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Sarah Blasko.
 28-year-old Sarah Blasko is without a doubt one of the most interesting and creative singer/songwriters in the country. Her ethereal style and fascinating introspective lyrics made her debut album 'The Overture And The Underscore' one of the most respected debut albums of 2004. One of the most captivating aspects is her voice - absolutely unique without being totally unfamiliar, her deep and sometimes breathy vocals add a touch of sincerity and sensuousness to her atmospheric compositions.
"[Singing], it's something that I just did and didn't think about," Blasko explains. "There was a lot of singing going around in my family, mainly because we went to church a lot. But I didn't really take it that seriously until I was about 17 or 18, and then I thought, 'ah, I guess I can.' There's a lot of harmonising going on at church, which is very handy. There's a lot of singing going on... You see a lot of kids, and they want to be a popstar, and they go to tap dancing classes and all these things to learn something, as though you can learn it! I just like the fact that it was something that I didn't think about, at least until I was a bit older."
I imagine being a solo artist is quite different from being in a band - and I can't fathom the amount of personal commitment a solo artist must put in to achieve any kind of success - but Blasko says that after twelve years as a casual worker, the choice to pursue a musical career was obvious.
"I just quit my casual job at the local cafˇ. I had my last shift on Saturday. I realised that I'd been working at one casual job or another for twelve years. I really have felt like I don't have any other option. It's quite all-encompassing; it basically is my life, inevitably, because I play music, I write music, I listen to music, I know lots of people who play music, it's just kind of evolved that way. In some way it's like, I really need to get a life!"
Blasko also tells me that, nowadays, she's feeling more and more like she's just part of a band anyway. "I worked on this record with a really good friend of mine, Robert Cranny, and we've developed quite a band-ish approach to things. That isn't really how I started out on this journey of solo-artist-ness, but I've actually found that I really need that. At the end of the day I feel like it's my vision, or direction that I'm trying to follow, but I feel like I've got the best of both worlds, because I've got someone I can consistently work with. You tend to hear a lot of different opinions, from record labels and from management, and if you're working with different people all the time in your band - I don't know how people do that, to be honest. My main aim is to have a bunch of people that I consistently work with, and I think that adds strength to what I want to achieve."
Finally, Blasko says that the church was not only the beginning of her blossoming singing career - it still has an influence on her as a songwriter. "My family went to a Charismatic Church for a while, which is all pretty liberated. It's a very expressive, emotional experience going to a church like that. But there's a lot of freeform singing in those churches. They had this thing called praise and worship in the middle of the service, where the band just keeps playing and everyone sings their own songs all together, and I think that had a really big influence on me, just singing whatever you were feeling, just trying to express something. And obviously that was in a religious context, of an expression to God.
"But that's how I tend to write: not in the sense that I start singing to God, but in the sense that often the way I start writing is by playing some chords and singing a melody. Sometimes I write by start singing just bits, in gibberish, and then words will form. Somehow. I think that the Church thing had a bit of an influence on that. But I don't know about spirituality - I don't really know where I am with that. I don't really know where I am with the whole belief in God vibe."
Ben Revi
 | Sarah Blasko plays at Fowlers Live on Fri 25 Feb with Little Ice Age and The Zero Kelvins. |
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