SARAH BLASKO
I Just Need To Conquer This Mountain (Independent)
AS ANYONE WHO HAS GONE through therapy of some sort will tell you, the past has a long tail. And it thrashes.
It doesn’t matter what you tell yourself, it doesn’t matter how much “work” you have done on yourself or in cutting loose those who damaged you, it doesn’t matter if you disavow the very idea of the past – its people, its events, its regrets and recriminations – having a role in who you are today, that shit sticks around.
It is there in your unthinking responses, your base sense of self, just as much as it’s there in the conscious decisions you’ve made to be something different: from your culture, from your parents, from who you were at 16 or 25. Most of the time though you just don’t know it, settled in your new “self-made” persona, hung up on quiet self-loathing that you’re sure is based on solid grounds of your own making, or just cruising as you’ve done for years, never hitting a pothole because, what pothole?
Yeah, until the reckoning, be it a relationship breakdown, financial/work crises, health or death, forces you to look at how and why you make your decisions, who you are and what made you like this. Then that shit that never went away floats up again and you can’t avoid it any longer.
Sarah Blasko’s new album – piano-centred, played at an elegant pace, contained in its escalations, packed with those graceful melodies of hers, and represented on the cover by a face in shadow save for a shining line of light entering/leaving her mouth – is the result of such a reckoning.
It finds her in her late 40s, happily settled with a long-term partner and children, at a creative peak, and to most eyes doing better than fine. But really not free of the past and its long tail. It’s a coming to terms with a religious childhood that was lived on the edge of impermanence – because the end was very nigh, things of this world, like love and connection, emotions or a future, mattered little or less – with a short-lived marriage in her early 20s that scarred more than she ever thought, with the unhappy end of a long friendship, and with the death of a friend.
In Bothering Me, that marriage is remembered less in its beginning than its end (when, as she sings later on To Be Alone, “I was only 26”). In her voice, the line “It’s the words that ring so loud that I can’t bear: ‘I wish we never met’.” feels like a fresh wound, over and over. Blame is shared but faith and its misplaced emphasis holds space. “It took the end of the world to end us, the poetry’s absurd/I know your packed bags were so well rehearsed/For your saviour’s return.”
Just how it came to that is explored in The Way, an almost hymnal arrangement whose adornments are simple, principally in the cooing backing vocals that rise up (To heaven? To humanity?) towards the end. Blasko sings as a girl who wants to understand what she’s done to not be in the grace of her god – “Take me back to the time I saw the spirit descend like a dove/Show me the way, the truth of my life/I don’t know where I went wrong.” – but maybe the answer is in her; definitely the fault is in her. “Get me to church, so they can cast this out/I want to be free of what you denounced”.
Get some of that into your head in your teens and 20s, and tell me you wouldn’t be damaged in some way. Even if it is just that feeling you have for decades after leaving the church that just expressing some of those feelings is a case of “all consuming … reckless emotions”. The kind that when “this dam has burst, the deluge hurts”, a moment reflected in the way drums and brass swell as if poised to burst in Emotions.
Hide it. Bury it. Deny it. It’s a life lesson, albeit a bad one, and one that can’t survive the dissolution of a friendship in unanswered calls, unfinished sentences and unspoken hurt. And certainly not of any value when death comes calling for someone who “we used to call the dreamweaver”, someone who “made us feel anything was possible”. Pretending it doesn’t matter is stupid and even if going back is not possible, “I will sing your praise, forever changed Dream Weaver/I sing your name, forever changed”, because you should.
In To Be Alone and Divine, the last two songs of the record, the reckoning shows its other side: the recognition of what has been gifted and why such a reward maybe, just maybe, is earned and deserved. Looking back on a life where a promise to never give herself up in the same way as her younger self had, where “It was romantic to be a fugitive at last/I used to pride myself in the selfishness I had”, Blasko returns, in several ways, to the idea of giving up that pointless fight.
“There is no enemy and no victory, there is no devil inside/Been upturning chairs but there’s nothing there,” she sings at one point; “I used to pride myself in the selfishness I had/How far I’ve come from that!/I’m running home when my baby is crying,” she says at another. There is good and it’s happening now and it might be across the breakfast table: “You hand me the morning with a look in your eye/Calling out my name like a song you devised/Walking over my heart one sweet step at a time/You came to remind me oh this life, oh this life is divine.”
Tell you one thing about a religious upbringing, it gives you lots of imagery to play with in your secular songs for years, songs as moving as these. Though I’m not sure that’s quite enough of a reason to put anyone through it, when the past’s tail can do such damage.
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