Drax Project on ‘Woke Up Late’, Ed Sheeran, busking & Lord of the Rings

Two years later, the band were catapulted into prominence with their irresistibly catchy hit ‘Woke Up Late’. “With ‘Woke Up Late’, it was honestly an accident,” O’Leary stated. “We wrote it and finished it really quickly. We were working on other music at the time, and we just happened to finish ‘Woke Up Late’ really fast, and we decided, ‘F*** it. We'll put out a song. There was no plan or anything. It just took off,” Ben added.

With the success of ‘Woke Up Late’, it brought opening slots for the likes of Lorde, Camila Cabello, Christina Aguilera and Ed Sheeran, whom both Thomson and O’Leary were equally effusive in their praise of.

“The best advice and most memorable interaction we’ve had is definitely with Ed Sheeran. He was the nicest and most generous person in the context of us being us and him being him,” Thomson stated.

“We did three nights opening for him, and on the first night we were in a little catering room having our dinner, and someone comes in and goes, ‘Guys, Ed Sheeran has walked into your dressing room to say hi. You should probably go there.’ We rushed back, and he came in and said, ‘Hey, guys, hey. Thanks so much for being on the thing. So sorry about the weather.’ And we were like, ‘We are sorry about the weather, bro. ‘You are in New Zealand,’ and he’s like, ‘Thanks so much really appreciate you guys being here. We are going out for dinner and drinks after the show. Please come.’ Just a lovely dude, and after the last show, he had an afterparty, which we all came to, and he spoke to us for 20 minutes," Thomson said.

“20-30 minutes. Just about the music business and a whole bunch of different things. Like how he had got all of his high school friends into work with him and stuff like that,” Ben added.

“The thing that stood out, though, is that he wasn’t talking down to us or being like, ‘If you are in this situation or if you do this,’ it was like, ‘This happened to me. When this happens to you guys, maybe keep this in mind.’ He was just the nicest dude and most generous guy with his time,” Thomson concluded.

“I think to sum that up. The moral of the story is it doesn’t matter how successful you are or how many people know your name or any of that sort of thing. If you are a nice person and you treat everyone equally when you meet them, that's how everyone should act,” O’Leary closed.

Initially performing covers as buskers in Wellington, New Zealand, they made the switch to writing their own material after O’Leary joined the band in 2015. “There was no plan to anything,” O’Leary admitted. “It was Matt and Shaan busking; Sam lived with them, so he was like, ‘I’ll busk too,’ and then it’s like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this gig. Maybe we should get someone to play chords.’ So I joined, and then it was, ‘Oh, we should write our own music.’ One thing was just a result of the last thing that happened,” the guitarist added.

“We started writing our own music in a pop context. We were all writing music when we were in university for different things like jazz music, but we only started writing our own music as a band in a pop context because we were playing all these covers gigs, and then we saw other cover bands, and no shade on people who play covers – I think there are some killer musicians out there who do that as their bread and butter – but we just looked at it, and we were like, ‘I don’t know if we want that to be our end goal,’ so we were like, ‘We best start writing our own music.’ It just snowballed from there.” Thomson said.

However, the years of playing music on the streets certainly paid dividends in regard to the band’s live performances.

“I think our live performances are kind of what set us apart and the way we’ve developed those live performances. We started from busking. It was Shaan and Matt initially, then I joined, then Ben a little bit later on, but it all started from playing music on the streets, playing other people’s music on the streets and reading crowds and figuring out what works in different contexts and what people react to,” the bassist recalled.

In an industry with competition that is significant, to say the least, Drax Project are a band that desire to innovate, merging elements of pop and jazz with Singh playing the saxophone. Combined with their live performances, it’s a recipe for success. “The interaction and the feeling between us and the audience in our live sets is really unique. Also, it’s not like we play the same songs the same way every time. At every single gig, things are slightly different, and there’s a little bit of an element of our jazz-improvised background, and Shaan playing saxophone as well is kind of a unique element to what we do,” Sam added.

The switch from busking to performing in bars brought with it a bit of an adjustment, but what was the biggest difference between playing on the streets and playing in bars? “Honestly, I think being okay with people not knowing the songs. When we were busking, we were picking songs that people would know because they would know them, and there were certain reactions we were looking for – different reactions from different people – so we’d pick different songs,” the bassist said.

“You’d see a certain person walking down the street, then you’d play one song and then change it for whoever was walking past, but they knew those songs because they were popular songs. It was a process of working in our own material and being okay with people not knowing them, and it was kind of funny because sometimes we’d play a couple of covers, then we’d play our own song and then play a couple of covers, and people wouldn’t notice that the song that we played wasn’t a big song – or at least wasn’t yet. It was trying to work things in and see how our own music could work in a set of popular, well-known songs,” Sam stated.

Last year, O’Leary had the opportunity to perform a track for ‘Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’, and Beachen voiced the role of Dunbarrow Captain in the movie, which brought with it the opportunity to perform in Hobbiton for the premiere and headline The Shire. Reminiscing about the experience, “It was pretty surreal, to be honest,” O’Leary admitted.

“Super random. A few friends of ours from Wellington, who had helped us out in the past – Phoebe and Artie – were heavily involved with the making of the film, and maybe three years ago, they asked me to do a demo as a proof of concept. Phoebe had written the song and just needed me to record it. I did that, and I didn’t think anything of it really until the end of last year, and they were like, ‘We want you to do another version for the film for the end credits,’ and it’s literally the last song at the very end of the credits. It’s pretty cool to be involved.

“We are all quite big Lord of the Rings fans. Matt, our drummer in particular, loves Lord of the Rings, so he was involved playing some percussion, and then they got him to do some off-screen lines, so he’s a credited voice actor in the film, which he has not stopped talking about, honestly, since it’s happened,” Ben said with a chuckle.

Headlining The Shire also brought with it a souvenir signed by actor and filmmaker Andy Serkis.

“Our production tech also makes drums, and he made this drumkit, which is like a Lord of the Rings drumkit with the One Ring around the bass drum, and Andy really loved it. We got to use it for that, and he came up and signed it, and it now says ‘My Precious’ from Andy Serkis on the drum, which is pretty awesome,” Thomson said.

“We were actually borrowing that kit off a guy called Dean, and we didn’t ask him if Andy Serkis could sign it because obviously if you have a custom-made Lord of the Rings drumkit, you probably want Andy Serkis’ signature. He was stoked,” O’Leary concluded.

The success of ‘Woke Up Late’ brought with it an opportunity to collaborate with actor/musician Hailee Steinfeld on a second version of the aforementioned track – a collaboration which O’Leary described as “pretty random”.

“That came about because we were touring the UK with Camila Cabello in 2018, and I don’t know how, but somehow Hailee heard of us through that tour, and she reached out to us to be on the song, which we, of course, said yes to. It was a random interaction. We’ve never actually met her. It was all completely done through the internet. Pretty random, to be honest, but we were happy,” O’Leary admitted.

Drax Project are touring the UK over the next week with dates in Brighton this evening, London, Manchester, Glasgow, Dublin and Bristol.