DESCRIBING HERSELF AS BEING “in the next phase” of the creative process – not so much the FAFO as the put it on and find out how listeners reshape her songs to their needs – and therefore with little control over what is happening, Sarah Blasko seems relaxed. Or as relaxed as the famously watchful and controlled Sydneysider ever gets in an interview, especially one conducted mid-Australian tour.
She spies over my shoulder a Michael Jackson album on the record shelves and mischievously wonders if it is in the cancelled section, without committing either way to whether that would be a good thing or not for the work of the possibly paedophile/probably damaged Jackson. (It isn’t by the way, though like Ryan Adams, it has not exactly been a go-to in recent years).
Blasko can banter if she wants as so far she’s not committed any social or other media atrocity to warrant such a consideration of her own work, but as it is something of a late-career move usually, there’s still time.
“Yes, I’ve noticed that lately: it can increase your listenership [chuckling] when you come back from the cancellation,” she says. “Though some people did it mid-cancellation.”
When she starts turning up on Joe Rogan for any rehabilitation of her reputation, we will know things have gone to shit. For now though, life is anything but shit. Though as you may have noticed via her most recent album, the independently released I Just Need to Conquer This Mountain – where she revisits the collapse of her pentecostal faith and an accompanying marriage more than 20 years ago, alongside the Covid-era end of a friendship that dates back even further – the same can’t be said for all of the past few years.
The songwriter told the Guardian that a movie of her life should start with the Art Garfunkel song Bright Eyes, from the film Watership Down, and people might smile and think sweet or cute, aww bunnies etc. Particularly if they have no idea about the high death count in that book and movie and the generations who were traumatised reading it as pre-teens. But those lyrics are like a premonition of this new album I reckon.
Blasko seems sceptical, saying that she threw the title out when caught short by the question and this was the first song she remembers liking as a child. “And anyway, I don’t want a movie made of my life. And I don’t think there will never be a movie made of my life.”
But compare I Just Need To Conquer This Mountain, with its theme of re-examining these two examples of faith that failed, and Bright Eyes’ lines about life and love that had burned so brightly “suddenly burn so pale”, a lost soul “wandering over the hills unseen/Or is it a dream?”, and its general if wobbly exploration of spirituality more natural than man-made.
“Okay, I’ll give you that,” she concedes slightly. But she looks a little wary as I extend this, as her album does, into that more recent failure of a friendship that is in its own way as devastating as the crisis of faith. Once again someone who was central in her life was no longer there. With some distance from the breakdown of that friendship, how is she now?
“I think that’s why I wrote the songs I wrote, because it was a way, like all of my other records, a way forward to write about these things,” says Blasko. “I think in the writing of the songs, it’s the letting go of it. Whether that’s successful or not, in real life, I don’t think you are ever really over any kind of grief; it just changes over time.
“Yeah, I would see that as a pretty big grief process and I’m grateful to have songwriting as a tool for that, an outlet for these emotions.”
Stressing that some of the personal aspects are played up for dramatic effect in the songs – though then again “some of them aren’t” – and can’t be judged as historical truths, she is nonetheless happy that the songs aren’t just angry or bitter, even as it is clear that the album’s storylines do converge on that apocalyptic church so central to her first 20 or so years.
“The reason why it is so connected to the church is it’s where [she and her friend] met, obviously. That’s where the album start. We met in the church and it was hard to not connect the loss of the friendship with my loss of my faith, which happened earlier but is still an ongoing process,” Blasko says.
“So yeah, it is all very intertwined, specifically because I was writing it at a time when it actually did feel like the world was ending. I couldn’t help but see the absurdity of that because we grew up believing the world was ending and then our friendship was ending at a time that the world could possibly be ending. It actually gave me … not a sense of humour about the situation, but it did feel really weird, like how can we not work this out? We always thought that life would be short, our faith was all about forgiveness and moving forward and then it was just not to be that forgiveness, and all of those things associated with our belief couldn’t play a part in it either.”
She pauses. “All I really had left was the ability to write songs about it.”
It is one thing to have that ability, it is another thing to derive some benefit from that expression and outlet. For her, some years on from that falling out that became final, is she reconciled to her part in it?
“I don’t think you need to know that. I don’t think that it is necessary to know that; it doesn’t matter what the resolution is,” she responds sharply. “You might hear the resolution on another record.
“I do believe that speaking something into existence works. It doesn’t matter what the resolution was; the resolution was the very acceptance of that situation and the working through it, and that’s all that really matters on this record.”
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Sarah Blasko’s tour continues in Coffs Harbour on Friday and runs until April 20 in Launceston. For full dates and tickets, see www.sarahblasko.com
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I Just Need To Conquer This Mountain: Live From The Factory Theatre is released February 25
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