Surrounded By Time

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His barnacled baritone steers a steady course through Moog-soaked covers of favourite songs, with sombre lines about dark oceans, soulless days, and skirting a skeleton coast. A bleaker success is Jones’s wise, rumbling, desert blues-backed version of Todd Snider’s super-sharp “Talking Reality Television Blues”.

He additionally praised Jones' desire to freely record whatever he pleases despite being primarily known for "belting out ' It's Not Unusual' at Hampton Court Palace and the Rhyl Events Arena". Additionally, Surrounded by Time was the best-selling album of the week in terms of both physical and download sales. It offers abundant proof that despite the passing of years, Jones has lost none his power or swagger. For the Japanese CD release, Jones' 1965 recording of " It's Not Unusual" was included as a bonus track. The fourth and final pre-release single released from the album, "Pop Star", originally written by Cat Stevens, was released on 9 April alongside a music video.

While on his tour supporting Long Lost Suitcase, Jones' wife Linda Rose Woodward was diagnosed with cancer, causing Jones to cancel his tour dates for the foreseeable future.

As a fan who’s never been able to join in with lock-in singalongs of Jones’ 1968 hit “Delilah” (the whole woman-killing vibe just never grabbed me), I’m not quite sure why Jones and Johns have decided to retell the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah here, with the chap yet again emerging victorious. This feat also made Jones both the oldest male to earn a number-one UK album and the oldest artist ever to earn a number-one UK album with an album of newly recorded material, overtaking Bob Dylan, who topped the chart at 79 years old in June 2020 with Rough and Rowdy Ways. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received a weighted average score of 83, based on 9 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".Alongside a digital release, it received a standard double-CD release [21] as well a deluxe box set release, designed as a 7-inch gatefold package that includes a booklet and additional art cards. The recording sessions saw changes in the way some songs were originally planned to turn out; "I'm Growing Old" eventually turned out to be only Jones accompanied by a piano player and "Ol' Mother Earth" was done in a spoken word manner as opposed to being sung.

The album begins with a pared-back take on “I Won’t Crumble With You if You Fall”, written in 1997 by civil rights activist Bernice Johnson Reagon. After Jones had recovered from his wife's passing, he resumed touring and continued for a few years.

The third single from the album, " One More Cup of Coffee", originally written by Bob Dylan, was released on 18 March. it instead comes across as something of a send off - a release that embraces the gravitas and legacy of Tom’s life and attempts to tie up the loose ends. Jones received a Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 1966, an MTV Video Music Award in 1989, and two Brit Awards: Best British Male in 2000 and the Outstanding Contribution to Music award in 2003.

But he growls such a conversational, experienced, Welsh truth into it that I suspect people who don’t know Snider might think he’d just freestyled those cleverly turned lyrics live at the mic. Stevens wrote the track out of contempt for the record execs who wanted him to hit the perky mainstream. A Jones’s thrill at scaling the charts is captured in a fantastic, staccato piano take on Cat Stevens’ 1970 song “Pop Star”. He performed the song live on The Graham Norton Show two days later and was briefly interviewed by Norton after the performance.

Jones has sold over 100million records with thirty-six Top 40 hits in the United Kingdom, twenty-two in Canada, and nineteen in the United States, including " It's Not Unusual", " What's New Pussycat", " Delilah", " Green, Green Grass of Home", " She's a Lady", " Kiss", and " Sex Bomb".