Why Vanessa Amorosi’s songs were blacklisted by music execs
As a young woman in music Vanessa Amorosi was told she was “too raw” or jealousy in her lyrics was “unattractive”. Now the 20-year music veteran is getting her own back, releasing a collection of the songs those execs once hated.
Entertainment
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Vanessa Amorosi isn’t the only person who’s had a major clean out in isolation.
However, for the Melbourne-born, LA-based singer, her housekeeping meant releasing an album of hidden songs she loved but those once guiding her career hated.
One former manager once told Amorosi outing herself as jealous in a pop song was an “unattractive lyric”.
The singer’s response? “Well, it’s the truth, but OK …”
Indeed after writing the therapeutic lyric — in a song from many years ago helpfully titled Crazy Jealous documenting an “interfering” third party and with lines like “I just can’t stand it knowing she’s back” and “can’t she find someone similar to you” — Amorosi went home and split up with her boyfriend.
She’s also long split with the manager who shut the song down.
“I was behaving like a crazy person, but it was a toxic relationship,” she says.
But she always loved the song. It, like dozens of others, sat on computer hard drives gathering digital dust. Songs previous managers or record company staff told her were “too organic, too rock, too soul, too raw, too full-on lyrically” and never wound up on an album.
Those albums gave Amorosi a string of hits, starting as a teenager with Have a Look and Absolutely Everybody in 1999, continuing through with Shine, The Power, Perfect, Mr Mysterious and her 2009 No. 1 This Is Who I Am.
She’s sold more than two million records worldwide in her career.
Cut to March 2020. Amorosi was still touring last year’s Back to Love, her first album in a decade that saw her move to LA, marry, have a child and work out what she wanted to do with her career.
In February she’d even taken part in Australia Decides, the competition to send a singer to represent the country at Eurovision.
Amorosi’s Lessons of Love wound up coming third.
“It reminded me of the early days, touring Absolutely Everybody through Germany and Europe,” she says.
The 38-year-old returned to her home in California with her husband, martial arts trainer Rod Busby, and son Killian.
When she moved to the US she was spotted by Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, who fell in love with her voice and talent and took her under his wing for recording sessions and tours worldwide.
Amorosi was driving into Hollywood for rehearsals for a show at the Grammy Museum with Stewart at the start of March when the world began to change.
“Dave called me and said everything was shut down due to COVID-19,” Amorosi says.
“And then my entire calendar was just blown out. I’ve spent the last year on the road and I’d planned to be on the road for another year before going back into the dungeon — my home studio.”
Amorosi has established herself as one of Australia’s most reliable live acts, surfacing everywhere from the Red Hot Summer Tour alongside seasoned live performers to popping up in nightclubs for her LGBTQ fans.
“I’ve spent so many years on stage I’m uncomfortable off it,” Amorosi says.
“It’s like returning to the home you grew up in, it’s comfortable. Being on stage is my happy place. It’s freedom.”
In a music industry where people have long stopped paying for music and stream it instead, resulting in tiny royalties flowing on to artists, performers rely on live work for the majority of their income.
She recently dabbled with a paid live stream gig, adapting to the new normal.
“It’s hard to sing to a camera, it feels like you’re singing to yourself, you miss the energy of the crowd, you feed off them.”
Amorosi was not the only musician to find her head spinning as isolation hit, trying to work out what to do with her life. Her initial impulse was to pack up and move the family to Melbourne to sit it out.
“But I have a lot of animals here,” Amorosi says of her American menagerie that includes horses, dogs and goats.
“I couldn’t just abandon them and let them fend for themselves, that wasn’t going to happen. So we just bunkered down. I’ve got a fairly big block here.”
While her husband stuck to his fitness regimen in isolation, Amorosi had her own routine.
“He’s still training and eating healthy and la la la. I wake up, deal with animals early in the morning, ride my horse, come back and my son’s woken up, I hang out with him and I go into the home studio. I can be in there from three in the afternoon to three in the morning. I juggle it that way. It works out with the little man.”
However, with her work diary suddenly free, Amorosi began to spiral.
“I felt like a mental case,” she admits.
“I felt trapped, I was stuck in my head, I was reliving moments and stuff I said.
“There’s nothing wrong with being in isolation, that’s how I usually operate to write records anyway. But I just hadn’t prepared for it. I was ready to be on the road, organising plane tickets and wardrobe and co-ordinating when my family was going to meet up. Then my team said ‘OK just sit for a week’. What, I haven’t done that for 12 months. It was an adjustment, it was my mind, getting in control of that.”
As ever, Amorosi worked through it by putting her thoughts into a song called Isolation. Created with her team back in Australia via technology, the song was soon finished.
