Staying Afloat

“At times I thought this record would kill me… I felt I would sink beneath it,” admits Sarah Blasko candidly in the liner notes of I Awake. Known for an innate attention to detail that has always made the softly-spoken Sydneysider stand out among her peers, Blasko makes it clear that she chose this challenge – to manage the grandiose statement of using an orchestra within a pop context, to self-produce the resulting “behemoth”, and to undergo the uneasy writing exile that led to both.

“I just like to sort of do something different with each record I 'spose. This time for some reason I chose isolation I guess and I thought I'd see what would come out of that,” Blasko suggests quietly of the period spent writing I Awake by the English Channel in Brighton. “On the one hand it was like this really amazing experience to have so much time to yourself and then it was really difficult and a lot of things came up that I didn't expect. But I think it's important to take that time to truly exist within my solitude. This album was very much written in that [headspace]… I think you have this chance to let your imagination run wild, think about things that you dream of doing and working with an orchestra was definitely something that I thought I'd wanted to do for a long time.”

For most, the enormity of coordinating a 52-piece orchestra would be enough to bite off for one record, though Blasko laughs awkwardly at the suggestion that also taking on the role of producer reinforces the idea that she needs the rush of a sink or swim challenge. “Well I don't know if I thrive on it but some sort of sick and twisted part of myself needs it in order to move forward,” she confesses.

“It felt like a natural thing,” she continues of self-producing I Awake. “I mean I was gonna work with Bjorn [Yttling, of Peter, Bjorn and John] on this album as I did the last, but we just couldn't sort of make the time work and then yeah, I knew that if he didn't want to do it that I would probably want to do it myself. It just felt like it was the right time and it just felt like a natural step,” she admits, though the role was not without its trials. “All the time,” Blasko says quickly of whether she second-guessed her ability to steer the project. “You just have to be very direct and strong and hold onto what your vision is. It can be hard to do that along the way but I just knew that the arrangements were gonna be a really big part of it and so recording with the band was just about kind of keeping all of that fairly simple. It was easy to doubt myself when I'd taken on such a big thing you know and to convince everybody to let me record with an orchestra and all this stuff, so I had a lot to live up to. “Apart from freaking out, I have good people around me I think who just kept reminding me what I was doing, particularly Lasse [Mårtén], who was the engineer who mixed the album – he was really encouraging and he and I had talked really clearly about what I wanted before we started. Yeah, I mean just having someone like that who kept reinforcing what I was doing… that's kind of what really got me through it all.”

Recording once again in the Swedish capital of Stockholm, Blasko visited the birth country of her paternal grandfather for two days to record the Bulgarian Symphony Orchestra in Sofia. She wasn't ready for the impact of hearing her musical vision in such a setting, particularly in a country that held a certain familiarity despite it being her first visit.

“Yeah you can't really prepare yourself for that sort of experience and just hearing them in that huge room – it was such a powerful sound. Because I recorded Here – the song Here – I recorded that live with the orchestra and that was actually the only one I sung in Bulgaria. I found it really hard to sing it at first because it was too overwhelming for me; it was really emotional. It was so surreal having written this song all that time ago and seeing it develop and then recording it with an orchestra, it was quite a mind-boggling or mind-blowing experience. “It felt like I was doing something incredibly special and like I would always remember. I just felt so incredibly lucky, actually. I mean Nick [Wales], who wrote the arrangements, he and I both felt like that – we were just like feeling like, 'How did we get here?'”

Her most ambitious project to date complete, Blasko still can't find the words to adequately describe how she got through the challenge of I Awake. She just knows that she did.

“I feel relieved – relieved that I made the kind of beautiful record that I wanted to make and yeah, I mean I just feel proud as well that I got through it and I did it; I had this vision for what I wanted to do and then I followed it through. It's amazing to feel like you do that, that you somehow kind of blindly just go forward, something kind of drives you and afterwards you just think, 'Wow, I don't know how I found the drive to do that.' It feels kind of amazing to think that you even sort of halfway pulled it off.”

Blasko worked tirelessly to ensure her musical vision of I Awake connected with the movements of the orchestra while leaving ample space for both her band, and her lyrical themes of conjuring strength and being true to oneself. The result is a record of depth, courage and beauty made far greater for its marriage of two musical worlds.

“I feel proud of how it's been received – I think people have understood it…” Blasko says happily. “I really wanted to make sure that people understand that it's not this watered-down version of things. It's got a lot of life in it – it's not like a tame kind of record and I think that sometimes people get that in their head when they think of an album with an orchestra… I don't want that to overshadow everything if you know what I'm saying. It's just the palette that I chose to hear the sort of sounds that I chose to use. It's got a strength to it, it's not a weak thing you know. That's kind of been my main hesitation or worry is that people would kind of think, 'Oh right, an orchestra album – boring.' To me it's a vibrant album…”
With one final challenge of the record remaining, Blasko will present I Awake with a different symphony orchestra for each of the six cities scheduled on the upcoming national tour.

“It's gonna bring this element of freshness and difference and you know it's gonna sound different every night. The only thing that I've done similar to this is when I put out What The Sea Wants [The Sea Will Have] I did some shows with a chamber ensemble. That was the same kind of thing – different players in each city and we had to rehearse on the day. It's kind of terrifying because it really does sound different each time but it really keeps you on your toes and you just have to kind of... there's a certain level of nervousness that's probably quite healthy. If you get too comfortable you can really see it when people do a show. I think it's just gonna, it just, every time you're around that amount of players, that in itself is quite an amazing thing to be around… I was actually just listening to some of the arrangements the other day and was kind of getting a little teary just thinking about how beautiful it's gonna sound because it just gives you such a magnificent sound of an orchestra.”

THE WINDS THEY'RE A CHANGIN'

Recently commissioned, alongside I Awake collaborator Nick Wales, to create the soundtrack for Rafael Bonachela's new work, Emergence, for the Sydney Dance Company, Blasko's next move is beginning to form through her current writing challenge.

“I'm not really sure but I think I know that I want [the next record] to be very different from this record. I don't know what it will be but I'm kind of starting to get a little sense of it. I'm hoping to try and write a new album this year so we'll see what happens,” she explains. “At the moment I'm doing music for a Sydney Dance Company production and I've been writing all of that and, you know, it's the first lot of music that I've written since my album and it's interesting to just see the changes in what I'm coming up with… I can see it already; there's something different happening and it's sort of been happening in the sounds that I've been choosing for this. For this production there's quite a lot of randomness and kind of the contrast of beauty and ugliness so there's some sort of quite aggressive or harsh-sounding things in what we're writing. I dunno if some of that will transfer into a new album, I'm not sure.”

While continuing to write on piano, tentatively Blasko suggests that her focus may be changing to another instrument.

“I sort of think I'm about to buy my first electric guitar so that might change a lot,” she chuckles. “Yeah, I mean I've had a real break from electric guitar 'cause I had quite a bit on the first two albums and I think something's resurfacing there. Actually I got, do you know Kirin J Callinan? I got him in to play some guitar for this Sydney Dance Company piece that we're doing and yeah, he's just, it's so fun watching him play and he just comes up with the weirdest things and he's got ten million pedals, so it just looks like so much fun really. I see people doing things like that and doing something interesting with the guitar [and] it kind of sparks an interest in my head.”

Sarah Blasko will be playing the following dates:

Saturday 9 February – Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Brisbane QLD
Thursday 14 February – Hamer Hall, Melbourne VIC
Sunday 17 February – Sydney Opera House, Sydney NSW
Saturday 23 February – Kings Park & Botanic Garden, Perth WA

I Awake is available now.