The Sarah Blasko Fan Forum

I don't know who this is from, but here it is anyway

Sweden, in the last decade, has become somewhat known for off-kilter pop music. From indie-electro-pop darlings The Knife through to the current day stylings of Robyn and Lykke Li, the Swedes have a talent for taking the standard, swirling it around a little and popping it out a little left of its original centre. Into that mix you could perhaps also throw indie-rock trio (and occasional NME favourites) Peter, Bjorn and John – and it is with bass and keyboardist Bjorn Yttling that Sarah Blasko’s latest story begins, with Blasko enlisting Yttling as producer for her latest solo effort, leaving behind Sydney’s sunny shores for a multiple-month stay in the depths of a snow-laden Swedish winter.

As Day Follows Night, the resulting album, is Blasko’s first since the Bernard Zuel-acclaimed (and ARIA award winning) What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have – an epic modern masterpiece in itself – and first without longtime collaborator Robert F. Cranny. Since the release of What The Sea, Blasko also dabbled in writing music for musical theatre, being nominated for a Green Room award for her work on Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is perhaps this influence that is immediately evident on As Day Follows Night, with album opener “Down On Love” containing a sprightly keyboard pixie that is part Wizard of Oz and part Tourism Victoria (if perhaps Joanna Newsom had a keyboard).

As the album moves onto first single, “All I Want”, it becomes abundantly clear that those hoping for a semla-fuelled “Konichiwa Bitches”-type outburst will be bitterly disappointed – this is a Blasko album through and through. While the track’s synth-like sounds hint at some of the more pulsating moments of What The Sea Wants (”Hammer”) it is the lyrical themes that instantly create synergy: Blasko has always been a highly literate, self-analytical composer and that theme is immediately evident. “I don’t even understand me, so don’t think that you can help” and “all I want is to one day come to know myself” she ruminates. While staying well clear of a Tori Amos cryptopia, it is nonetheless the start of a stream of self-questioning (including the “I wonder what I’ve done to end up this way?” pondering of album standout “Is My Baby Yours?”).

The influence of producer Bjorn Yttling becomes fully evident on the album’s third track, “Bird on a Wire”. Gone are the piano and guitar driven pulses of Blasko’s earlier work – and indeed, absent they remain for a large majority of the album’s remainder. In their place is the insistent pounding of a various drum beats and percussion – an occasionally arrhythmic heartbeat pounding loudly under Blasko’s musical skin (”keeping in time don’t matter as much as the feeling” she utters on “Over and Over). While much of her earlier was vocally and lyrically driven, the organic, percussive nature of As Day Follow Night takes centre stage – with Blasko’s usually languid vocals taking new haste on on “Bird on a Wire” and taking command on “Lost and Defeated” (”the emotional tide has turned and I see red”).

Despite its beat-centric schema, As Day Follow Night keeps things musically diverse with a few unexpected touches – the Copacabana-carnival keyboard introduction to “Over and Over”; the slight flamenco tinges of “Is My Baby Yours?”; the vocally-lead waltz of “I Never Knew” and the hints of film noir on album closer “Night and Day” (a track that, admittedly, would not have sounded out of place on What the Sea Wants, with shades of “Woman by the Well” and “I Could Never Belong To You”).

Ultimately, As Day Follows Night may divide Blasko fans, most noticeably for its stripped-back lyrical approach. The poetic twists and spirals of the Blasko literary vine are trimmed back and straightforward prose blooms in their place – more accessible for some, yet slightly disappointing for others. As an album it is much less challenging than What the Sea Wants, albeit never quite as jangly-guitar-pop-rock-easy as album debut Overture and the Underscore – and yet, doesn’t entirely sit comfortably between them either. Like all her work, it is worthy of repeated listens and, while never quite reaching some of the the dizzying heights What the Sea Wants, should help Sarah Blasko reclaim her coronet as Australia’s foremost* female singer-songwriter.

In summary: she is still good.

Standout track: Is My Baby Yours?, All I Want

Sounds scarily good!

