On Byron Bay Buskers, Owning A Restaurant & Writing About His Ex

For anyone who has ever worked in hospitality, the idea of ditching a music career to take a 'break' by opening a restaurant would seem utterly insane. Paul Reid - who you'll know as Drapht - found that out the hard way. "Oh my god, I don't know what I was doing for that period of time in my life," he laughs. "It sort of reaffirmed why I started music in the first place. I was writing constantly when I had the restaurant, writing just because I love writing music, just to get shit off my chest."

He regales The Music with tales from the kitchen, managing his cafe Solomon's and laying down tracks simultaneously. "I would literally just be like the homeless guy mumbling with my headphones in, just writing on my phone. My staff would have thought I was fucking mad. And I would always ask my staff 'do you remember this pop reference?' just to see if it was still relevant. And they'd be like 'na' and I'd be like 'fuck, scrap that line.'"

"I would always ask my staff 'do you remember this pop reference?' just to see if it was still relevant. And they'd be like 'na' and I'd be like 'fuck, scrap that line.'"

If running a budding hospitality business wasn't stressful enough, he had gripes with the industry itself. "It's so gruelling, [the] lack of appreciation. And there's Zomato [the new Urbanspoon] that's just a fucking waste of everyone's time and hell on earth and shreds apart organically grown local business, but also family run business. People lose everything, and I'm so fortunate that I had an opportunity to sell when I did and not lose a thing... But I've had friends within that industry that just get taken down by a bad day, and the review system and people not forming a community and just ripping to shreds an establishment without knowing details behind it. It's a shitty, shitty industry," he vents.

This frustration ended up on Seven Mirrors in the form of Scumday (Skit), a 1:39 minute track featuring Briggs as a snobbish, troublesome reviewer. "Briggs and I just tried to amalgamate that whole idea around the Australian mentality within hospitality... The beauty with Briggs is that he can switch on wanker mode at the drop of a coin, you know? He's really good at that if he needs to be," Reid laughs.

The ill-fated time-off allowed Reid to find his creative passion once more after quitting music off the back of his fourth record Life Of Riley. In fact, there was so much to write about that he ended up with 13 leftover songs. "I had an album previously ready to go, and I released [Dancin'] John Doe [in 2015] which was on the album. And then I was like, 'this is not ready. I'm totally not ready,'" he explains. After acknowledging the seriousness of his demo-itis, he reached out to producer Styalz Fuego "to give me a bit of clarity... that wasn't that constant debilitating inner dialogue that I put myself through with every record process... Like a bunch of those songs, nearly 80% of that record we wrote in a six-month period. I probably used maybe, shit, four of the songs off the original album," he realises.

Seven Mirrors "is a loosely based conceptual record that revolves around the relationships within your life... the Seven Essene Mirrors."

"Say with Rapunzel, I sorta got consent from my ex-girlfriend to release that song… [When she] realised it may not have been the most positive song, she sorta went back on it and just thought 'holy shit, everyone knows that's me, and you've ruined my life.' It's pretty awkward and I do feel terrible at times, but I don't know where to draw the line. I release a lot about my personal life with my music because I believe that people relate to honesty more than anything else, and if I'm vulnerable on an album then people can understand who I am as a person, not just an artist."

Concerning the record's multiple collaborations, his favourite story is about discovering new talent 19-year-old Bradley Stone. "I was walking down the street in Byron Bay in the middle of Groovin The Moo and I hear this kid's voice. I was going for a drink with a friend of mine and I just ignored it... Half way through I couldn't stop thinking about this voice and Monsoon in particular. So I raced over and he was packing up, so I said 'hey man, can I just grab an email off you?'. He didn't know who I was or what I did, he had no idea and I didn't tell him. And then he whispered in my ear 'hey man, can you ask for my band's email as well? So I had to ask for all these kids' emails just like a fuckin' pedo," he laughs.