Thursday, January 20, 2005

Music Feature: Asking Sarah Blasko.

After being assigned the enviable task of interviewing Sarah Blasko, I asked a mate at Sydney radio station FBi how his interview with her went. ‘You’ll develop a crush,’ he said. ‘After she left the station, my producer, assistant and I all had one.’

And it’s hard to argue with him. She’s totally likeable, intelligent and funny. Oh yeah, and she’s also released a really good album entitled The Overture & The Underscore. Think David Gray’s White Ladder fronted by Bjork without an accent and Massive Attack doing the programming. Or something similarly awesome.

I sat down with her at Universal Records’ well-designed headquarters in Sydney, overlooking the harbour, and discussed literature, religion and daggy Paul McCartney records.

Your lyrics are pretty literary. Do you have literary idols or books that you really like?

I studied English literature at uni, and I did heaps of old-style classics. I don’t know if any of them were really an influence, but I did a whole session on Shakespeare and a whole session on Jane Austen.

You lyrics have got that kind of Emily Bronte thing going.

She wrote Wuthering Heights, didn’t she?

I think so.

Yeah, I’m pretty sure she did. Yeah, that’s certainly an amazing work of fiction. I think there is a bit of a melancholic, dark tone to some of the stuff that I write. I’ve got a lot of religious guilt under – or over – tones… I guess it’s just an outpouring of the things that I think about, and the problems that I have.

Do you suffer from the infamous Catholic guilt?

Well, no. I didn’t have a Catholic upbringing. [I have] Protestant guilt.

So there’s a branch of Protestant guilt?

(Laughs) Perhaps. I think that, like a lot of people who grew up with a Christian upbringing, I have quite an unbalanced view on life. Deep down, I guess, there’s always this pervading sense that things are either really, really good or really, really bad. There’s not much in-between. I think that tends to come through in my music.

Do you think where we are, at the beginning of 2005, that things are good?

No, I think they’re really shit (laughs). I think there’s a lot of really bad stuff going on. I don’t know – I don’t really like to get into too many debates or deep philosophical arguments, because I find that I just dig myself into a hole.

I actually feel sort of optimistic about my life at the moment. I don’t really know…

(Originally published at fasterlouder.com.au. Click here for the full interview transcript).

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