped...but over the years I have learned that (it's) preparation. I am lucky enough to work with the best team in radio and podcasting. I work with an amazing team of producers and we work really, really hard on doing a ton of research and being really prepared and thinking a lot about the work and finding out a lot about the guest...because I find the more I have in my back pocket, the less nervous I am.
When I flew to interview Mick Jagger, I got somehow every interview he had ever done from 1964 up until 2024 and I got them all printed out — which is bad for the environment — and I put them in a binder and I read them the whole way on the flight from Toronto to London...you can't beat preparation.
Business & Arts NL: What keeps you curious? And what are you most interested in learning about people when you sit down for an interview?
Tom Power: When I was 15, I was the biggest Bob Dylan fan that I knew. Now, there were bigger Bob Dylan fans in St John's, but I was the biggest 15-year-old Bob Dylan fan that I knew. And when I was about 16 or 17, Bob Dylan played at Mile One...I had Robert Plant posters on my wall and Guns N' Roses flags, and I think growing up in St. John's, I felt that great art and great artists were somebody who wasn't like me — they were gifted from God, they were of a different species. And even the language that we used around it was like, Jimmy Page was a "guitar god." Like we used apotheosis, we turned them into gods.
So at that Bob Dylan concert, I went up to the front, and I kind of elbowed my way in, and as I got closer to him, I realized that he was wearing elastic waist pants. And he was wearing sneakers. And I can't tell you exactly what happened to my brain, but something clicked and I went, "Oh, he's just a person. He's just a guy. He's not a god. He's just a guy from Minnesota." And all of a sudden his work was more profound to me because it came from a person. It came from someone who ate and slept and had relationships and had a favourite type of coffee and had thoughts on the world and didn't have thoughts on the world. That moment changed me, and I think, really guides the show, because the one thing that the team and I talk about a lot is, "Who is the person behind this work?" When I'm talking to someone — I talked to Ryan Reynolds last night — you're trying to get past him as Deadpool and trying to find (out) “Who is he? Who is this guy? What is the stuff that he might think is boring about himself that has made him who he is?”
I think the more that we realize that great art comes from normal people, and we dispel this idea that great art comes from people who aren't us, the more art can be made and the more opportunities we have to make it.
Business & Arts NL: What would you say is the best piece of advice that anyone's ever given you?
Tom Power: My mom told me when I was a kid that regret is useless, that it's okay to make mistakes and it's okay to mess up...and all you can do is learn from them. But to be lost in regret about them is useless because you can't do anything to change it. And I think when you do a daily show the way that I do, when you do two interviews a day, when you're constantly messing up — I don't always live by it. I get lost in regret and I get mired in guilt and all that stuff like we all do. But her voice, and she's still with us, telling me that ultimately, that's not a particularly useful use of your time, to spend your time mired in "Why didn't you do this thing differently?" The only thing you can do is try to figure out what you can do next...that piece of advice from my mom, who was a great high school teacher in St John's, that always stuck with me.
Catch Tom's featured talk at (Un)Common Threads 2025 on November 4 at the Sheraton Hotel in St. John's, NL (click here to purchase tickets).