After a five year hiatus, singer/songwriter Sarah Blasko is returning with a brand new album: I Just Need To Conquer This Mountain. The album delivers what the title promises as Blasko sings and writes about the thoughts that have kept her up at night: her relationship with organised religion, the end of a once dear friendship and reflections on her first marriage.
I Just Need to Conquer This Mountain album cover
‘I write about what is most important or pressing in my life at that moment,’ she tells me over a cup of tea in Brisbane. ‘I guess I wrote these songs in a very reflective state during 2020, which is when I just had a baby and the world was kind of ending. Everything felt kind of nuts and I had a lot of time to reflect.’
‘I wish I could be somebody who thinks ahead and doesn’t reveal too much about their life. But, I’m not like that. I write about what’s happening to me.
‘The first half of the record is really like the middle of something that’s quite heartbreaking and sort of trying to let go. The second part is about reflecting on my life in general and wondering where to go from here.’
Blasko was brought up in a Pentecostal environment, which, as she grew older, didn’t fundamentally sit right with her.
Sarah Blasko IMAGE by Mclean Stephenson
‘One of the only things I’ve learned in life is that it takes time to get over things,’ she said. ‘There’s no quick way through it. It’s like the We’re Going On A Bear Hunt book I read to my children: “You’ve got to go through it … We can’t go over it/We can’t go under it.”
‘I think the songwriting process is part of going through it. Sometimes people are quite surprised that I’m actually quite a ridiculous person in my day to day life. I have a rather silly sense of humour, because I do let out my intensity through my music.’
Parents’ vinyl was an influence
Singing came naturally to Blasko at an early age. Her parents had vinyl records and that’s where she fell in love with some of the giants. To this day she still loves Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight and Paul McCartney.
‘Aretha and Gladys Knight were two artists I listened to a lot when I was around 12 to 14. Just over and over. At that point all my CDs were from the bargain bin at, like, Big W or something. There were a lot of Greatest Hits in there. Tori Amos’ Under The Pink was in the bargain bin. Sonic Youth was in the bargain bin, and the Cure.
‘I was always singing in my room into a hairbrush. I was a total cliché,’ Blasko recalls. ‘Our neighbours referred to me and my sister as the “singing sisters” because we must have sung so loudly in our bedrooms.
‘Writing my own songs became a natural progression. I also wrote teenage poetry in my room.’
Okay with ‘big subjects’
Blasko tells me she’s ‘okay with the big subjects … it’s my natural state’.
As a Pentecostal Christian, she thought the world may well end before she turned thirty.
‘We didn’t really go to the Pentecostal Church until I was 12 or something. When I look back to it now, I think it’s quite a damaging thing for a teenager, because you’re really dramatic anyway and wondering what you’re going to do with your life.
‘For someone to be telling you “Don’t worry about what you’re going to do with your life, the world’s probably going to end”. Well … on the one hand, I suppose it’s like: oh, well, that solves that. On the other hand, it was like: what am I aspiring towards? The drama of it.’
‘I remember feeling quite scared all the time when I would go to church, because it was very dramatic, very loud. It’s always someone yelling and there was speaking in tongues and a lot of intensity. I don’t think it’s good for you as a teenager, because you’re sort of intense and emotional anyway.
‘So, my sister and I rejected that church when I was about 17. We told our parents we thought it was wrong and we should stop going. So, we all stopped going, but I still kind of hung on to a bit of Christianity for a few years after that. The real clincher was when my Mum died when I was like 23 and I couldn’t … organised religion just made absolutely no sense to me.’
Late bloomer
‘I’d been married, as I’ve revealed very candidly in this record. When I was about 26 I left that marriage. Basically, at 26 I finally found myself in the world. I was trying to work out who I was and I finally let go of all of that stuff. I was a late bloomer.
‘It took me a long time to get over those thoughts, at least 10 to 15, years to get rid of that mentality of not being in the here and now, basically and being very fixated on the afterlife.
‘Now, I just want to be firmly rooted in what is going on right here.’
Sarah Blasko’s I Just Need To Conquer This Mountain was recorded at Rancom Street Studios in Sydney with engineer Brent Clark, produced by Sarah and mixed by Kenny Gilmore (Weyes Blood, Julia Holter, Ariel Pink).
Blasko’s touring in November and December 2024. Her Queensland gig is The Princess Theatre in Brisbane with special guest Seja on 30 November.
Check here for more tour dates
IMAGE of Sarah Blasko at top of stoy by Marcus Coblyn