Here's the source by the way: http://darkcafedaze.wordpress.com/2009/ ... ht-review/

And here's the other end of the asterisk: *With apologies to Sally Seltmann. You are also excellent.

haha I have to say that the more I read through this interview, the more I thought what utter crap.

with album opener “Down On Love” containing a sprightly keyboard pixie that is part Wizard of Oz and part Tourism Victoria (if perhaps Joanna Newsom had a keyboard).

I have to say, the opening to the album is one of my favourite parts. It sounds so magical and awe inspiring. It leaves you anticipating what you are about to hear

pondering of album standout "Is My Baby Yours?"

Well it shows everyone's musical taste is different. Just to show how different my opinion is from the reviewer's, that's the only track that doesn't blow me away ( I still like it - it's not bad or anything ).

The poetic twists and spirals of the Blasko literary vine are trimmed back and straightforward prose blooms in their place

Did they just create that sentence from a random word generator? What does that mean?

it is worthy of repeated listens and, while never quite reaching some of the the dizzying heights What the Sea Wants

What? Okay this person has clearly lost me now. This is Sarah's greatest album yet!

In summary: she is still good.

In the words of Comic Book Guy - Worst... Summary... Ever!

Ignore this lukewarm review. The album is nothing short of amazing. You will all be blown away by it.

reviewers are are a funny lot,their job is to listen to new music,give the cd a couple of spins (while cleaning at home,between urgent phone calls,in a traffic jam etc etc.) i never agree with most reviewers about movies, books ,music.i like what i like and no one can tell me different.you are right ,the new album is brilliant,lets hope the next album is different too hopefully this album will not divide us fans like the reviewer suspects,it might lead to rioting in the streets after the enmore show,all out fights at splendour ,upturned seats at lismore .people arguing about sarah,s" stripped back lyrical approach" oh by the way it was not a word generator,no it was a gardening australia magazine,available at all good newsagents

Sarah Blasko
As Day Follows Night
Sarah Blasko’s third album 'As Day Follows Night' showcases her ongoing development as a singer and songwriter, writes ADAM D MILLS.

The past couple of years have been a period of exponential growth for Sarah Blasko. Just as her second full-length album What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have was a massive step forward from debut The Overture and the Underscore, album number three As Day Follows Night showcases her rapid and ongoing development as a songwriter and performer.

Recorded in Stockholm with producer Björn Yttling (known to the world as one third of Peter, Björn and John), As Day Becomes Night sees Blasko step outside her comfort zone, utilising a new sonic palette drenched in jazz-influenced percussion and double bass and augmented by little more than the occasional flourish of piano or strings. Guitar figures very slightly here: it’s only notable appearance is the flamenco-esque acoustic that drives the heartbreaking ‘Is My Baby Yours?’. The spaciousness of the arrangements leaves plenty of room for Blasko’s voice, which is just as well, because it’s her best performance committed to tape yet.

Though there’s a distinct playfulness to tracks like ‘Hold On My Heart’ and ‘Over & Over’, As Day Becomes Night feels quite dark overall. The austerity of the instrumentation combined with Blasko’s intensely personal, deeply searching lyrics, make it much heavier going than either of its predecessors. That said, it’s not a gloomy album, or one that’s difficult album to digest. Opener ‘Down on Love’, with it’s almost Danny Elfman-esque arrangement for piano and strings, is a warm and welcoming invitation to the record, while the likes of ‘We Won’t Run’ and ‘I Never Knew’ are among the most affectingly gorgeous songs in Blasko’s oeuvre. But it is a challenging album, and one that’s full of (unfailingly pleasant) surprises.

“This record reflects personal, as well as musical growth. Several lyrical themes repeat throughout, the most notable of which is the struggle to feel comfortable in one’s own skin.”

This record reflects personal, as well as musical growth. Several lyrical themes repeat throughout, the most notable of which is the struggle to feel comfortable in one’s own skin. “Can’t please somebody else/Until you’ve learned to look after yourself,” Blasko sings on ‘Hold On My Heart’. The sentiment is echoed on first single ‘All I Want’: “All I want/Is to one day come to know myself.” Much more than lyrical rhetoric, it sums up the record’s strident confidence.

