When a recording artist has three top 10 ARIA albums and over 250 million total streams to their name, the last thing you’d expect them to do is retreat from music entirely and start working on an Italian olive farm. Yet that’s exactly what Adelaide-born rapper Allday did after the release cycle of 2021’s Drinking with My Smoking Friends, an album that saw the artist born Tom Gaynor take a detour into the world of indie pop.
“I had been in this cycle of album-tour, album-tour, so I needed to do something else to clear my head before I got back into the grind,” says the 33-year-old. “I wanted to do something weird, so I went and worked on an olive farm for a few months. It was hot and difficult and I didn’t speak any Italian, so pretty quickly I was like, ‘Actually, the studio doesn’t seem so hard anymore.’ It was fucking hard work and my family’s all Irish, so I’m very pale — I’m not cut out for the Sicilian sun! So the whole experience put things in perspective.”
The rigours of olive farming and a reignited love for rap music were the catalyst for the creation of Gaynor’s excellent fifth LP The Necklace, which started taking shape in Australia before he relocated to the UK to make inroads in a foreign market he had yet to fully conquer.
“We were locked down for quite a while in Melbourne, so I thought maybe I needed to just try something else,” he says. “I’ve been trying my whole career to spread my music everywhere, so that’s still a big goal for me to move toward. I’ve got some audience [in the UK] but I just want to make it bigger.”
Rather than feel like he was starting from square one, the challenge of building up a fan base in a new country is one that Gaynor relishes.
“Here it’s similar to where I was in Australia a number of years ago, but that can be fun,” he says. “Just getting to play those shows where you’re playing a one-foot stage and looking people in the face — you’ve just gotta have the energy to rock with them from the beginning again. I’m down for that sort of thing — you don’t want to be the guy who just wants to rest on his laurels and be like, ‘I’m known here, so I’ll just stay.’ It’s probably a good strategy, but I’d rather burn all my money trying to make it everywhere.”
That sense of ambition and focus is apparent throughout The Necklace, which his record label is touting as a concept album based on a real-life event: a girl Gaynor was seeing found a woman’s necklace at his place that wasn’t hers.
“I think it maybe stops short of being a total concept album. To me, a concept album is like Masta Ace’s A Long Hot Summer, which is something that’s very specific,” he says. “But for me, [The Necklace] had like a clear theme, so about halfway through making it I was like, ‘Maybe I just need to stop trying to protect myself in the lyrics and stop trying to portray myself as always being a good guy.’ I knew it was going to be better if I admitted to my own faults. That opened up a thing with me, and I thought about the necklace [incident], which was a time when I was really lost in the sauce with music stuff and just being like ‘the rap guy.’”
Gaynor says this period of self-reflection led to some personal growth and a newfound level of honesty in his music.
“I started to acknowledge, ‘This is the truth of what I have been,’ where I was skirting the line between saying the semi-misogynistic things that you say in rap songs versus being aware that that’s actually not very good,” he says. “I feel like there’s moments on the album I’m doing normal subject matter and in other moments, I’m sort of expressing guilt for that.”
The music on The Necklace was also created with pushing things forward artistically in mind, with the album’s epic first song, “Toxic,” featuring a gospel choir — a result of Gaynor attending one of Kanye West’s ‘Sunday Service’ events in Los Angeles a few years ago.
“Kanye’s definitely my biggest inspiration musically, although obviously I don’t agree with everything he’s ever said,” he says. “I was invited to a Sunday Service in LA with a massive gospel choir, and it was so special. I was crying my eyes out — it was beautiful.”
Attending a private event with one of the world’s biggest artists demonstrates how far Gaynor has come in the last decade, with his popular debut album, Startup Cult, celebrating its tenth anniversary this year.
“I’m blessed and thankful for the people who have engaged with my music because it means something to them,” he says. “I didn’t even start making music properly till I was 20 because it didn’t seem like a realistic hope. I didn’t have a microphone or a laptop so I’d just write bars on the notepad app of my desktop computer at home. It’s been a crazy ride.”
Ten years into the game, Gaynor says he feels no pressure to stay on top of the latest rap trends to sound relevant to a modern audience.
“I’m naturally taking in a lot of what’s current, but then trying to do something that feels right to me,” he says. “On this record I’m not insecure about it being too ‘chasing the moment’, which I’ve definitely done at times. I’ve learned my lesson.
“If you’re only doing what you think the audience wants, that’s a trap in itself. You’ve got to follow what you want, and most of the time, they will like it. Otherwise, I might as well be working back on the olive farm.”
This article features in the June-August 2024 issue of Rolling Stone AU/NZ. If you’re eager to get your hands on it, then now is the time to sign up for a subscription.
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