Whatever happened to Vanessa Amorosi?
She was once the inescapable face and voice of Australian music. Then Vanessa Amorosi disappeared. In an exclusive interview, the notoriously private singer reveals where she’s been all these years.
Stellar
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There have been some major changes in Vanessa Amorosi’s life since she was last a chart presence nearly 10 years ago.
She moved to America. She toured constantly. She got married and she had a baby. She also made several albums worth of music, none of which anybody has heard yet.
But that’s about to change. There is a new single on the way. There is also a new attitude.
Once incredibly guarded about her personal life, the 35-year-old singer from Melbourne is also roaring back with a new attitude, all too happy to answer the question: what did ever happen to Vanessa Amorosi?
“I’m not a sharer,” she tells Stellar. “Even with my closest friends. So this is a new experience for me.
“But this is the second time in my career where I’ve gone away and come back. If I said, ‘Oh, I’ve just been making music,’ and didn’t talk about my personal life, it would be kind of weird.”
It is now two decades since a then 15-year-old Amorosi, who was discovered singing at a Russian restaurant in Melbourne’s Carnegie, released her debut single ‘Have a Look’, which she also co-wrote.
On reflection, she now says, “I don’t know how I got away with that. I had a rock band at school, I was working in a studio as a kid; in return I could create my own songs. That’s just what I’ve always been about.”
The song went gold and reached the Top 20, but it was the follow-up ‘Absolutely Everybody’ that became an inescapable earworm and a turn-of-the-millennium Australian anthem after its release in November 1999.
The song, co-written by early champion Mark Holden, made the Top 10 at home and became a smash in Europe.
She went on to perform the song at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and it remains a constant in her live shows — as Amorosi sees it, it has to.
“I’ve been so lucky I’ve been able to survive off music for 20 years,” she says.
“God knows what I’d be doing if I hadn’t; I just never prepared myself in any way to derail off the course. That’s what makes me really respect the songs that have become successful.”
Holden and his family remain close to Amorosi; he tells Stellar that “she’s one of the world’s great singers and creators”.
When Amorosi’s 2000 chart-topping debut album The Power was released, it unleashed another hit called ‘Shine’, which was also co-written by Holden.
The original title was ‘Die’ — it was about suicide, after all — but Holden told her a pop song with the chorus “Everyone you see/everyone you know is gonna die” might be a little too bleak for radio.
“He said, ‘Why don’t we look at lightening it up just a little?’” she recalls. “He was being the voice of reason: ‘I know it makes total sense, we all die. But do you really want people to think about dying when they hear the song?’ I thought, ‘Why not?’
“That’s the difference between then and now. Back then, I rewrote things. Now I’d be like, ‘No, it needs to be heard.’ All the backing vocals in ‘Shine’ still say, ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t you do it.’ They still relate to the title being ‘Die’, not ‘Shine’. It doesn’t make sense!”
Not long after, Amorosi tired of the Europop scene and took her first break, a four-year stretch that ended in 2007.
At the time, and for a singer of her age, it was an eternity. “I kind of always have been the person that pushes against conforming,” she explains. “Having tattoos definitely pushed against the glossy world I was in at the time. That’s just part of my nature.
“Even what I was wearing at the beginning, I look back and wonder how I got away with it. Kudos to me. How did that happen? I don’t try to be something I’m not. At a young age, I knew I wasn’t a model, I didn’t want to be a dancer or an actress, I wanted to be known as a singer/songwriter.”
Amorosi would finally score a number-one Australian single in 2009 (‘This Is Who I Am’), but she again grew weary of what the industry required, and by 2011 her writing trips to Los Angeles turned into something much more permanent.
“I was pretty burnt out,” she says. “I didn’t really evolve for a few years there. I really needed to rejuvenate myself and think about where I wanted to be.
“Going to the States and working with incredibly gifted people really put the pressure on me to step out of my comfort zone.”
It was in LA that she met two men who would alter her course. One was Dave Stewart of Eurythmics fame, who heard her voice, decided he wanted to work with her and has been her musical mentor ever since.
“When I first started in that very manufactured, overproduced world, pop artists were miming and it was more about what we looked like,” says Amorosi. “We weren’t writing songs. I felt like I was pushing a lot of boundaries back then, being a songwriter [and] wearing Fox racing gear.