Though it feels at times like a risky album, there’s nothing tentative about it. Blasko has really pushed herself here, and the results speak for themselves. It might be her least instantly accessible record, but it possesses a timeless quality that makes specific reference points difficult to come by. All at once, it sounds as though it could have originated from any point in the past 50 years while still feeling entirely contemporary.

+

Sarah Blasko’s As Day Follows Night is out July 10 through Dew Process.

Steve wrote:The spaciousness of the arrangements leaves plenty of room for Blasko’s voice, which is just as well, because it’s her best performance committed to tape yet.

But it is a challenging album, and one that’s full of (unfailingly pleasant) surprises.

Though it feels at times like a risky album, there’s nothing tentative about it. Blasko has really pushed herself here, and the results speak for themselves. It might be her least instantly accessible record, but it possesses a timeless quality that makes specific reference points difficult to come by. All at once, it sounds as though it could have originated from any point in the past 50 years while still feeling entirely contemporary.

Those comments sound superb, especially the first one.

Now THAT'S a review!

I couldn't have agreed with it more! The writer covered so many angles of what makes this album great. I think he really 'got it' and obviously enjoyed the album (who wouldn't?)

Top find, Steve. Thanks for posting that

This is from todays 03/07/09 Melbourne Age - EG Section full page plus full page cover photo.

Emotional rescue



July 3, 2009
After collaborating on her first two releases, Sarah Blasko was determined to write her new album entirely by herself.

After collaborating on her first two releases, Sarah Blasko was determined to write her new album entirely by herself.
Photo: Supplied
Latest related coverage

Sarah Blasko
Video A behind the scenes look at Sarah Blasko recording her album.

Sarah Blasko's new album is straight from the heart. By Bernard Zuel.

HOW bizarre, how bizarre.

Sarah Blasko is sitting in what you could call, if you were being extremely generous, the "boardroom" of the little warren that is the Sydney office of her management company.

It was in this room, sitting at "the crappy, out-of-tune piano" she calls Everett and keeping office hours and office habits, that she spent many weeks last year writing the songs that ended up on her new album, As Day Follows Night.

There is no natural light but there is, directly above the piano, a giant framed platinum award for classic one-hit wonder, New Zealand rapper OMC, whose song How Bizarre also summed up his career trajectory.

"I did get quite philosophical looking at that," Blasko says with a hint of a smirk. "It made me realise just how short life is."

Blasko, who is described by good friend and fellow songwriter Darren Hanlon as having a goofy sense of humour (and a mean karaoke voice, quite unlike her stage voice), is caught between laughter and seriousness in the shadow of OMC. An understandable position, really.

"Looking at awards like that, for people who aren't necessarily around, it's like writing in a graveyard," she says. "But I think it's always good to think about one's mortality, musical or otherwise."

OK, but what was she doing working in an office? While she may dress like a primly stylish office manager-cum-librarian from the early 1970s (today she is in a high-neck, paisley pattern grey-and-brown dress with her little brown boots laceless), you don't expect people to be creative in the shadow of the Bundy clock.

"I do think it's quite reassuring to see other people while you're working," says Blasko, explaining that she had been living alone in a little Newtown bolthole until very recently. Perhaps, even more pertinently, not only was she living alone but, for the first time in her career, the fine-boned Sydneysider was writing alone.

Her long-time personal and creative relationship with Robert Cranny, with whom she had written and produced her first two albums, had ended some time back. So now, at 32, the woman who always thought of herself more as a singer and writer than a musician was flying solo.

"I felt like I had to. I felt like if I didn't do it now I would always wonder why," she says. "I really love writing with other people, I always have, but it was coming to a point where I was finding it a little frustrating with other people. Not because of them, it was just I felt I needed to not have any compromise."

On the first listens of As Day Follows Night, it may sound like "without compromise" meant without the musical complexity and lyrical opaqueness of her quite stunning second album What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have, which scored seven ARIA Award nominations and won Best Pop Album in 2007 and also earned her an Australian Music Prize nomination. This is an album, much to the pleasure of her record label, that is simpler, cleaner and more optimistic than its predecessor.

