Gigging since the 1990s as a member of Sydney folk rock group Acquiesce and then, briefly, electro outfit Sorija before releasing her debut solo album, The Overture & the Underscore, in 2004, multiple ARIA Award-winning Sarah Blasko knows gigging deep down in her bones.
And yet, watching her soul-sundering rendition of epic new record, I Just Need to Conquer This Mountain, her first solo material since 2018’s Depth of Field, at the Northcote Theatre late last year as part of Victoria’s Always Live music festival, Blasko seemed surprised, regularly thanking the crowd for coming, listening and enjoying.
“It requires a little bit of people, sometimes, to know what they’re in for,” she says of performing the entire new album before indulging in the glowing back catalogue. “I feel a little bit like, ‘OK, thanks for coming on the journey,’ you know, because it’s a lot. Like being hit over the head with emotion, emotion, emotion, and then there’s release towards the end of the record. I’ve really been enjoying playing it.”
Launching into a regional tour in February, Blasko will champion the new album, less a confessional and more an exorcism of her much-discussed break from Sydney’s infamous Hillsong Church. “Each time I put a record out, the headline of every story is always something to do with religion,” she half-jokes.
That past is wrenchingly addressed in the haunting piano ballad ‘Bothering Me’, about an integral friendship that survived the break, only to fall apart later. “We went to the church together and ended up leaving at similar times, coming out of it completely then having to forge our new life in the world, as we always referred to it, because the church always called it the ‘things of the world’,” Blasko says.
“The fact that we had survived all those things together, but then [the friendship] somehow didn’t survive the rest of our lives was very confusing and confronting.”
Blasko says the breakdown brought that history flooding back. “It’s almost like I didn’t even realise that guilt of leaving the church, of leaving my marriage [to poet Cameron Semmens] in my mid-20s, all of those things were intertwined,” she says. “I knew I had to get out to the world, so leaving that marriage and the church was about saving myself, ultimately.”
As the empowering invocation of the album makes clear, Blasko’s glad she made the break. “It was the right thing to do, even if, at the time, it felt really wrong and was really hard,” she says. “Putting all those pieces together and trying to find hope, not being defeated by that weight of the past, is why I ended up calling it, I Just Need to Conquer This Mountain. Like, no big deal. I’ve conquered mountains before. I’ll just conquer this one, and another one…”
The joy of collaborations
If all this sounds heavy going, it’s worth bearing in mind that the self-produced album’s Sisyphean title sprung forth from Blasko’s evident good humour. “I thought I’d learned this lesson already,” she eyerolls. “I made a flippant remark while we were doing some recording before we made the album, and I kept f***ing up the piano. I was like, ‘I just need to conquer this mountain’, and then I thought it was ridiculous, but I love that.”
Opening track ‘The Way’, co-written with fellow ex-Pentecostal attender Bec Sandridge, was similarly birthed in jest. “We live really close to each other and kept crossing paths and I knew she had a religious background, so we just decided to get together and try something,” says Sydneysider Blasko .
“We were playing around with these chords as she just kept singing ‘Get me to church,’ in a ridiculous voice, but I kept loving that bit,” she adds. “And sometimes it’s a good way to start writing a song. You free it up through humour, even if it ended up such an intense song that plays on the Bible verse ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’.”
Ryan Downey’s gloriously gravely accompaniment on ‘Goodbye!’, duelling as much as duetting over a “Burning house” that will be “gone by the morning,” is a luminous highlight of the album. “When I wrote that song, I didn’t think of it as a duet. But then, as I looked at the lyrics more and more, I realised that they sounded like they were answering each other and, as I’ve never done a duet before, I thought it would be really fun.”
It helped that they’d toured together on Blasko’s last record and got on like – pardon the dangling pun – a house on fire. “I love the mystery in his voice.”
Saving live music
Touring again feels cathartic. “I don’t think about how personal something is until I perform it, which is kind of nuts,” Blasko says. “I’m proud of my honesty and not being precious about it. When a record’s made, it becomes so heightened and bigger than me, anyway, and I feel relieved of the burden. Performing it live is a reminder of what it’s all about.”
Live music is worth saving, Blasko insists. “Everything’s online now and, while people will always see the power in live music, it does feel sad to feel like there’s a struggle there,” she says of the scourge of smaller venue closures, particularly in Sydney, where lockdowns came off the back of years of destructive lockout laws.
After rejoining the ‘world’, post-Hillsong, Blasko embraced seeing bands at local pubs and worries that’s being lost. “I talk to my [Newcastle-based] niece who’s 25, and she says a lot of people she knows, if they’re going to pay for something, it almost has to be guaranteed that they’re going to have an amazing time at this big event,” she says.
“Whereas when I was younger, it didn’t even matter if you loved it or you didn’t, because you were out with your friends, meeting people. Smaller shows seem tougher to sell, and I find that fascinating and sad.”
When her niece texted that she was at a live jazz gig on a Thursday night at a warehouse in Maryville, Blasko was overjoyed. “I really believe that those things will come back around,” she says. “Every time she goes to a random thing now, she always sends me a video, and I love that.”
The major festivals need to play their part. “I don’t want to bite the hand [that feeds me], but I think it would be great to see more emphasis put on smaller venues and smaller acts, because a lot of developing artists may never get a chance to go to regional areas or do an extensive tour,” Blasko says. “They get stuck, but we really need to protect a healthy live scene with grassroots venues.”
For more on Sarah Blasko’s regional tour.
