“There’s This Feeling That I’ve Got To Be Nice Because I’m A Woman”: Sarah Blasko On Her New Album And Sound
“It was very conscious, in a way -- like, ‘Let’s just make fucking good songs!’"
Sarah Blasko is stretched out face down on a luxurious chaise lounge in a power blazer, her feet swinging lightly in the air. “This is how Sarah will be taking all her interviews today,” comments her publicist. I bow down deferentially, and take a seat on the ground.
We’re in a Darlinghurst loft to talk about Blasko’s fifth studio album Eternal Return, the follow-up to 2012’s I Awake. Unlike that one, which was deeply melancholic, her latest record is pure, pulsating ecstasy: a five-star master class in pop, and a revelation of confidence and sexuality the likes of which you have never heard from the two-time ARIA winning artist.
The publicist’s comment and my mock deference are, of course, all tongue-in-cheek. Blasko is a delight to talk to, with a personable, light-hearted energy that seems at odds with her public image. Since her debut in 2004 with The Overture and The Underscore, she’s often been pigeonholed as deeply brooding or aloof, but in person she’s playful and confident – a mood reflected in the unabashed celebration of pop (and synths) that pervades her newest album.
Still, I can’t help but notice the irony of our improvised lounge scene, considering the first question written on my notepad: Where on earth has Sarah Blasko been hiding this ‘80s pop diva?
“So I’ve become a diva with this record? That’s fantastic!” she laughs. “Spiritually there’s certainly some Tina Turner vibes on this record. The Eurythmics, some Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen,” she concedes. But for her, what really set the tone of Eternal Return was an instrument.
“There was a keyboard, the Prophet, that I brought to the studio. It was probably the most influential sound for the record. I’ve been a really big fan of David Byrne for ages, and I’m obsessed with that [Talking Heads concert] movie Stop Making Sense. And I realised one keyboard that featured on it a lot was the Prophet.”
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Though she’s been applying her genuine adoration and understanding of pop structures and influences throughout her career, this album is perhaps the most successful display of Sarah Blasko’s unique ability to express a theme through a simplicity of structure and music. Her love of repetition, shameless hooks and theatricality are brought to the forefront by producer Burke Reid (Courtney Barnett, The Drones), who allows the star of this album — Sarah’s intoxicating vocals– to sit front and centre beyond the walls of synths and mechanic drums.
“Even before I started writing I said, ‘Alright, we’re going away [from my usual style]. We’re going to use these two synths and a drum machine. We’ve got to hit this tempo. I don’t wanna make a slow song; people have got to be able to move. I want melodic basslines.” Sarah starts marking each beat by making a chopping motion with her right hand, to her left. “Smooth FM was maybe the biggest influence on this record if I’m going to be perfectly honest. But come on, let’s not discount the importance of pop!”
After the almost classical tones of I Awake and the deeply conceptual fantasy-folk album As Day Follows Night, the freedom to write towards her guilty pleasures was a welcome change. “It was very conscious, in a way — like, ‘Let’s just make fucking good songs!’ Those songs that make you — well, this is going to be hard to capture on audio, but they make you feel –” Here, Sarah flips her hands to shoulder height and presents the classiest jazz hands I’ve ever seen, while her eyes flick to the ceiling as she let’s out a joyous, “A-wooooooh-yeah!”
“You just feel this ‘glory’ moment you know? I wanted to make those songs that were open. Where the melodies just — they just sing out proudly and free.”
Like all good pop albums, Eternal Return is, at its heart, a celebration of love. The closing words of the album come in the form of chant: “If you have not love, you have nothing at all.”
“When I started writing the record it felt a little bit depressing, to be honest. I was just doing the ‘alone at the piano’ thing … and suddenly found myself a bit bored. You know, recognising patterns, and sounding the same,” she says. “So this time I thought really early on it was time to co-write with people… There were all these people around me I’d been playing with for ten years and never written a song with.”