But take a closer look and you see that things are much more complicated than that. It begins with Blasko declaring that she is "down on love"; later she tells a putative lover "how can you know me when I don't even understand me" and doubt and loneliness underpin even the sunniest melodies. "To be honest, I genuinely went into quite a dark period and it was broader than just [a breakup]," Blasko says, her discomfort at the subject stark as she half turns away, tightly bound, with her arms wrapped around herself.

"It was a really, really tough time. One of those times when you feel like you are questioning everything in your life. You are questioning the main thing you do in your life, which is writing and playing music, feeling a bit of hopelessness."

It was then that she found herself listening to the likes of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday and a lot of soul music.

"These great singers who responded to heartbreak seemed really relevant to me when I was feeling kind of rock-bottom I guess, to use a cliche," she says now, adding with a half laugh of embarrassment at what she fears is another cliche: "I was emotionally exhausted."

Three years ago, Blasko talked about feeling that she had finally been able to put aside some of the complications of her past, like her conflicted attitude to faith after a childhood in various pentecostal churches and an early unsuccessful marriage.

She was ready to move on with greater confidence in her own ability to change, she said. But the propensity for darkness never really leaves, though this time Blasko chose not to wallow but instead use the writing as a way out for her and as a pointer for others.

"I think it's something that I am constantly struggling with. I don't know whether it's like a family curse but I think there is a darkness," she says. "That's why the record really had to be about pulling yourself out of that because anyone who's gone through any kind of depression or felt literally like you can't go on (knows) it's about changing the environment. These songs were, in part, that for me. Stuff like Sleeper Awake and We Won't Run and Down on Love, they are all about that feeling of a loss of hope but desperately trying to find that again. Trying to make it into a positive."

Blasko's answer makes even more sense of a comment about her from another Sydney songwriter, Josh Pyke, who has watched her from side stage ("she is fairly transcendent when she is performing," he says) and listened with some intent to an artist he describes as feeling like she is beyond his scope as a songwriter.

"Some writers will lead you back to yourself with their words and their music but Sarah's music has always taken me right outside my own life and into a kind of romantic, imagined existence," Pyke says. "The sonic palette, her voice and the arrangements aren't at all parochial and, for me, that creates a feeling of real escapism when I listen to her stuff."

Escapism in one sense is what Blasko wanted this album to provide. Without the oblique lyricism she had favoured previously and with simple arrangements and straightforward music, the new album colours the emotional turmoil in a completely different hue.

It is, as she keeps returning to in her answers, something meant to be understood. "Generous" is a phrase she uses often to sum up her intention.

"The thought of making - and I know it's a cliche - these things universal, to make them relatable to other people, was really important to me," Blasko explains, beginning to unfurl her narrow body.

"I didn't want to be unnecessarily wordy, just cut to the chase. And I think the idea of it, relating to other people, having that generosity, is what made me feel better. I feel that this is my project, to make something that's bigger than my story."

This is why her choice to write on her own this time is all the more interesting, as Hanlon says she went into this album terrified but determined to write it all by herself. Beyond confidence about whether she could do it or not, it would have been tempting to rely on other people to do the work, to take some of the spotlight off her and her singular concerns.

She did change gears to record the album, in Stockholm, with a more collaborative approach alongside Bjorn Yttling of power pop group Peter Bjorn and John (that was "just liberating", says Blasko of having another voice in the process) but the focus remained on not just being straightforward but being transparent. Not just about the depression and the way out but also the mixed feelings about those moments of heightened emotion.

"Much of the album is about that awakening, seeing things for what they are. That's probably why I chose that particular style of being obvious in a way," says Blasko. "It's like when everything around you becomes painfully clear and that's really wonderful, like a heartbreakingly good time. It's odd how at the hardest time there is almost something wonderful about it that you never want to lose: you don't want to lose that feeling of being really in touch with what's real and you can so easily forget those things when everything is easy and quiet.

"So I think there's a bit of a wonder in it, which I really wanted to capture, that feeling that you are seeing everything anew which is harsh and hard and revealing and good. Everything, at the same time."

How bizarre? Not so much.

As Day Follows Night is out July 10 through Dew Process/Universal.


http://www.theage.com.au/news/news/gene ... ntentSwap2

emember that Missy Higgins chick? Yeah, the one with the painfully inoffensive acoustic pop songs that just wouldn’t die a quick death, lingering in the airwaves and permeating into ads and TV spots until even her fans started to get annoyed. Well, there’s another female Australian singer-songwriter who has been doing the same thing, only for some time longer and a quite whole lot better.

