Sarah Blasko: delving into the depths

Musician Sarah Blasko let a filmmaker document her every move as she wrote her latest album. What on earth was she thinking?

Musician Sarah Blasko in the recent ABC documentary Blasko.

While writing the first drafts of songs that would become the backbone of her sixth album, Depth of Field, Sarah Blasko agreed to allow a documentary filmmaker to capture the creative process, warts and all.

The Sydney-based musician and performer is no stranger to collaboration, having done so during the past decade with the likes of Sydney Dance Company and national theatre company Bell Shakespeare.

Yet in consenting to let a camera swoop in on her while pondering handwritten lyrics, or sitting at a piano and sketching out chord progressions and melodic ideas, she was opening herself up to an entirely new sort of exposure.

Her previous five albums had been written largely while on her lonesome — or in geographic isolation in the case of her 2012 album I Awake, whose songs were written while she lived in Brighton, England, far from her Australian friends and family.

But letting a filmmaker document her creative successes and failures during a two-week residency at the Campbelltown Arts Centre in late 2016? What on earth was she thinking?

“You go into these things wanting to be honest and wanting to reveal yourself to other people,” says Blasko. “I think that in conversation I am somebody who reveals a lot about themselves; I’m not somebody who holds a lot in. I’m quite forthcoming about who I am and my feelings about things. But you go into it thinking you’re sharing with one person, then you suddenly realise, ‘Oh god, what have I done? Quite a lot of people are going to see that now.’ ”

It helped that the documentary idea was pitched by a friend, Brendan Fletcher, with whom she felt comfortable and unselfconscious. As for writing songs on camera, “It was only hard when you couldn’t come up with anything, otherwise I was not that conscious of him being there,” she says. “I probably could have not talked to him the whole time he was there but it would have felt odd because he’s a friend of mine.”

Fletcher’s resulting documentary, Blasko, premiered on the ABC in November last year. It is a wonderfully intimate and revealing insight into the hard work that goes into making music. Having begged out of the editorial consulting process about a month before Fletcher completed his final cut, the songwriter could not bring herself to watch it on the night. Her partner, Dave Miller — also a musician, with Sydney indie electronic trio PVT — asked if he could watch it on television. She gave him permission, then went to bed early and cried.

“It’s just so hard to put something out there,” she says. “It’s pretty personal. It’s awful to watch. It’s not like I’m some unusual case; who wants to watch themselves writing stuff, struggling? You do these things, and one day you’re happy to be on it and you’re fine with revealing all this stuff. And then the next day it’s like waking up with a hangover and realising all the things you did when you were drunk.” With a laugh, she offers an example: “ ‘I probably shouldn’t have picked up that banana, danced around and pretended I was on the phone to Ring Ring Ring.’ ”

Other than the titular songwriter and her close musical collaborators, one of the few other characters Fletcher decided to foreground is the artist’s father, Nikolai Blaskow. An English history teacher with an authoritative speaking voice and an arch wit, he makes several worthy contributions in interview clips that appear throughout the 54-minute film. (His daughter dropped the last letter of her surname in an effort to sidestep mispronunciations.)

From what she saw of early cuts, Blasko was bemused by his out-size presence. “It’s funny, because it makes my dad out to be my muse, like he’s a big part of my creative decisions, behind the scenes like a ghostwriter,” she says with a laugh. While that’s not the case, she notes that his influence was a key reason she pursued music. Today, she describes him as a friend with whom she can talk about anything.

In the film’s narration, Blasko says her mother didn’t want her to be a singer. “She thought that the music industry was too hard, and that I’d end up with my heart broken, and she wanted me to do something more practical,” she says in the voiceover. “When I was 23, mum became really sick. One of my last memories of her is when she was in hospital, and a nurse asked her what I did. My mum said that I was a singer. It was a really meaningful moment for me because I’d never heard her say that before. It wasn’t long after that that my mum passed away.”

One of the film’s best moments arrives in the second half, when her father’s voice is played over speakers, reading aloud a passage by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, with whom he is obsessed. A toothy grin forms on Blasko’s face as she wonders aloud what words of wisdom her old man will offer her. “He’s probably going to make me laugh, more than anything,” she reckons.

Her father’s stentorian voice fills the Campbelltown Arts Centre as he begins reading from Nietz­sche’s 1881 book, Daybreak. “Whatever they may think and say about their ‘egoism’,” he begins, “The great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego, which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them. As a consequence, they all of them dwell in a fog of impersonal, semi-personal opinions, and … a strange world of phantasms.”

The camera has settled on Blasko’s face while her father speaks, and on hearing this she gives a theatrical gasp and looks across to her collaborator, Nick Wales. “I feel like it’s inspiring,” she says, pondering the words. “Good on you, Dad!”

Of that moment, Blasko says, “All I took from it was the word ‘phantom’. The song ended up becoming about my dad, and about the people closest to me, and the influence that they’ve had within my life. You can’t erase this influence they’ve had on you. It’s to your bones; they’re the people who’ve shaped who you are.” In the chorus of the album opener and lead single, she sings, “I’m going to fill my lungs with you / My phantom heartbeat.”

As a whole, Depth of Field is yet another strong showing from Blasko, whose unfailingly high quality of artistic output must be maddening to some of her peers. Written as a concept record of sorts, it is rooted in imagined scenarios of the challenges, temptations, arguments and resolutions that face couples in a monogamous relationship. As a result, it offers emotive insights into hum­an nature, while the arrangements are by turns moody and uplifting.

The sixth track, Making It Up, is particularly dark and electrifying. Written from a male perspective, its narrative studies the slow creep of infidelity and deception that can poison a relationship. “But in all honesty, a man can fake it / You’re a woman, just lie back and take it,” Blasko sings in the middle eight. “It’s nothing personal when I’m on the road / And I have my needs.”

As good as the songs are on Depth of Field, it’s Blasko’s remarkable voice that floats in the centre of the mix and consistently thrills the ear with its timbre. We first heard this extraordinary instrument on her 2004 debut album, The Overture & the Underscore, which was nominated for four ARIA awards.

“I’ve always been quite astounded by her voice,” says friend and fellow Sydney-based songwriter Holly Throsby, who has recorded and performed alongside Blasko and Sally Seltmann under the name Seeker Lover Keeper. “If we’re in a room together and she sings something — whether she’s just warming up or singing a song with us — I’m always astounded by what comes out of her mouth. She really has an incredible presence as a singer.”

The artist herself says she’s become more confident to make mistakes. “It doesn’t have to be perfect straight-up,” she says. “It’s about the process of what you’re doing, not the end result. I’ve got my eye in a bit more. I feel patient. I want to take the time to refine something. I’m interested in the process being interesting, and finding new challenges. You either find new challenges or you just become stagnant, and that’s when you should stop doing what you’re doing.”

If anything, her sixth album marks an artistic breakthrough and suggests her best is yet to come. As for whether she’ll invite a filmmaker into the room next time around: maybe not — but, then again, the results here speak for themselves. Based on the muscular, commanding set she has assembled with Depth of Field, concerns of creative stagnancy should be far from her mind.

Depth of Field is released on February 23 via EMI. Sarah Blasko’s national tour begins in Byron Bay on May 11 and ends in Melbourne on June 22.