At the start of April she’d decided to turn her enforced break into something positive — wrangling up all those songs other people told her not to release, and some new material, on an album called The Blacklisted Collection.
“I slammed straight into this gear,” Amorosi says.
“There’s a lot of songs. But these are the songs I have lived with over the years on high rotation, and the ones I fell back in love with. They’re predominantly the ones I always gravitated to and have been desperate to get out there.
“There was no business in the plan this time. It was simply ‘What’s a great art piece? What song do I love that I hope takes on a life with someone else?’ That’s just how I picked them. When I write pop songs I send them to my team. I usually go with the ones people normally all agree on. Because I’m so close to these songs they’re all ones I haven’t been able to part with. People have a better understanding of me through this collection of songs. It’s so liberating to finally have them out there.”
For the first time in her now 20-year career, she’d release it as an independent artist on her own record label.
“I was always scared about that. Would it be taken seriously if I didn’t have a big team or a huge record label to support it? But it’s actually been quite wonderful.”
The singer now has a streamlined team around her of four people, including herself.
Her manager of two years, Steve Scanlon, met her when she was singing as a 14-year-old and has long worked as a tour and production manager on her tours.
“She’s an incredible talent,” Scanlon says.
“She’s coming into her own. It’s interesting when you talk about someone who was a teenage star, they go through many different relationships with managers and record labels. She’s eventually evolved into this situation where it’s family orientated, all close mates.
“This was an amazing opportunity for it to come straight from the heart and have her make those kinds of decisions herself. Record companies tend to fashion artists, particularly when you are dealing with a major record label who spend money on you. You go along with the vision, it’s all a compromise.
“This time there was no compromise at all, it was just Vanessa doing what Vanessa wanted to do. It’s very freeing and it’s great for any artist to be in that position. You don’t have the money backing you like a record label does for promotion, but we’ve tried to do what we can with what we have.”
The singer set herself a goal to release a song each week — meaning the team had a challenge to get them ready to go in just days.
“It’s a lot easier than I thought it would be, with technology your music just rocks up on people’s phones, they don’t need to go into stores or buy CDs now, its just at your fingertips in an instant,” Amorosi says.
However, she admits she was cautious each week she’d release a song and promote it on social media, with most of the music less “pop” than her regular material and more soul/rock/blues based.
“I was a little scared of the feedback putting it out, I was almost expecting people to say ‘can’t stand these songs, prefer the pop stuff’ but I didn’t get that. People related to the stories, it motivated me to continue,” she says.
Amorosi needn’t have worried. The Blacklisted Collection is No. 1 on the AIR Independent Albums chart and debuted this week at No. 16 on the ARIA Australian Artists Album chart.
“Social media helps me, it helps direct me. It’s super motivating. With what’s going on in the world I’ve got a good relationship with the people supporting my record.”
For many years Amorosi has spoken about releasing a straight-up blues album — one that previous record companies felt could be potential commercial suicide. But the reaction to The Blacklisted Collection has given her confidence to stretch her musical wings.
“I have a gospel record finished. I planned it for this year but with lockdown we’ll postpone it. There’s another totally finished record that’s in a whole different genre.
“I want to be known as a musician and a great songwriter. As much as I love pop music and I’ll always continue to do it because it is the hardest thing for me to write, so it challenges me, I still want to be able to venture out of that lane.”
The Blacklisted Collection includes an iso-collaboration with singer Kate Ceberano on a cover of the Ray Davies song I Go to Sleep, recorded by the Pretenders and Sia.
“I’d never heard it and I became obsessed with it,” Amorosi says. “Kate thought it would fit this record and she was right.”
Back when she was a teenager enjoying early success Ceberano was one of the first tours Amorosi joined as opening act.
“I had to bring my teacher with me on the road,” Amorosi recalls. “Kate was so incredibly good to me, I was such an awkward kid who wasn’t very good socially.”
Ceberano remembers it differently. “She would dead stare you as a young teen, which I thought was really cool. She would say she was lacking in confidence, I read it as enigmatic. She could say quietly the most appropriate comeback to wisecracks or comments from the audience. Very still, steady and potent. Vanessa has always had an ability far beyond her age and I always felt she had an internal compass that was unshakeable … pointing directly toward this moment.
“I feel like she has simply been perfecting her skills to be able to ‘do it all’ … write, produce, play every instrument, mix and control every step of the way so she would never have to say that no stone was left unturned, or no man or woman made her into the person she is today! She is a self-made, self-owned woman of the times and I for one have been waiting to see her in this space owning it!”
For Amorosi, she’s embracing getting to release music her way, 20 years after her debut album. Now all she needs is word on when she can return to her other love — performing live.
“Once they open those gates I’ll be rushing out like a wild horse.”
The Blacklisted Collection is out now.