“I thought it was a good time to take one” Sarah Blasko explains of her recent seven day escape from the rigour of releasing her new album, As Day Follows Night.

It’s her third long player, but that didn’t mean there was less stress in the studio. “I think I find a lot of things stressful” she laughs. “I don’t think this one got any easier than the last one. I think subconsciously I like to make things difficult for myself.”

She’s alluding to the fact that for As Day Follows Night, Blasko travelled to Sweden, the frozen land of mead horns and wenches to do the recording. “I just thought ‘what the hell?’” she explains. “It was a great place to be, and I was really excited to be there but there was a moment there when I wondered what the heck I was doing.”

The catharsis at the end of the stressful rainbow of writing and recording will come when she gets her hands on a physical copy of the album, and can finally share it with the world.

“It’s like you’ve been waiting for years for the right guy to come along and then you meet him and you just want to show him off.”

Just like meeting a life partner though recording the album was a big move, one that took Blasko right out of her comfort zone.

“It was really liberating, but it was a little bit scary. I wasn’t sure whether I was capable of it. Feeling like you’re the leader of something, it’s a stressful thing, but that’s what’s exhilarating about it at the same time. It’s your vision, your ideas and all these wonderful people are helping you achieve it.”
On her last two records, fellow songwriter Robert F Cranny was on hand to co-write and produce her work. This time around the pressure was on – she was on her own working with a Swedish producer, Peter, Bjorn & John’s Bjorn Yttling, someone she’d never met before and who wasn’t really familiar with her back catalogue.

“To me that was a really important part of this record. He was somebody who heard the songs as they were and what I wanted to do with them and took them completely at face value. He wasn’t concerned about the past and to me that was really liberating.”

The more shoegaze-acoustic-balladry sound of Blasko’s earlier albums has changed with the times and, perhaps, maturity. Working with Yttling, discovering “new, or different ways of doing things in the studio” on the new album too has given Blasko the chance to shape the overall intent of the record.

“The new album, I think it’s very different. I think you’ll hear people saying it’s a departure but I don’t think that can be true when you’re a solo artist. I feel the new album is more true to myself than the other records. I feel like it’s quite strong in that sense.”
The sometimes sparse arrangements on As Day Follows Night, “some parts of songs there’s little else than vocals, double bass and drums” give way at moments to the grandeur of strings, a bit of instrumental saw, baritone saxophones and banjos.

Hitting the road soon in support of the new album, Blasko tells me she’ll have a decidedly different collection of instruments with her in an attempt to convey the fuller, grandiose sound of her new work. Of her back catalogue, Blasko says, “I’ll definitely do the old stuff, but I think I want to kind of reinvent them a bit. I’ll have to find a way of adapting them to this new sound. In a way it’s kind of a jazz sound, the new record.”

If you’re not going to catch Sarah at Splendour, she’s doing shows with Jack Ladder in Bellingen on July 23rd and Lismore on July 24th otherwise keep your eyes and ears peeled for her national tour in October and Novemeber. As Day Follows Night is out July 10th on Dew Process.

Wow, I completely understand what she's talking about in the third review (how bizarre). She basically said exactly my thoughts that I've never been able to get out. As much as I loved her before, after reading that I seriously gained so much respect. And how she speaks of the album...I have a very good feeling it'll be my favorite album.

July 09, 2009 12:00am

SARAH Blasko was searching for something. Not a clean slate exactly – the intimations of personal turmoil in the lyrics of her new songs show she had plenty to work through there.

But a new canvas to work on, at least. She found it, almost as an afterthought, in Stockholm, where her third album, As Day Follows Night, was recorded with producer Bjorn Yttling, of Peter, Bjorn and John.

The result is something that feels earthier and more direct than her two earlier albums, The Overture and The Underscore and What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have.

Gone are the electronic instruments – replaced with piano, strings, double bass, banjo, nylon-string guitar, vibes, sax, musical saw even – and the focus is more purely on the songs and that striking yet vulnerable voice.

