Recorded in Sweden with Bjorn Yttling of Peter, Bjorn and John fame, Sarah Blasko’s third album 'As Day Follows Night' shows that home isn’t necessarily where the art is, writes ADAM D MILLS.

Having recorded her debut album The Overture and the Underscore in Los Angeles and its follow-up What the Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have in Auckland, Sarah Blasko ventured to Sweden for album number three. While traveling in Scandinavia, she struck up a friendship with Bjorn Yttling – who, besides being the Bjorn in Peter, Bjorn and John, has produced records by The (International) Noise Conspiracy, Lykke Li and Camera Obscura – and decamped to Stockholm in February to begin working on what would become As Day Follows Night.

This tendency towards recording in far-flung locations reveals an important aspect of Blasko’s creative processes: the desire to remove herself from her comfort zone, both spatially and psychologically; to put herself in deliberately foreign environments and situations in order to foster her own artistic development.

“I think it’s good to go somewhere where you’re just focusing on the album and you’re out of your home environment,” she explains. “This time I did feel that it was very helpful to me. The last two records, even though I did go to a different environment, I [had] someone that I knew with me. The first time I went with Rob [Robert F. Cranny, instrumental wunderkind who co-produced Blasko’s first two albums], and the second time it was with all Australians that I knew, so that was very much like friends making a record. This time, just going over completely on my own, it really was very good for me. When you’re with people that you do slip into the way that you would normally do things. But when you’re essentially outnumbered it’s really hard [to do that].

“I got more of a sense of the universal nature of music,” she continues. “I live in Newtown [in Sydney], and there’s something that happens to you when you’re just so far away that you think, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna put a flamenco guitar or a saxophone here’, and just know that it’s not what I would be doing if I was in Sydney. There’s something that can be suffocating about being in your home environment. Things don’t seem as magical for some reason. Maybe that’s silly of me – I can just do what I want anyway. But there is more of a free feeling when you’re so far from home. You feel like you can almost do anything.”

Yttling’s role as producer was much more than that of a hired-gun engineer or even a musical sounding board. As Cranny was during the making of Blasko’s first two albums, he was a fully-fledged musical collaborator, helping to define the album’s structure and tone. Like any working relationship, however, this one wasn’t without its occasional bouts of strain.

“We did struggle, because we are very different as people,” says Blasko. “But just every now and then. I would say for the most part it was actually a really exciting and a really wonderful experience. I think for the most part we really understood what we were trying to do. We just had very different ways of communicating, and I think that’s where our problems lay. Essentially, though, it was a really good learning experience for me. I find it really hard to just let go of things. Obviously it’s so important to not just let everything go, you’ve got to have your own ideas, but to trust somebody and let go and let them be a director of sorts was really important for me this time. I really needed that by that stage because I’d spent so much time writing songs alone. I had ideas in my head but I wanted to be flexible to what someone else thought. It was kind of hard; it’s hard to take direction sometimes.”

Between them, Blasko and Yttling created a unique aural world for As Day Follows Night, one quite far removed from that of its predecessors. Whereas Blasko had written the bulk of her previous albums on guitar, this time she found herself writing on the piano, following her experiences with the instrument while composing music for the Bell Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet. “My running joke at the moment [is] now I’ve got two instruments that I play really badly,” she laughs. “So I’m thinking the next [album] I’ll pick up another one and I’ll have this growing number of instruments that I can’t really play.”

”There is more of a free feeling when you’re so far from home. You feel like you can almost do anything.”

Though she concedes that she’s “actually not too bad” at the piano, she left the bulk of the playing to a cadre of session musicians and friends/associates of Yttling who were drafted in to realise the unusual arrangements the pair had worked out for the songs. “We talked really in a detailed way about what kind of musicians I wanted to use. I really felt like I wanted a jazz drummer and heaps of double bass and stuff like that. So they were loosely from a jazz background, I guess, [from] really different musical backgrounds to me. But then Bjorn was interesting, because he kind of bridged the gap. He does a bit of jazz and stuff, but essentially he comes from more of an indie world with his band. So it was great playing with him, because he’s like me. We both have terrible technique with playing, we both don’t care too much. Although he does play some wonderful piano parts on the record, he doesn’t really count himself as a slick kind of musician. But I think those elements are the rougher edges that he and I could provide, [so along with] these wonderful session players [it was] a good mix.”

Hidden among the pop gems of The Overture and the Underscore was a mild sense of darkness, which Blasko further explored on What the Sea Wants. As Day Follows Night seems to continue along the same arc, trading the upbeat catchiness of ‘Don’t U Eva’ for the string-laden lament of ‘I Never Knew’.

“I think I’ve got a warped view of things,” Blasko says, “because I feel like this record’s really poppy. But then I say that to my friends and they’re like, ‘No it’s not!’”

The album has a wonderfully inviting tone, due in no small part to the fact that it was mostly recorded using analogue equipment and laid down to tape.

“I think it’s got a beautiful warmth,” enthuses Blasko. “I really wanted to have that real generosity and warmth about things even though they’re kind of sad songs. When I wrote them I thought that if I was to record them in a sombre kind of way … we really needed to vary the tempos and the expression and just expand it so that it wasn’t this little sad and sorry record. I think I’ve really achieved that. I feel that all the songs have a real life to them that goes beyond their circumstance.”

Though at times the album can sound quite lush, the arrangements are actually quite stripped back. Blasko explains: “Often it just boils own to double bass and drums and voice. For me that was wonderful to record a record that’s like that because there’s just so much space. It was wonderful as a singer to make an album like that. The album’s mainly about the voice, the drums and the bass, and for me that’s really exciting. There are so many things you can fill the sound with, but I just love hearing those raw instruments and really being able to hear their character.”

As Day Follows Night also sees Blasko opening up as a lyricist. Though never one to obfuscate her meaning with layers of superfluous metaphor, here she’s more honest than ever before, especially on fragile yet disarmingly intense tracks like ‘Is My Baby Yours’ and ‘Night & Day’.

“It’s quite direct, I think,” she says. “I wanted it to be that kind of record. I wanted it to have that honesty and be very straightforward in the way [of] an old jazz or blues song; those songs of heartbreak. You know exactly what they’re saying, and it resonates. They were kind of my role models or whatever for the record.”

But even though it’s her most personal work to date by a long shot, Blasko maintains that As Day Follows Night isn’t meant to be taken as confessional. There’s a strong element of characterisation – of truth as fiction – to it as well.

“I think songs are your ideals, the things that you want. For me that’s the way it is. The things that you want to teach yourself or ideals for the way you want to be. They’re like discussions, and there are different characters within that. Often people just assume that if you’re using ‘I’ then it’s about you. It is. In basis the character is me. But then it goes to a more universal ‘I’. You’re trying to say something about the human character or aspects of yourself or aspects of other people. It’s always like a little study, really, like a sociological study in human behaviour.”

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