Top Australian country singer: ‘I felt enormous pressure to be perfect’

Six-time Golden Guitar Award winner, Melinda Schneider began trying to achieve perfection from her earliest of memories and only recently started talking about her mental health struggles.

Country singer Melinda Schneider began trying to achieve perfection from her earliest of memories.

The six-time Golden Guitar Award winner, one of Australia’s most successful female country artists, only recently started talking about her mental health struggles.

“It took me about a year in therapy to find the courage to be able to go public with my story because, across my 40 year career, I felt enormous pressure to be perfect and to put out a positive story, a story of success, a story of beauty,” Schneider said on the latest episode of the Mental As Anyone podcast.

Melinda Schneider- multiple golden guitar award-winning singer sits down with JMo for Mental As Anyone Podcast. Picture: supplied

“That was something that came from my childhood, having a showbiz childhood with my mum, Mary Schneider, and being on stage from the age of three and first recording at the age eight, there was huge pressure to be a happy, pretty little thing. For many, many years, I did a wonderful impersonation of perfect.”

Schneider, 53, wears a lot of hats.

She’s a creative – singer, writer and artist – and is also an ambassador for the Rural Adversity Mental Health Program (RAMHP), describing herself as a “female empowerment advocate”.

Personally, she is mum to beloved son Sullivan and wife to legendary Australian muso Mark Gable of the Choirboys fame.

“I think when you’ve been raised that way, conditioned to be perfect, it’s something that’s in your cells really,” she explained.

Musician Melinda Schneider in 2002.

Melinda Schneider in 2005.

“And it takes being very conscious to keep reminding yourself that you don’t have to be achieving things all the time, you don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to be slim, you don’t have to be attractive, you don’t have to do anything other than just waking up in the morning and existing. That is all you really have to do. I do have to remind myself of that at times when that negative inner voice comes in hassling me.”

It was seven years ago that Schneider had what she called “her collapse

In 2020, Schneider launched a website – begentleonyourself.com.au – and released a song of the same name that she wrote with Dave Faulkner (Hoodoo Gurus) two decades earlier.

Her other inspirational tracks include Courageous, which she recorded with the late Olivia Newton John, as well as Sometimes It Takes Balls To Be A Woman, My Voice and Stronger.

“Something that I am grateful for my depression experience for is it taught me that perfect does not exist, and it’s okay to not be perfect, it is not even a thing,” she said.

Melinda Schneider- multiple golden guitar award-winning singer sits down with JMo., Picture: supplied

“Everyone’s idea of perfection is different and you never really get there. So in 2018, when I first had my collapse, it was after a show and I was exhausted, I’d been pushing myself too hard. I was a workaholic … just trying to beat the last bit of success I’d had and whatever I did, whichever project I was doing next had to be better than the last. It was really my way of being accepted in the world, feeling worthy … that’s why I was a workaholic.”

* A new episode of Mental As Anyone is released each Tuesday morning.