"I was after someone who didn't know about my previous music and didn't want to go there," Blasko says. "That was really liberating for me. Bjorn was great, he liked the songs and he's not afraid of any style of music."

After recording her first two albums overseas, Blasko planned to make her third closer to home. But after an intense period of writing and also appearing in and composing the score for a Sydney production of Hamlet, she felt like she needed a break.

"I thought it was a good chance to get away, to finish some songs, but also have an adventure. Bjorn's name kept popping up on records I liked so I wrote and asked if he was interested. I thought the songs I had written had an old-fashioned quality, almost like old jazz and blues songs, so I was looking for someone who could appreciate that.

"I was certain right from the start but I didn't want to have electric guitars or electric keyboards on them, that anything like that would be too heavy. It needed the lightness and character of instruments that have space and air around them."

It's an interesting relationship with a producer, I venture, it can't be too cosy.

"This definitely wasn't cosy," Blasko says with a laugh.

"That's not to say we fought like crazy but I did feel like I was being coached, directed in a way. As much as I liked to think of myself as being open-minded, it was a struggle for me to trust somebody I didn't know at all before. That was a big thing for me to learn, to let go more this time."

Blasko's previous albums were songwriting collaborations with her then musical and personal partner Robert Cranny. But there is no hiding on As Day Follows Night. The songs are all written by Blasko alone and are often emotionally honest accounts of heartbreak and recovery.

"When I hear the songs now I feel like I'm being more true to myself, it's a more revealing kind of record that I wasn't able to do until now.

"Although it's not like I suddenly feel so confident that I know exactly what I'm doing. I think the day I feel like that is when I wouldn't want to do music any more. I like the fact that it's a bit of mystery."

Also keeping the nerve-endings open during the writing was Blasko's appearance in Hamlet.

"I think the mood of the play did filter into where I was at in my life," she says. "I was in the midst of writing a record that's a personal one, talking myself through a difficult period and seeing the positives in things.

"There was a comforting element in hearing the play every day for four months. There is so much richness there, exploring what it is to be human and to be good and to have integrity."

As well as providing the music, Blasko did appear on stage with a singing role.

"I was only on stage for 15 minutes and there were these amazing pianos backstage in the rehearsal rooms. I would be out there in my stage costume writing my songs."

She enjoyed the creative buzz of a theatrical production too.

"Actors are hilarious people to work with. They are so different to musicians, who can be stand-offish. Actors are hugging you every five seconds."

Blasko is looking forward to some more honesty taking these songs around the country in a national tour.

"In Australia, I find it difficult that there is a more conventional approach, a slightly embarrassed approach, when it comes to talking about the arts. In a lot of interviews, often you feel that people are steering you toward the funny side of it, that it's embarrassing for people to talk about it as a serious art form and work.

"That's a big difference between Australia and the US, where there is more of a full-on musical heritage, where music is taken more seriously on the whole."

But Blasko is looking forward to recreating the richness of the album on stage.

"They aren't complicated songs so it's really important for me to get the sound and the feel right as I play them. I'm going to have a basic band and string players and hopefully later to incorporate things like tympani, vibraphone and flute in the show."

Three albums in, she is more confident in her craft. Does she feel certain now that songwriting is her calling?

"Sometimes I wonder . . . it's a difficult life in some ways. It is pretty much my life and I know it's important to be obsessed with writing, but to do that successfully you almost have to do the opposite sometimes. I've realised that stepping outside of that life is important too, to experience other things, to be another person."

As Day Follows Night (Dew Process/Universal) out now. Blasko plays The Tivoli, Brisbane, on October 10. Tickets on sale now through Ticketek. She plays Splendour In The Grass, Byron Bay (sold out) July 25.

Don't know if you want to repost these in an easer to read/find form Neil?

ALICE WASLEY

July 09, 2009 12:00am

SARAH Blasko is sitting in her "office" which, with ratty couches and upright piano, resembles the living room of a share house more than a place where you toil.

For about nine months last year, she walked from her house in Sydney's Newtown to this little room in her manager's Darlinghurst office to write her third studio album, As Day Follows Night.