“I used to think there was a formula to make a hit. Dave said, ‘I hate your formula. It’s done to death.’ He gave me the courage and motivation to go wild as an artist. Especially on his stage; he’d take me out of the cage.
“The crazier I went, the crazier he went. He feeds off it. It was incredible to have someone like him saying go for it.”
The other man was Rod Busby, a mixed martial arts trainer Amorosi met “randomly” at an LA coffee shop.
“It was automatic,” she says. “I want to marry you, I want to be with you. But falling in love is a horrifying experience! I’ve spent my whole life trying to control situations and focus on work.
“When you fall in love with someone, it’s uncontrollable. It’s like being thrown into a vortex.”
They married on Halloween 2017 in a church in the Californian desert — the same one that features in Kill Bill.
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When she’s not working on music, Amorosi now helps out at the gym he runs. “He’s all about fitness, structure, being up early, healthy lifestyle, healthy mind.
“I live the totally opposite rock’n’roll lifestyle where we’re up all night working and we drink way too much coffee. Our two worlds colliding is pretty incredible.
“None of our clients know what I do. I’m kind of ignored and that’s a nice sensation. I can come to the gym in my pyjamas dragging my child behind me, and we’re both looking like complete messes.
“I definitely come to the gym and train, but I disappear all the time on tour or recording. So having a son is a good excuse: ‘She’s home with the baby.’”
Their son Killian is now three, but so far he’s lived out of the public eye. Amorosi kept her pregnancy so secret, only her inner sanctum knew what was happening.
“I had pre-eclampsia [and] some complications, so I stayed away from everyone. I didn’t go anywhere near a microphone when I was pregnant. I went silent on everybody.”
She recalls Stewart calling her the week before she was due to give birth with an offer she couldn’t refuse.
“Dave said, ‘I’ve been talking to Mick and played him some of the gospel songs we’ve been doing and he loves them and he wants you to go on the road,’” she says.
“And he’s talking about Mick Jagger and the tour was the Rolling Stones! I hadn’t even told Dave I was pregnant. My first thought was, ‘I need to have this baby now and go on the road with the Stones.’”
Amorosi and her husband workshopped a scheme where she would have the baby, and he would take care of the newborn while she toured.
“We were so inexperienced,” she says now. “I’m thinking, ‘OK, this is doable.’ Anyway, Dave’s wife Anoushka calls me back and says, ‘Oh, honey, what if you have the baby and there’s complications? Sometimes it doesn’t go smoothly. And you really won’t want to leave him after he’s born.’ I was so delirious, a hysterical mess.”
Then she gave birth. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, thank god I did not leave.’ I had no idea what I was doing, he was so tiny. I was so scared to even hold him. There was no way I could have just sent him off with his dad. It was such an insane time. I look back and think I was so delusional thinking it was going to be that easy.”
Her new single, ‘Heavy Lies The Head’, is a pivot from the beloved gospel sounds she has been tweaking for the past several years, with a healthy dose of venom in the lyrics.
“The song’s message is if you’re a bad person you need to live with that. I can sleep at night. I’m a big believer in karma. I’d be really bitter if I wasn’t. As you get older, you start to let things go and think that life will sort things out.
“This is definitely the right song to come back with,” she says. “It is a risky move to disappear and come back again.
“I have to evolve as a person, otherwise I would just be writing junk, the same thing over and over again. And people can tell whether something is real or whether it’s made up.”
There’s more touring ahead, starting with the current Red Hot Summer dates with Daryl Braithwaite, John Farnham and Jon Stevens, another mentor.
“It’s like being with family. I look at them and go, ‘That’s me, that’s what I’m going to be doing for my life.’ There’s no changing course now. You have to be passionate and you have to love it.
“The main income is from playing live now, not selling records. And that’s perfect for me. Playing live has always been my thing.”
And for the first time, she is touring Australia as a family, with Rod and Killian in tow.
“Having him has brought so much joy to my life, now it’s even more important to show my son what I’ve been able to do. I want him to feel like Australia is his home.
“And now, rather than telling my hubby about life on the road, I get to show him what I do. He has no idea. It’s exciting having him come and play in my world.
“He likes to prep and plan everything, and there’s no planning in this world. It’s just get in there and you go, wherever the strings pull you.”
‘Heavy Lies The Head’ is out on Friday. For more information and tour dates, visit vanessaamorosi.com.
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