Tom Baxter's brand of alt rock is heavy on introspection but sidesteps the worst excesses of navel-gazing, writes Kevin Courtney

The world may not need another sensitive singer-songwriter, but the world of singer-songwriters may need Tom Baxter. Ruggedly handsome, softly spoken and with the shadowed air of a man who has lived through darker days, Baxter comes loaded with a "new Jeff Buckley" tag, but though he acknowledges the late Buckley as a prime influence the octave-hopping Suffolk lad is searching for a different kind of grace.

Baxter is in Dublin to showcase his filigreed but formidable brand of introspective alt rock. It's early morning at the Morrison hotel, and he has just performed a few songs for an enthusiastic Tom Dunne, on Today FM. A few days later Baxter will play to a rapt audience at the Sugar Club, showcasing tracks from his début album, Feather & Stone.

Don't expect much in the way of strummy navel-gazing, though: Baxter's brand of tunesmithery is a more uplifting prospect, beginning with simple, unadorned melodies, then building to emotional mini-concertos.

Baxter is trying to reach the parts other guitar-strumming troubadours can't get near: the scared, angry child locked inside the man, buried beneath pride, power and posturing.

The album's opening track, My Declaration, is Baxter's Bittersweet Symphony, a manifesto for men in crisis, with a lyrical map pointing the way back to the world of the living.

"Before I wrote that song, before I got signed, I had a period of about two or three years when I really lost the plot and had a very depressive period of time when my place in the world was off-kilter with how I imagined it being," he says.

"And so that song is about having to acknowledge that I had to get help psychologically and that I had to re-establish and rework out the way I looked at life and how I was going to try and engage with life again."

Looking at the calm, composed 29-year-old, it's hard to believe that Baxter is anything other than the cool, smug, successful type the rest of us love to hate, the guy who gets all the looks, all the talent and all the girls. But that's the problem with singer-songwriters: they wear their misery on their denim sleeves, waving their pain under people's noses. In real life people keep the pain locked under a facade of cool, piling on the attitude in the hope that, like make-up, it might cover up those wrinkles in the soul.

"I think, fundamentally, it happens to all of us. It's not just a song about a male perspective, necessarily; it's just about anybody having to go through that." In astrology, says Baxter, it's known as Saturn's return, that two- or three-year period in your late 20s when you find yourself suddenly cut adrift.

"It's like your whole idea of what life is all about, your concepts and ideas, disappear, and it's a little bit like tumbleweed, you know, nothing is there. You don't know what to believe in or what to think about or what to love, what to hate, and you become neutral. . . . I can now look back and say it was an incredibly growing experience, but at the time I just didn't want to exist."

Early life for Baxter was somewhat unorthodox. His parents were musicians who played the folk circuit of the 1960s and moved house often, piling their kids and belongings into the back of a Land Rover. They settled in an old hotel called the King's Head in the town of Bungay, and this is where Baxter, his two brothers and his sister spent their teenage years. The hotel had an old-fashioned ballroom and a nightclub called Charlie's Bar in the basement, where the young Baxters got to see numerous bands.

Soon Tom and his brother were writing songs together and even supporting some of the acts. When he moved to London at 19, however, Baxter faced the harsh realities of a tough city and a fickle, unforgiving music business.

He drifted in and out of jobs, went to music college and tried to get noticed among the throngs of singer-songwriters. He got a job at a pub in south London, performing in the bar at night and grouting its tiles during the day.

Eventually, people started to value his songwriting skills over his DIY skills, and when Sony offered a deal he took it - cautiously.

"It's so fickle, you know: the whole industry can turn at any moment. If you're great then you're great, you're a genius, but then the next minute you're an arse. . . .

"Because of the whole nature of the music industry, and the way everything is collapsing, record companies have to start believing in something and start sticking with things to show that they have faith.

"We know they can produce boy bands and girl bands, but where are the great artists? Where are the Springsteens, where are the Dylans, where are the Mitchells?"