"I kind of found that a romantic notion, whereas a lot of people would kind of laugh at me," she says. "But to me I was like 'I want to have a full-time job and I want to write songs for a living'."

The first single to be released from the album is the sonically lush All I Want, which opens with the lyrics "I don't want another lover". Love and heartache are themes that feature prominently on the album - the followup to her ARIA award-winning 2007 album What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have - but Blasko is coy about who inspired All I Want and other romance-themed tracks such as Down on Love and Hold on My Heart.

Blasko worked with Swedish producer Bjorn Yttling in Sweden to record the album but says she was keen to write the songs alone, a process she struggled with. "I found it really hard, yeah . . . I've definitely written songs on my own before but largely the songs on my records have been collaborative," she says.

"It's a really lonely but really rewarding process doing it on my own because there's no filter."

By working alone, Blasko now knows it's OK to make music without all the bells and whistles that other musicians utilise and, in many cases, rely on.

"Somewhat I think I have (found more confidence) but I think it's more just coming to terms with what your strengths and weaknesses are and just accepting the fact that I am a very simple musician and that's OK," she says.

Blasko, who is performing at Splendour in the Grass in Byron Bay later this month and touring in October, is keen to get back on the road.

"I just really want to put the record out and let people hear that for a while and then do some shows after that," she says.

What: As Day Follows Night

When: Out now, through Dew Process

No, I quite like having them all in one thread. It makes them pretty easy to find all in one place. People can always use the forum search if they want a specific one.

Mo0fin has scanned in some images to the gallery from a couple of magazines, if you would like to have a look at them. There is a Gorgeous picture of Sarah!

Posted in Music by darrynking on Jul 10, 06:00AM
Sarah Blasko
As Day Follows Night
(Dew Process/Universal)

My seat at the 2007 ARIA Awards was so high up and so far from the action that I had to be guided to it by a sherpa. But even from there I could tell that Sarah Blasko was a little bemused as she accepted her ARIA for Best Pop Release of 2007. “I always thought my music was pop,” she joked, her gentle sarcasm echoing around the infernal chasm of the Acer Arena.

It would seem that Blasko has had quite enough of being misunderstood. Her third album, As Day Follows Night, immediately sets itself apart from 2004’s The Overture & the Underscore and 2006’s What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have. Where both of those albums kicked in with a haze of murky vocals, synth and TR-606 beats, the new opener ‘Down On Love’ unravels like an old standard, all dainty piano flourishes and understated strings. It’s Blasko as we’ve never heard her before.

Actually this whole record is Blasko as we’ve never heard her before. There’s a laid-back jazz club vibe throughout, with plenty of brushed snares, meandering double bass and Blasko bending notes like it's Billie Holiday’s business. Though importantly, without - to be clear - the whole thing becoming a self-conscious throwback to burnin’ blue soul a la Duffy’s Rockferry.

The record makes the most of three main elements – voice, bass and drums – without resorting to electric instruments at all. It’s hard not to miss the prog-rock sensibility and Jonny Greenwood textures of What The Sea Wants, but there are new pleasures to be discovered in Bjorn Yttling’s keep-it-real production: the immaculate crispness of the nylon strings on ‘All I Want’; the blunt attack of the piano on ‘Lost & Defeated’…but mostly it's all about Blasko’s voice, which shines in these spacious arrangements. Here Blasko is in her finest form yet.

There are a few surprises in store too: the flamenco stylings of ‘Is My Baby Yours’; a Tin Pan Alley vaudeville number in ‘Hold On My Heart’ (not a cover of the Genesis track, obviously); the bouncy ‘Lost & Defeated’, with strings shivering away in demi-semiquavers as if from the chilly Scandinavian winter; and, even if Blasko refuses to say so herself, echoes of the Wild West in ‘All I Want’ (rattlesnake shakers, clippety-clop percussion and singing saw coyote howls).

The biggest a difference perhaps is that Blasko, who has tended to be willfully obscure in her lyrics previously, lays it all bare here, with refreshingly direct lines like “I never knew it would hurt like this / to let someone go against my wishes…” Lines like these, together with music like this, is tantamount to throwing on the house lights after a little bit too much flickering candlelight. It’s stirring, beautiful stuff.

Darryn King