A new album is coming from Sarah Blasko, one which deals directly with religion, in her past and what it says about her present. That stuff leaves a mark, as anyone who came through a religious upbringing of any sort can tell you.
But as Wind Back Wednesday remembers, peeking at a 2005 interview, Ms Blasko has touched on this before in conversation at least, with bonus – for the few who know their geography down to the small detail of tiny islands off the coast of Africa – Mauritian-adjacent content.
While we wait for (some) god’s second coming, enjoy this faith-based history.
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GUILT? OH YEAH, SARAH BLASKO CAN do guilt.
It peppers her lyrics; it comes up in conversation; it informs her preference for pessimism over optimism (“then if things go right I can be pleasantly surprised”). She’s the first to admit to it, pointing out that’s it’s one of the reasons she enjoys the films of Woody Allen.
And you don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to figure out some of the cause. Certainly not while Blasko is around as she’ll tell you herself: religion. Proper religion too.
You see Blasko’s parents were missionaries on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion, her mother a nurse and her father, whose German/Bulgarian background is responsible for the surname (which incidentally was also Bela Lugosi’s real name), a teacher. And later in Australia they became inveterate investigators of new churches.
“I felt like I had a fairly traditional suburban life but we went to so many different churches I don’t know that it was so normal: Baptist, Pentecostal, the full Anglican gamut,” the slim and sleek Blasko says jovially, pushing around the food on her plate without ever really looking like she’s going to take eating seriously. “Instead of moving schools or moving states we moved church.”
Blasko, who at 28 is older than you assume from her young face, girlish laugh and an air of wide eyed innocence often taken advantage of by her prank-pulling housemate and fellow musician Darren Hanlon, even spent some time in the favoured church of your Idol stars, Hillsong.
“In my teenage years I was immersed in that movement. It had a big influence on my life,” she remembers. “Growing up in a charismatic church music was up there with God in importance. You could use this creativity for God.”
Consequently, while religion gave her a lifelong addiction to guilt, it also gave her something equally as useful in a musical career: confidence. Blasko sang as a teenager but didn’t have her first lesson until she was 19, and even then only to make sure she wasn’t doing anything likely to damage her voice. And when she took up guitar at about the same time as her first singing lesson she quite deliberately chose to avoid the idea of perfection.
“It’s always been pretty basic for me my playing but at the same time there’s something interesting about the mystery of things and that could be a good thing,” she says, adding with a laugh, that “it’s potentially a flaw in my personality but that’s what I like about music, that there’s something beyond my control, something that wells up in you.”
The idea of this “mystery” comes up again later when Blasko is talking about some of her musical influences. While the music she’s writing now, the songs which appeared on her debut album The Overture & The Underscore, have a mix of intense folk and low-level electronica, her formative years were spent in thrall to the likes of David Bowie and The Cure.
"There was always this mystery and theatricality about them. All of those things intrigued me, spooked my imagination.”
She wouldn’t be the first to fall for God, Bowie and Robert Smith (not necessarily in that order of course). There’s many a tragic RSL club/footy smoko night performer who began with the same dreams of being one or maybe even all three. You could even argue that Blasko wasn’t that starry-eyed or impractical as she did do the “responsible” thing and complete a BA in English literature and film and has worked her share of supermarket jobs and café waitressing.
Still, they were all time-fillers in their own way as she admits. “I never had any other career in mind.” Though when she released her debut EP in 2002, at a time when she was playing some gigs to three people and a decidedly quiet bar cash register, she almost did give it away.
But then JJJ liked her, Universal Music came calling via one of their offshoot labels, her impressive album won a lot of respect late last year and in a few weeks she’ll be bringing her mix of guilt and confidence to London and the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas.
Which has to be good, even guilt-free news for Blasko. Given Austin’s not too far from Waco and it’s in the home state of God-bothering presidents, it’s clear they sure do love their Pentecostal religious types there.
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