In 2012, while attending Brisbane’s Music Industry College, the then 16-year-old singer-songwriter Sahara Beck saw two of her songs make it through to the Queensland Music Awards, You Could Be Happy eventually taking out the High School Category. The song became the title track of her debut EP, and the following year, two more of her songs became finalists in the QMAs. She’s just released her second EP, Bloom, the first single from which, Brother Sister, features some of the most unusual percussion you’ve ever heard.

“When we were making that song, we literally just walked around the kitchen,” she laughs, “because I had all these other songs in mind that I wanted it to feel like so we just walked around the kitchen hitting all these different things and seeing what sounded right with the song, and then we made this board of utensils and hit them in the recording.

“Songs just come, I suppose. I’ve never really thought about it. It’s almost like I don’t write them, like I channel things in a way – without sounding pretentious or whatever, you know?” That laugh is never far from the surface. “It’s like you get this feeling of: I need to write something. You have no idea what’s it’s gonna be about. Usually it won’t make any sense to me at the time but if I play the whole song at the end, I’ll go, ‘Oh wow, that does have a meaning to me. I’ll just slap a name on this and call it a song!’

“When we were making that song, we literally just walked around the kitchen.”

“Usually I write about other things that I see happening around me, but for this EP, it was a lot of my experiences and my insights into those experiences around the last couple of years, like my ‘blooming’ years in a way, I guess. It’s just all from experiences every day kind of thing.”
So the opening track of the Bloom EP, Words For Mary, is about “all the advice I’ve pretty much ever gotten from anyone,” Beck laughs again.

“It’s a shame you have to make an EP a journey, but these songs all had a reoccurring theme of, like, something that you go through in your youth, so I tried to put them together to tell a story, in a way. I’ve already started writing and going though some stuff for the album, but to be honest, I’m pretty scared to make an album, ‘cause it’s very big and scary.”

Which might sound a bit odd from a young artist whose first release, when she was 15, was exactly that – an album, titled Volume One – released in 2011. “Oh yeah, that’s a different story,” Beck dismisses with another laugh. “I think I was a bit too young to make an album at that point, but, you know.

“I think performing is the most rewarding part for me. It’s almost a blissful feeling to me, getting to play the songs that I wrote in front of people who came to hear them and are actually listening.”