A Double Mastectomy And Six Albums Later

The word Anastacia is the Greek word for ‘resurrection’, and as a name, her parents couldn’t have given Anastacia Lyn Newkirk anything more appropriate. The first Australia heard of this striking singer from Chicago was her 2000 breakout single, I’m Outta Love, and over the intervening 15 years, Anastacia has released six albums, her latest, Resurrection, in October last year.

While throughout those intervening years, she toured pretty solidly (particularly through the UK and Europe where her records have been particularly successful), featured as a judge in a UK TV talent show, set up her own fashion label and more, Newkirk has also had to battle two bouts of breast cancer, the second prompting the confronting decision to have a double mastectomy. She got herself through that experience, as any strong-willed artist would: by turning her fears and pain into songs, the result being the Resurrection album.

"I realised it would help my Crohn’s if I spoke about stuff ‘cause I would have very, very terrible Crohn’s attacks"

“I wanted to reconnect with the artist I am,” she explains. “And that album did help me so much to do that, to fall in love with my own gift again. When I played Stay to my friends, I cried a couple of times, but then my friends could not stop crying. So I realised that I had written some songs that touched upon some deeper emotions, and also many more ballads than I thought I could write, so that was a surprise.”

To watch her in action on stage today, it’s hard to reconcile the fact that a lack of confidence and a natural dislike of rejection initially sent the youthful Anastacia into a career in dance rather than song, and she worked as a professional dancer through the 1980s. She eventually did start auditioning, picking up some work as a backing singer, and finally got noticed when she made the finals of a shortlived MTV talent show performing a song she wrote that became the title track of her 2000 debut album, Not That Kind, making her something of a late bloomer, at 32, to be breaking into a pop/soul career.

“In my mid-20s, I started writing my feelings because I started trying to understand how to talk my feelings out, getting them out, talking to people about my feelings. I wasn’t really great at that, but I realised it would help my Crohn’s [Anastacia was diagnosed with a debilitating intestinal condition called Crohn’s disease when she was 13] if I spoke about stuff ‘cause I would have very, very terrible Crohn’s attacks. My doctor said, ‘It’s probably better if you speak what’s going on in your heart, ‘cause you can’t hold it inside, it’s going to eat away at you.’ And I took that in, pretty dramatically. Then when it came to writing a song, writing emotions in words wasn’t hard for me.”