Sarah Blasko on Sir Elton John, Shakespeare and Carpool Karaoke

After almost 20 years in the spotlight, indie darling and now mother-of-two Sarah Blasko still has a few secrets and surprises left to reveal.

Sarah Blasko provides the stage sountrack for Bell Shakespeare’s production of Twelfth Night. Source: Kylie Coutts

Your parents were Christian missionaries and your childhood was steeped in music and religion. When did you decide to make music a career? I went to a Pentecostal church as a teenager and when I was about 17 we went on a sort of Christian crusade to France to convert people. I was singing in a youth group band and I had an epiphany that music was a great way to reach people. It’s very different to the way I make music now but the fundamental desire to communicate is still why I pursue it.

You have since recorded seven albums and won three ARIA awards, but still no formal musical training? I can’t read music, no. But this year I finally got my driver’s licence so it made me think: I can learn a skill as an older person, maybe I should study music.

You’ve just written new music for Bell Shakespeare’s production of romantic comedy Twelfth Night. Was that working outside your comfort zone? That was definitely the appeal, and it’s really refreshing to serve someone else’s vision. [Director] Heather Fairbairn is focusing on gender fluidity and mistaken identity and the melancholy of the play. There’s actually a lot of grief. It was important the tone made sense to me, that there was room for melancholy because I don’t do super chipper music that well.

What was your first experience of Shakespeare and was there a particular play that spoke to you? I had a really passionate high school English teacher and she brought him to life. She’d play the audiotapes of the plays and keep stopping and explaining what it meant. You couldn’t not fall in love with Shakespeare the way she presented it. I think the first one which spoke to me was Macbeth, with that feeling of impending doom. I must have had some pretty weird attraction to dark material as a child because my dad played me the Elephant Man soundtrack a lot from a young age.

Sir Elton John once named you as an inspiration. How did you react? I grew up listening to Elton John in the ’80s, so it was amazing and so weird. He was on that Carpool Karaoke segment [on The Late Late Show with James Corden]. He mentioned me and [Canadian electronic artist] Grimes and he called me young, so I don’t know what I was more impressed with.

Your boys are eight and three now. Has having children impacted your creativity? Once I got over the all-consuming nature of the first couple of years, I’ve been really reinvigorated. It’s a complete overhaul and everyone needs a good overhaul in their life to kind of start again.

Any new music of your own in the works? I made an album at the end of last year and I’m working on a visual accompaniment, so both will come out next year. I’ve always been a huge fan of the Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense; it’s cleverly constructed and choreographed and not as live as it seems. I want to do something similar that blurs the line between the show and the making of the show. It’s called I Just Need to Conquer This Mountain, which was a little phrase that I said during rehearsal because I kept making mistakes while playing the piano.

Twelfth Night opens at Orange Civic Theatre on July 28, then tours the country and winds up at the Sydney Opera House from October 24 to November 19.