Gordan Dumka

The multitalented Kuba Oms has done an impressively painstaking job of making the interior of his condominium look just like a Gastown alleyway.

Remember when indie was a word used sparingly in the music industry, downloading for free was something only sci-fi hackers did, and record companies had enough money to throw around for advances? Kuba Oms does. About 10 years ago, he and his Victoria-based electronic-improv project, Velvet, were being wooed by major labels in the States. But like so many other aspiring rock stars before him, Oms couldn’t wait for fame and fortune to start his downward spiral of self-destruction. He kick-started his path to ruin before his much-buzzed-about band even got signed.

“I was an egomaniac and a control freak—thus, a poor leader,” admits Oms, who sat down with the Straight at a South Granville café to share tales of the journey that eventually led to his 2009 solo release, the soulful and groove-driven How Much Time. “Then I fell in love and all of a sudden this hype—it truly was hype—wasn’t as important as love, and so I sort of turned off my phone and that was that.”

During this period, he attempted a solo career. Unfortunately, he was struck by the mother of all writer’s blocks. “I could not write a song to save my fucking life,” Oms recalls. “I was in the middle of this solo record and I just started to go through extreme self-doubt: ”˜Is this cool? Is this good? Are my friends gonna dig it? Is it too commercial? Is it me?’ ”

This professional crisis, and consequent misery, eventually led to the demise of his three-year relationship.

Enter coke.

“I was drawn to this white powder as though it was glamorous—like the whole ”˜rock star doing rails off of a model’s hip’ type deal,” Oms says.

Of course, once he checked himself into rehab a couple of years ago, he realized that coke wasn’t so sexy.

“But, the thing is once it gets you, you are in trouble,” he notes. “One minute, you’re playing around in the sandbox and the next thing you know, you’re sinking in quicksand.”

“I’ve probably done coke off of toilet seats in every restaurant and club in Vancouver,” he continues. “That is fucking disgusting.”

Ironically, during this four-year bender Oms was a writing machine. He won Canadian Music Week’s 2005 songwriters competition for “Never Meant to Hurt You,” a gravelly, heartfelt pop-rock number featured on How Much Time. And then his acoustic ballad “This Heaven” (also featured on How Much Time) closed the Craig Kelly documentary Let it Ride and won best soundtrack in 2007 at the X-Dance Film Festival, an action-sports film showcase that runs concurrently with Sundance.

By the time Oms cleaned up and was ready to finish recording How Much Time—which you can download for free during the month of November at www.kubaoms.com/—he had a wealth of material to work with. Some songs he kept as is. Others he tweaked to coincide with his newfound spiritually enlightened outlook on life. “Beautiful Uncertainty”, for instance, wasn’t always about how we can only achieve true happiness when we embrace the unknown and let go of our attachment to the known. (Yes, he reads Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle.)

“Originally, that was about a beautiful girl,” says Oms. “But then I was hanging out in the studio with k-os and we were talking about writing a pop song that actually says something.”

Inspired by that conversation, Oms took his ditty home and reworked it for the album. And much like the rest of the record—think Paolo Nutini with a bit of Jamiroquai thrown in for good measure—the new and improved “Beautiful Uncertainty” is a sweet slab of bohemian coffeehouse rock.

And so our rise-from-ashes story comes to a happy ending. But the question remains: can Oms write as profusely without copious amounts of blow? It’s a query he answered himself in a manifesto he wrote—during his coke-fuelled heyday, no less.

“It’s written from me to me, saying, ”˜I do not need drugs to write,’ ” says Oms, who is currently vying for top spot in the PEAK Performance Project. “Because I knew that I was writing prolifically and I knew that I was trying to figure shit out, I made a deal with myself that it’s not because of the drugs, and it stuck.”

As for the whole tortured artist thing, he’s done with that too.

“I realized only three years ago that I don’t have to be miserable to write, because I acquired the tools,” Oms says. “I know how to do it [write a song]. And it doesn’t have to come from suffering. And I don’t want to suffer anymore, because when I suffer, other people suffer.”

Kuba Oms plays the Cellar Nightclub as part of the PEAK Performance Concert Series tonight (November 5).