page_title: Thomas Dolby
section_title: The Sole Inhabitant
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Dolby / Solo music career / The Sole Inhabitant
caption_attribution_description: Thomas Dolby, Boulder Colorado 2006
context_page_description: Thomas Morgan Robertson, known by the stage name Thomas Dolby, is an English musician, producer, entrepreneur and teacher. He came to prominence in the 1980s, releasing hit singles including "She Blinded Me with Science" and "Hyperactive!". He has also worked in production and as a session musician. In the 1990s he founded Beatnik, a Silicon Valley software company whose technology was used to create the Nokia tune. He was also the music director for the TED Conference. On faculty at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University since 2014, Dolby leads Peabody’s Music for New Media program, which enrolled its first students in the fall of 2018.
context_section_description: Following his involvement in Beatnik Inc, Dolby returned to his musical career in 2006. He performed his first solo public show in 15 years at the Red Devil Lounge in San Francisco, California on 21 January 2006, surprising the crowd who were there to see local band Notorious. He then launched an American tour, the Sole Inhabitant Tour, on 12 April, comprising a string of small dates in California, a science education benefit in Boulder, Colorado, and gigs across America before receptive crowds.
  The United States leg of the "Sole Inhabitant Tour 2006" was captured on a "live" CD and DVD. The CD represents a recording of two gigs played by Dolby at Martyrs in Chicago, while the DVD was filmed at the Berklee Performance Center at Berklee College of Music. The DVD also includes a 30-minute interview, and a lecture by Dolby at the Berklee College of Music. Both the CD and DVD were released in November 2006, and are distributed through CD Baby and iTunes. Dolby autographed and numbered the first 1,000 copies of the CD and DVD.
  A show at the 800 capacity Scala club in London was booked for 3 July 2006 as a warm-up for Dolby's Hyde Park set opening for Depeche Mode. The show sold out in a matter of days and prompted Dolby to reprioritise the UK, resulting in him moving with his family from California back to England, and a nine-date Sole Inhabitant tour of the UK in October 2007, coinciding with the release of a lavish box set of the Sole Inhabitant CD and DVD by UK independent label Invisible Hands Music.
  Thomas toured throughout the months of November and December 2006 with electronic musician BT. This tour included a version of "Airwaves" that BT added his own technique to, which was the opening song on the UK leg of the Sole Inhabitant tour (sans BT).
  Thomas Dolby's performance of 15 March 2007 at the SxSW festival was released as the live EP "Thomas Dolby & The Jazz Mafia Horns, Live at SxSW" (with musicians from San Francisco's Jazz Mafia collective, through iTunes and on CD Baby.)
  The 2007 UK Sole Inhabitant tour included three new songs previously played on the US tour, one called "Your Karma Hit My Dogma" another called "Jealous Thing" and a cover version of The Special AKA's "What I Like Most About You Is Your Girlfriend". "Your Karma Hit My Dogma" was inspired by Kevin Federline's unauthorised use of a sample from Mobb Deep's "Got It Twisted" which in turn had used an authorised sample of "She Blinded Me with Science". The tag-line from that story became the title of the song. The wording was lifted by Thomas from a bumper sticker on a car that he saw whilst living in the San Francisco Bay area. In a move close to performance art, Dolby tried to post a 'cease and desist' legal letter on Kevin Federline's MySpace page when other attempts to contact him proved fruitless. The song is on the Live at SxSW EP.
  The second new song, "Jealous Thing" was performed at least at The Graduate in Cambridge and London's Islington Academy on the UK tour in Summer 2007 and features a Bossa-Nova type rhythm.
caption: Dolby performing in 2006
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