Their 2017 hit single Woke Up Late made Drax Project a household name here in Aotearoa, and with the hype surrounding the song the pop alternative act secured a record label in the US, not long after moving to LA to live out their dreams as international musicians. The end of 2024 saw them release an album recorded live at London’s iconic Jazz Cafe, a significant milestone for the jazz-educated sometimes Wellington band. Charlie Rodgers talked with guitarist Ben O’Leary about the live album and creative independence.
Drax Project completed a European tour in early 2024, the four-piece R&B/pop band’s first return there since Covid, resulting in enthusiastically familiar crowds and some of the favourite gigs they’ve played, according to guitarist Ben O’Leary.
“We’d done a few support slots around the UK and Europe when we opened for Christina Aguilera and Camila Cabello in 2018. When we went back there earlier this year the shows were so good that we’re already planning our next tour there in May 2025! We had shows in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and then we did three gigs in London. There’s obviously a big Kiwi presence in London, so it was nice to give those fans a taste of home!”
Doing the business behind sax-playing vocalist Shaan Singh are Sam Thomson on bass, Ben, and drummer Matt Beachen. Announcing their confident arrival with the 2016 ‘Drax Project’ EP, the four released a self-titled debut album in 2019, following that up with ‘Upside’ in 2023, alongside a series of multi-million-stream singles including a number of collaborations.
Success has seemed a constant, but the impact of Covid was significant to the band who were then establishing themselves as an international live act. Prior to the end of 2019 the band were happily living in the States. They had returned home for an Aotearoa summer tour of festivals and their own beach run, with a Saturday show at the Sydney Opera House scheduled before flying back to Los Angeles. On the Tuesday before then the world went into Covid lockdown.
“At that point we were all over the place, it threw a big spanner in the works. But it wasn’t all bad because we got to stay and spend time in NZ, and it forced us to up our own skill set which was which was positive.
“We were lucky, we had been writing heaps of tunes over that past year so we had heaps of half-cooked tunes to work on. During that time, we just bunkered down in Avalon, which was where our studio was and just did a bunch of Zoom sessions with people we’d met in the States.
“Up until that point, we had been working with producers most of the time and then when lockdown happened, it was like, ‘Oh well, we literally can’t be in the room with these people that we’ve been working with, so we either do the whole thing over Zoom and not be as involved, or just get our own chops up and learn to do it ourselves.’”
They chose the latter, and that wasn’t by any means the biggest decision that the global pandemic forced upon the band as Ben, their new album’s mix engineer, explains.
“We had a regular show crew before Covid and then situations changed during that time. The margins on shows are not what they were, and people are just cautious with their money, so it’s played a role in decisions like what crew we bring with us when travelling.
“It’s a blessing and a curse, because you’re constantly working with new people which can be tough, but it’s also forced us to be more onto it with our stage set up and our sound. Being able to articulate to a front of house engineer, or a monitor engineer what we want in technical terms, instead of saying, ‘Make it fat, huge and punchy!’ It’s forced us to understand what is helpful and what is not helpful with foreign and local crew alike.”
Having booked one show at The Jazz Cafe in London Ben says the band only realised after the fact that the Camden venue is actually legendary, and promptly booked a second.
“D’Angelo’s live album is at The Jazz Cafe and that album inspired us when we were studying music. Jamiroquai, Sun Ra, Amy Winehouse, all these legends have played there and also done live albums! It’s such a sick venue. We thought because the shows sold out six months in advance that there would be a bunch of Kiwis, but most of the crowd were people that saw us at the Camila or Christina shows we did.”
Not all was plain sailing on the first night however, with serious issues appearing when the band turned up for soundcheck.
“We had a front of house tech locked in for a while, and he was all over our set up, what we wanted to do, our audio recording… and then he bailed the week before and didn’t tell us,” Ben exclaims. “We ended up using someone who had no idea who we were, he didn’t even know we were recording the shows!
“The replacement recorded the shows into Reaper with his laptop attached to the front of house console, but there’s a few moments where the audio skips. His laptop or hard drive he was recording on wasn’t fast enough, so there were bits that we couldn’t use, which was a real shame.”
Ben says not much thought had initially been put into the live album possibility, but when they’d announced the second night the band had realised they could film both nights. Their tour manager Jack and a few friends pitched in to achieve that. Thankfully the London shows went off, and the band played two mind-blowing gigs.
