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Sarah Blasko.
"It's important at this stage to keep in contact with what you're doing and be down to earth," says Sarah Blasko of her flourishing career. "You need to maintain a sense of self. It's always hard to have a perspective on how people are responding to what you're doing. I think it's most evident when you get a chance to meet the people who have been listening to your album. It's definitely a nice feeling, being able to connect with that," she laughs.
"It's just crazy waking up with the clock radio and thinking, 'My song is the soundtrack to my dream' but then realising it was on Triple J!"
Blasko seems amazed at the number of copies her debut album has sold (over 30,000 in the bag so far). She is looking forward to her North American release and accompanying tour in August: "I didn't realise it was going to be so big!" she exclaims. "Over 1800 people a night!" Last year she did a tour of America and ended up doing two shows at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. "The first one was a disaster!" she laughs. With everything possible going wrong, she was amazed to gain a booking agent in the US plus a request from singer/songwriter Ray Lamontagne to tour later this year throughout America. "Through our shows in New York, Toronto, LA and Texas we had lots of people come and see us and one of them was Lamontagne's manager. He was really interested in us doing a tour together and that's now going ahead later this year. I think it must have been a sympathy vote!"
Blasko grew up as the youngest missionary on the French-speaking Reunion Island, just off the west coast of South Africa. Growing up singing in the church and then later in a band with her older sister, she has developed an extremely individual style of music. Listening to 80s pop and her mother's Olivia Newton-John and dad's classical records gave her a very varied musical upbringing. "I think my childhood has had a huge influence on who I am now. I had an extreme adolescence in the Pentecostal church which was all about speaking in tongues, casting out demons and all that weird shit. My friend - who went to that same church - and I sometimes joke that we have a really unbalanced way of looking at the world: things are either really good or really bad. I think that can show through my music." She's a long way from home in more ways than one: having started off as a small girl singing in the church choir with her tone-deaf mother and as part of a band with her sister, she says the size of her current band (a five-piece) is "crazy."
Having quite a different style from many artists around at the
moment, Blasko takes offence to being called an 'alternative
to Missy Higgins'. "I find that sort of stuff sexist. I'm trying
to pave my own way." She says of her style: "It can be really
difficult to see how you're perceived by other people. I think
it's a hard thing to pinpoint." She goes on to tell me about
how this is reflected in her just-filmed clip for Perfect
Now, on which she worked closely with Brendan Fletcher (who
also worked with her on her first clip, Don't U Eva).
"I wanted to capture the darkness of the song, the turmoil in
the film clip. I had an idea for it pretty early on in the recording
of the album. I guess this song struck me as a song to be handled
lightly, as if it were fragile."
'The Overture & The Underscore' (recorded in a small studio in Hollywood and released in 2004) is Blasko's first solo album. "It's liberating to be a solo artist. You can try different things. It means that your voice can always be the defining feature." It's not all roses, though: "It would be a lot easier to be in a band. The press conferences would be so much more interesting!"
Jess Law
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Sarah Blasko plays at Fowlers Live on Thurs 14 and Fri 15 of June.
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