I do believe in God, which is probably an uncool thing to say in Sarah Blasko recently turned 30, moved house and completed her second album. As stressful events go, that's a decent trifecta, like a triple whammy of blows to the legs, chest and head.
You might expect to find her wrung out, begging for solitude. The opposite is the case.
In a cafe in Glebe, impervious to the rumbling of trucks outside the window, Blasko talks freely, looking younger than her years or stupid.
She is anything but boring or stupid. Or unimportant.
Her debut album, The Overture and the Underscore had sales in excess of 50,000 - impressive for a debut artist in 2004, when Australian Idol dominated the charts.
She was nominated for four ARIAs, had several songs included on film and TV soundtracks, this year won a Jack Award for live music's best closing ceremony of the Melbourne Commonwealth Games.
"We probably shouldn't mention I'm 30," she smiles. "It'll probably ruin any chance I have of having younger fans.
"
She has a point: this new album, What the Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have, doesn't sound like a 15-year-old's choice. It is darker and more subdued than her debut, which sold to teens and adults and liberally spotted with regrets, plans for reconciliations and a quest to make sense of life.
Jim Moginie, who worked on the album, is a fan.
"Sarah is not a pop artist, she's got more depth than that; she's in it for the long haul," he says. "I don't think she'll mind me saying that. The songs are more like poems and she hears them that way.
There's nothing wussy about it though. There's an arcane, almost confessional quality to it."
It sounds, in other words, like the kind of album likely to be made by an adult at a crossroads in her life.
But as Blasko reveals, she has only recently shed the fears she had as a 15-year-old. That 15-year-old's influence can be heard in one way or another on all these tracks.
struggled with a lot to overcome, from the past, I was ready to move on," she says.
"You know when you're struggling with an aspect of your life, you keep coming back to it and you can be really hard on yourself sometimes? You expect you would have got over it by now and I found that I hadn't, I was right back there."
If this sounds gloomy, Blasko doesn't look it.
The discussion has raised the temperature, brought some colour to her pale cheeks.
comfortable with the fact that shit happens. I think there are that you can't control everything.
"
What are these resentments that have stuck with her? Blasko's older sister and father - her mother died about five years ago.
"I didn't really have a normal kind of adolescence.
And I had a sort of adolescence in my 20s," she says with a giggle. "I think I was a very serious teenager. A lot of it stems from the fanatical religious denomination I was part of.
I didn't necessarily think I would still be here when I was 30.
"At 15, I really thought I wouldn't make it [because the world particularly healthy for a 15-year-old. I was so serious about 'the time is now, I have to get everything right, now'.
It's not a very happy way to be."
regularly changed churches. ("Instead of moving schools or moving states, we moved church," Blasko joked to me last year.
) They settled at a Pentecostal church in Sydney, which later became Hillsong.
upbringing. "People tend to automatically see the cliche, which is that you were brought up in this restrictive religious household," she says with obvious annoyance.
"My family wasn't like that and I rebelled."
Blasko left the church in her last year at school, declaring her interpretation of the scriptures. She never entirely lost the faith, though.
"I can't help but think about it though, because it's always been such a big part of my life," she says. "The common expression away' - but in a lot of ways I kind of feel more..
." she drifts off or a replacement for that belief. "I think I do believe in God, which is probably an uncool thing to say in Australia, but I don't really know what that means," she sighs.
"I do believe I'm not just here to hang around for nothing. I think it can be a negative thing you do.
"I don't want to sound like one of those people who says, 'if I didn't have music, I don't know what I'd do' but it is something that I feel I'm meant to be doing.
Not in some airy-fairy religious feel fortunate that it's something really satisfying, something I'm it and then go home."
That passion, the realisation that she should do something special, was the basis for the new songs. On Blasko's first album to be.
There is none of that this time.
"With this record I felt more assured, not cocky but, yeah, I've got a plan," she says. "It's a good feeling.
I think this record has more space, that it has a, not a forcefulness about it, but it kind of cuts the crap."
album. As an admiring Moginie puts it, Blasko shows how "it's so wants, for example, or the silver-tongued devils you meet at the backstage party".
However, somebody somewhere in the record company more singles to sell this to radio?' Declining to do so is either a ballsy or a foolish move.
"One of the two - I'm about to find out which one," Blasko says.
"There have been some debates over such matters. But I felt I had to get the record put out now. I thought it was important to make a stand in that regard and not lose the focus.
To have a bit of faith in it."
Faith. Of course.
And the sea, too. That is another recurring theme across the album, the repeated images of the sea, which recorded. "The ocean as a metaphor for emotional change.
Being pulled out to sea, feeling lost and feeling like you're looking for a really clear direction. Travelling and leaving a place," she explains. "I guess it's kind of like a fatalistic approach, of being fearful and caught up in the past.
"
Anything else left in the past? Relationships, maybe?
"I have a lot of regrets," she nods.
"In my mid-20s it was like I wanted to throw everything out. That was relationships, too." A pause.
"I've rebuilt some of them. It was pretty difficult, yeah."
Blasko is single.
Not that she wants to talk about it, though, squirming when asked.
What the Sea Wants, the Sea Will Have is out @Newtown RSL on November 22-24.
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