Melbourne artist Reetoxa didn't set out to write "Gown." It arrived, uninvited, during one of the lowest stretches of Jason McKee's life, and the song exists because he couldn't shake it once it did. "Gown" is the emotional center of Reetoxa's new album "Soliloquy," carrying the same weight for this record that "Bobbie" carried for the debut.
The story behind it is unusually literal. McKee had just lost a hard-won career as a stockbroker, a path he'd built almost entirely by teaching himself the markets, and the loss landed at the same moment his marriage was already under strain. In that low point, alone and struggling, he had a vivid, disorienting dream: a woman in a striking gold gown appeared, led him out over the Melbourne skyline, and pulled him into an experience that shifted without warning from tenderness into something dangerous. He woke to his wife shaking him awake, badly shaken herself, and the fallout that followed, her packing for Brisbane, the dog needing feeding, no job on the horizon, left McKee with almost nothing steady to hold onto except the melody still running through his head.
That's the part worth sitting with. Rather than burying the dream, McKee turned straight to his phone and started singing the chorus before the feeling could fade. Everyone around him at that moment was, understandably, focused on survival. McKee heard music.
"Gown" also shaped the album visually, with the gold-gowned figure from that dream inspiring both the front and back cover art of "Soliloquy." Producer Simon Moro took full creative control of the recording, working alongside engineer Luke at The Avenue studio in Cheltenham, and brought in orchestral arrangements from the Budapest Orchestra alongside backing vocals from Jess McPherson-Riley of The Voice Australia.
The same core lineup from Reetoxa's debut, Peter Marin on drums, Kit Riley on bass, James Ryan on guitar, returns here, giving the track a lived-in chemistry rather than a session-for-hire feel.
With European, UK, and Asian labels now in discussion and a European tour under consideration, "Gown" marks a turning point for Reetoxa, not a farewell. Soliloquy was, at one stage, meant to be the last record McKee had in him after such a heavy emotional stretch. Instead, he's already halfway through a third album, a lighter, party-driven collection, proof that even his darkest material ultimately pointed him forward rather than shutting the door.
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