“After the gigs Sam and his partner went on holiday, and Matt and Shaan had kids before we went on tour, so as soon as the tour was done they went straight home. I was the only one with the time to work on it.”
Operating from a small home studio in his flat, Charlie says he ended up mixing most of it on headphones because his subwoofer broke a week into the process, and he wasn’t used to the sound of the room without it. By the time the sub was fixed he was so deep in the mix that he completed 90% of it with headphones.
“At the start I would mix one song, get it to a point, and then start the next song off the back of where the last one finished. Ideally, I’d just have the gig as one DAW session, but I started automating everything all over the place and it was just getting way too messy. I was chasing my tail in some regard. I’d get to the end of a track and then I’d notice I’ve made the snare sound way better than in the songs before, so now I’ve got to open up the first songs again and copy the plugin chains over – which was a result of me not having done something this involved before.
“There was a lot of learning on the job and figuring out what was possible, and what was going to give the best results. It’s a live record and we want it to sound live, but we also want it to sit next to our other music on Spotify.”
Bearing in mind that track mixing was a skill he’d essentially learned out of necessity during Covid, the Drax team had turned a bad situation to their future good.
“When you start to learn that stuff yourself, you realise how much you know just from watching other people do it,” credits Ben. “We were always super keen and involved in the production side of things, even when we didn’t know what was going on. I imagine we were pretty annoying in production sessions. As soon as the producer did anything we would ask, ‘What’s that plugin? Why are you doing that? Have you heard of this plugin?’
“Once we started doing it ourselves there was a lot of things that clicked, and at that time heaps of producers and mixing engineers started streaming on Twitch, so we just watched hours of streams, and you pick up so many things just from watching someone, like their workflow and habits.”
“You don’t have to know everything, but you need to have a basic understanding of all the different sides of production (writing, recording, mixing, and mastering). We were fortunate that the people we were working with were all open books and they taught us a lot about songwriting and mixing.”
“There are a few plugins that I used in general. A lot of the equalising was done with the FabFilter Pro-Q3 as well as a few of the Universal Audio compressors like the LA2A and 1176 on vocals and bass. I have this one plug in called Silencer by Black Salt Audio, and it’s crazy. The biggest problem I had was bleed from the cymbals. I’d get the song sounding good at one point and then the next time Matt was hitting the cymbals it would spill into the other microphones, so I was using that plugin to help reduce that spill.
“I also put it on Sam’s bass a couple of times because there was quite a lot of electrical noise in the bass recordings. I was also going through and doing a lot of manual editing, like cutting up the audio and removing the noise, but that was so time consuming. When I put Silencer on the bass track it saved me hours of editing!”
Some Kiwi-origined software also came to his rescue in producing ‘Live At The Jazz Cafe London’.
“In one song there was feedback that happened, and it was down to Shaan’s vocal track being really loud, so I got the Serato stems plugin that lets you to do stem separation. This allowed me to isolate the vocal track from the recording and use the plugin to separate the spill in his microphone into different tracks, so I could remove the feedback from his vocal microphone.
“That plugin is so good, I used it quite a lot just for parts where Shaan’s playing sax and he walks in front of the drums so all the drums are coming down the sax mic. There’s been a few moments where I could get in and separate the spill from tracks to help mitigate some of that bleed going on.”
Winding the interview up Ben allows himself to admire the outcome and reveal a bit of Drax Project’s live magic.
“We all grew up playing team sports and it feels like that when you’re playing a gig. If something happens like I break a string and Shaan sees that he’ll start playing keys so I can swap guitars. It’s like one goal, we want to put on the best show that we can in that moment, and when I listen to the live album it reminds me of that feeling.
“I think it feels fun, it sounds fun, but it also sounds a bit hectic. Some of the tracks are well balanced and nice and there’s some other songs that are a bit wild and wobbly at points. People that we’ve sent the album to have said, ‘It feels like I’m at the gig.’
“That’s what we wanted to achieve, to capture that feeling because it’s hard. It’s hard to get that in the studio when you’re recording everything separately, everything’s to a click and the possibilities are endless. The live recording, it’s just raw and real, and I love that!”
Photo by Ashlea Caygill