She’s referring to the royalty of Australian music: composer and long-time collaborator Nick Wales returns to pen one of Eternal Return’s finest choruses with ‘Say What You Want’; and the band who will tour with Sarah in 2016 is a collection of old friends — Ben Fletcher (Marina & The Diamonds), Laurence Pike (PVT) — and new faces, including Sarah Belkner and synth-master Donnie Benet: “Oh, you could’t make a synth album without Donnie!” Sarah laughs.
Despite the simplified set-up — downsizing from I Awake’s 52 piece Bulgarian orchestra to a room of keyboards — the album is perhaps Blasko’s most dynamic. Choosing analogue synths over computer generated soft-synths, it avoids becoming ironically retro and instead plays out as a reinvention of the sounds Blasko, now 39, grew up with.
The first outing of her new material came just under a month before the album’s official release today, playing the record in full at The Graphic Festival at Sydney Opera House. The gig began tentatively, with Sarah openly acknowledging her nerves, but she walked us through the new album to rapturous applause; the audience was hypnotised by her easy style and those strange but endearing dance moves she’s known for, and she waved a single sparkling black glove to close out each song.
“It was a high pressure gig,” she tells me. “For one, it’s the Opera House. Then there was brand new visuals, a brand new band, brand new songs. There were a lot of factors that could go wrong. And I felt that it had to be brilliant.”
Blasko is acutely aware of how this pressure can manifest itself in the rehearsal room.
“Sometimes there is that feeling, as a woman, that you’re going to be undermined.”
“I can definitely be a task master. But it’s not about being perfect, it’s about it being right. That’s our job, isn’t it?” Sarah’s question is clearly more a statement she is proud to make. “I always find it funny. I’ve always been portrayed as a gentle person. But I think I’ve got quite a hard side to my personality. I’m pretty opinionated. I know what I want. But I’m kind of one of those people who go, ‘Nice, nice, nice – NOT NICE.’ I guess it can really shock people.”
In Blasko’s opinion, it isn’t hard to understand why the way she’s perceived is so off-kilter with who she is.
“Sometimes I think it’s about being a woman, and the position I’m in. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it’s just my personality — and I do think I’m getting better at being direct — but I think sometimes there is this feeling that I’ve got to be nice because I’m a woman. And you know the constant questions about like, ‘Aw, Sarah are you alright? Are you okay? Why are you so worried?’ And you end up fucking exhausting yourself just by trying to be nice and polite, and like –” here, she holds her hands like a choir girl, and smiles. “– And then you just SNAP!“
Sarah takes a moment to consider the thought: “Sometimes there is that feeling, as a woman, that you’re going to be undermined.”
Complicating matters, Blasko has recently become a parent for the first time with her partner Dave Miller (PVT). In an interview between fellow musicians Holly Throsby and Clare Bowditch in 2007, Bowditch noted that a lot of interviews for her upcoming record were “focused around the fact that I am a parent rather than a songwriter.”.I’m curious to know how being a musician mum has complicated the narrative for Blasko.
“I don’t really like talking about it,” she says. “It seems like it’s not that — it sounds awful to say but he’s relevant to my life; he’s not relevant to this album. It’s relevant in the sense that, yeah, I was pregnant in the recording process, but it was written and kind of completed before he was even born.” She bemusedly traces the timeline of the recording process: “For some reason I left the singing until the very end and when I got there just thought, ’Am I completely insane?’ It almost took me two days, and sometimes I’d just be leaning up against the wall sort of –” Here, Sarah mimes heaving with heavy contractions. “It was pretty funny.”
Eternal Return represents striking moment in her career. Surrounded by some of Australia’s finest musicians, Blasko has lifted the album beyond what could have been throwback retro jam to a work that commands your attention from start to finish. It is a definitive statement that she’s far beyond playing up to expectations, or indeed playing nice. The album opens with a track titled ‘I Am Ready’ — and as her voice cracks and purrs over the synths and military drum sounds, she ends the song’s title, “…to be revealed”.
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Eternal Return is out now through EMI.
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Brendan Maclean is a songwriter and a writer. He is currently touring with Marcia Hines in their disco show Velvet. Find him on Twitter @macleanbrendan, and watch the clip for his new single ‘Tectonic‘ here.