‘Not Yet’ – the poignant closer to Sarah Blasko’s fourth album,I Awake– carries a gentle insistence that she won’t give in to her fears.
It was a timely statement, as early last year Blasko endured a challenging period that led to a change in trajectory. “Sometimes it’s very frightening,” she admits, “and you just think, ‘Well, maybe this is it – maybe I don’t have anything else.’ I really thought that I couldn’t write, so I had to just totally shake it up.
“The last couple of albums I just wrote on my own in a room where I was just playing simply on a piano,” says the Sydney-born singer-songwriter. “It wasn’t working for me this time; I was coming up with certain kinds of songs, but not really the kinds of songs I wanted to write. But then I thought, ‘I’m just going to write a whole lot of songs with people I know and see what comes of that, and get away from the piano and just focus on the melody and the lyrics.’ I’ve found [on this album] that this is the best way to write … so it’s just been a matter of getting out of my old ways, I suppose. I think you’ve just got to keep looking for a different path.”
Besides preparing for a Twilight At Taronga concert and her headlining slot at Victoria’s Riverboats Music Festival (“There’s always something nice about performing in the outdoors at night. There’s always something dramatic about that – there’s always insects involved somehow”), Blasko is currently working on her new album, which she expects to complete by April or May.
“This one’s pretty different in feel so far,” she says. “It’s a pretty ‘up’ kind of album, I think. I Awake was very dark, but I think this is going to be a lighter affair. I think I’ve consciously tried to pare things down a bit for this record and try to keep it simpler, but there might still be an element of strings because I can’t deny that I love them. But I don’t think it’ll be anything near the scale of what I did on the last record. I’ve been writing more on keyboards again, on synths, which I haven’t done for years. I think As Day Follows Night and I Awake were real explorations of just acoustic instruments, really, and we did find ourselves going into more of a technological… it’s not like it’s electronic music or anything like that,” she clarifies with a laugh. “It’s just breaking, I suppose, the palette of the last album.”
Over the past year, Blasko has also written the musical scores for two films. She recently completed the score for Brendan Cowell’s Ruben Guthrie – a film about a high-flying advertising agency director’s battle with alcohol addiction, which was first seen as a play. Blasko and Cowell have discussed collaborations since working together on Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet in 2008. Blasko also scored a 12-minute film by Australian artist and winner of the Archibald Prize in 2008 and 2013, Del Kathryn Barton. That film is based on Barton’s book of artworks inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Nightingale And The Rose. “It’s been a year of trying new things,” Blasko says.
As for Seeker Lover Keeper – the supergroup comprising Blasko, Holly Throsby and Sally Seltmann – Blasko expects they’ll release more music in the future, too. “We’ve kind of just mentioned it to each other over email in the last little while. I think that will maybe be in another couple of years.”
In her music and conversation, Blasko brings a celestial air to melancholy introspection, but even as one of the country’s most respected, successful and admired artists, she views her greatest achievement as “probably just continuing to move along”.
“I do think that the last record, for me, probably represented a fulfilment of a dream in some kind of way. It was in my mind for such a long time that one day I wanted to play with an orchestra, and to find myself doing it, I really had an out-of-body experience, to be honest,” she laughs. “I’m not really someone who necessarily has specific goals, but that was something I had in mind at that point in my career. So that was probably the greatest achievement – it was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
“I don’t know if I’d necessarily say it was my most creative period – I think it’s one of those things that ebbs and flows. But I do feel more focused now, creatively. I always feel like I’m just looking forward to the next thing and just trying to get better.”
Blasko remains mystified by the way in which her devoted listeners connect to songs. “I suppose I’ve always decided to speak about what is meaningful to me, and you hope that it resonates with other people. It’s not something that you consciously try and do – well, you consciously try to be honest, but you don’t consciously try and relate, necessarily. I always find it really amazing, a flattering thing, that people can connect to songs. It’s lovely that people can take their own meaning from songs, and I think that there’s often been a little bit of room to interpret with some of my stuff [laughs]. It was an outpouring of where I was at that point. I suppose that’s what all of my albums have been.”
Catch her alongside Luluc as part of Twilight At Taronga, atTaronga Zoo onFriday February 13, tickets online.
