Allday"I want my album to win urban album of the year at the ARIAs. I've got a bunch of other things but I don't want to make them public yet. Getting onboard a national touring line-up was a big thing for me,” Tom Gaynor begins. It's obvious the young Melbourne-based rapper is not fazed by setting the bar high, and given his dramatic increase in notoriety over the last 12 months, it's hardly a surprise. Gaynor has been asked to perform at the upcoming Groovin The Moo festival by popular demand, and he's overwhelmed by the idea. “People were making Facebook pages and stuff for it, trying to get me to play. It was a pretty 'wow' sort of moment, that people actually spend time putting this stuff together and requesting it. It's crazy.”
You'd expect plenty of artists to feel stressed out in the position Gaynor finds himself in, with a horde of supporters and a new album in the works, but he feels the reason he's been able to keep it together is his ability to keep himself composed. “I feel internally pressured to do well. It's weird – if I listen to Drake or Kendrick (Lamar) or people I consider the best rappers in the world right now, I think to myself, 'Hey, I can do that,' and all I have to do is pressure myself to get to that level. I don't feel pressured by the support, I feel pressured by me because that's where I want to be and it's all up to me to get there.”
While it seems to be in his best interests to block out the demands of his fans, he's adamant that his new work will be reflective of his ever-growing popularity. “When I started things a couple of years ago I had So Good, which was in the Hottest 100, and when I was doing it then it was just all a hobby. Someone would send me a beat and I'd decide to rap on it because I didn't have access to other beats or recording studios, so it was just fun – it wasn't really that important to me.
“Now that it's my job and my life, I have to be in control of everything and I'm very pedantic about it. The music that you'll hear coming out this year will feel like a better representation of where I want to go as an artist. When I'm trying to be creative, everything that's happened to you affects that and that's what I've been trying to do. You could probably describe this new album as quite dark, but it's still got the singing elements and sweet melodies. It felt very different to putting together an EP. It was gruelling, particularly because I'd put together so many mixtapes and not worried about getting things right. So I had to learn to be a perfectionist, which really isn't in my nature. It's getting pretty close to… well, not perfect, but neat.”
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