Sarah Blasko: Breaking The Waves

Sarah Blasko crosses the ocean of memory to find freedom with her new record

On ‘Hammer’, a track from the lucid fever dream that is her second album, What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have, Sarah Blasko sings, “You want to build the world again from scratch/’Cause nothing moved means nothing found”. It’s an idea that could easily encompass both her art and the life it springs from. Recorded at Neil Finn’s Roundhead Studio in Auckland, New Zealand, with production from Blasko, her songwriting partner Robert F Cranny and former Midnight Oil polymath Jim Moginie, What The Sea Wants is a record where the past is remade into the future. The world it builds from scratch is defined by the protagonist’s struggle to liberate themself, a process Blasko is familiar with as the daughter of deeply religious parents. Now aged 30, with a measure of success to her name, she’s keen to move past such a straightforward reading of her musical motivation, but remains wary about providing overt definitions.

As someone with a long held interest in Woody Allen, what did you make of *Match Point?*

I liked Match Point, but most people disliked it very much. I’ve barely met anyone who liked it. People say to me, “That’s so far-fetched, as if it would happen”, but why does it have to be realistic? It’s a study of the darkness that dwells in human relationships and what we’re capable of. Woody Allen isn’t known for his realism. But maybe I was ready to love it because I love so many of his films. I’ve been revisiting a few of them lately.

Is there a cinematic quality to how you make music?

For this record I had more visuals in more when we recorded and wrote it. ‘The Garden’s End’ is a good example of having a picture of dragging somebody, wanting so much to drag them through the things they’ve dragged you through. It’s quite a vindictive song about people abusing positions of power.

Do those images come to you first?

No, they came as I was trying to write the song and figure where the story was leading.

Does writing a song like that give you a sense of satisfaction when it’s done?

I felt a sense of satisfaction with all the lyrics on this record. I worked really hard on them and I got to the point where I felt I had conveyed what I wanted to convey. But it’s a struggle to get to that point. Some of the songs I didn’t finish until the very end.

You wrote these songs this year, didn’t you?

Pretty much. I’d had the ideas sitting around, half-written songs. There was a point there when I was looking through the stuff I’d been dabbling with to work out what kind of direction I would go in for the record and I could have gone for a more electronic record, but in the end I wanted to do the opposite and have a fairly live sounding record. And keep it simple and nothing over the top. When there was a piano I wanted to hear the piano, when there was a guitar I wanted to hear it – it had to have space. The last record was padded and layered because it was mainly keyboards.

Were you nervous when you got to the start of 2006 and you only had half-written songs?

No, everyone actually wanted me to chill out and take six months off.

Did you want to take six months off?

At first I thought I should have the big break, but then I decided that I didn’t want to. For two years I’d been doing gigs and pretty much everything else but writing songs and I wanted to write songs. I wanted to do it and do it fairly quickly. I wanted to see what would happen and pretty quickly I felt that we had the makings of a strong record and I don’t think other people were very convinced at all. I had to fight a bit to get the record made when I did, because there was pressure to take more time.

Had you always been tough enough mentally to have that fight or is that something you’ve picked up over the last few years?

I’ve never been afraid to have a discussion. My family love s a bit of confrontation [laughs]. But there were struggles with the first record, about the sound and stuff, so to an extent I felt reassured about having my opinion vindicated and I feel it’s important to follow your instincts. If I have a belief in something and feel strongly about it there’s generally a reason. If it means something to me it will mean something to other people, although in some cases it might not be that many people.

What was the effect of such a tight collaborative process in the studio?

We’d got to the point where we could have piled so many more things onto these songs, but we weren’t interested in that at all. There was pressure from people, the record label and places like that, to over-produce things, to have hooks everywhere and overdo everything. We resisted that with all of our might.

Is that why you recorded in New Zealand – for physical distance?

Definitely, although they could have got on a plane at any time, but they were respectful and let us do what we needed. It’s important not to have many distractions, because you need to know what you think before you can handle the opinions of other people. You’ve got to absolutely trust yourself.

Were you surprised that the first album appealed to so many people?

I was. I had no idea what would happen, so I ended up being pretty happy with how it went.

Did you ever get used to being “Sarah Blasko” for promotional purposes, because in 2004 you appeared to be struggling with that notion?

That kind of stuff is a bit of a mind… game. It does get a bit strange talking about yourself. I don’t like the idea of becoming someone else at all. I’m not interested in having to sell myself, so to a degree you put up a bit of a front.

Were people nervous to ask you about your religious upbringing?

I don’t feel like people were nervous about it – I got asked about it a hell of a lot. I got sick of seeing it in print, particularly with the headlines like ‘Losing My Religion’. But it’s interesting when you talk about something like that because people will in turn confess to you about their own past or upbringing. People assume they can talk to me about religion.

Does that freak you out?

Yes, it does. I’m no expert. But it all happened; it’s part of me. I’m glad I had the experiences I had and that it was part of my life. There are worse things than changing churches at a rapid rate.

The moods are very strong on this album.

I couldn’t help to have the songs sound very direct – they sound that way to me, maybe not other people – and straight to the point. My frame of mind was that I didn’t want to mess around. I knew what I wanted.

The tone of the album reminds me of the sense of clarity you get after a fever has broken.

This record did feel like that because I wrote the record pretty quickly, so I had a sense of feeling very clear about what I wanted to write, there’s also the feeling of a lot of things having welled up over time and trying to come to terms with them. You realise that you have to let go of a lot of things, because it’s easy to hang onto things.

They become a comfort.

Yes, even if they’re not good for you.

Is the balance between self-revelation and characterisation deliberate?

I like to leave things somewhat unsaid when I write. When you write a song there are elements of it related to you and other things that are more universal. Sometimes people say to me, “Oh, that’s about this person or that relationship you had”, but often they’re directed from one part of your personality to another and sometimes it can get quite violent.

The sense of language on the record is quite formal – I’m reminded of Henry James or The Piano.

There is a formality to the language, but I can’t say where that comes from. Songs like ‘The Albatross’ I just started writing.

‘The Albatross’ is a good example: “Fear lies beside me, a vessel, an army that threatens the night/The wind is whispering. Howling and hissing: be unafraid”. There’s no hint of slang or modern contraction, instead it strikes an extremely precise tone.

I like the idea of taking people somewhere, even if it’s an era or just another place outside what they’re used to. It’s something I endeavoured to with this record, because it didn’t happen on the last record.

There’s even a hint of the Bronte sisters?

I definitely like the darkness of the elements and the darkness of human nature. There’s confusion and mistrust involved and I guess that can reflect the different sides of you and how that can fit in with other people in the world. Images of nature give you a sense of wild, uncontrollable forces and that’s something that has been done in Victorian literature.

And that era had a heightened sense of emotion – because so much of it was repressed – that really works for your songs.

For me it’s a process of going into yourself and forming these ideas about what you’ll do. Sometimes you really don’t know how it happens, it just comes from everything you’ve read and seen and heard. All of these things influence an aesthetic.

How satisfying is the note struck at the end of the journey that constitutes the album?

I like the idea of having a good introduction and a strong ending, so it was important to have ‘I Could Never Belong To You’ last. It is a statement of resolution – it sets up a sense of the future, but without any ideals. It sounds like a negative song, but it’s quite positive, because no-one actually owns anyone else and there’s a freedom in that which allows you to love somebody without you owning them and them owning you. That doesn’t diminish the love between people, it makes it stronger.

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