"She has tiptoed amongst the shadows of people like Nick Cave, Jim Moginie & Neil Finn – people whose contribution to music stretches back into her suburban youth. Yet Sarah has emerged into the sunlight on the other side unflinchingly still herself."
Prelusive...
Sarah Blasko first began singing in the pews of a church, flanked on one side by her tone-deaf mother, and on the other by an eighty-year-old soprano unafraid to flaunt her vocal chops. Perhaps it was amongst these congregations that the influence of music seeped into her subconscious. For Sarah Blasko was conceived the youngest missionary in the French-speaking paradise of Reunion Island, before her parents returned home to Sydney.
Blasko developed a musical interest without really thinking about it too much. Her mum's Olivia Newtown-John cassette was a prized a possession. In contrast, her father - an English/History Master - introduced her to the likes of Rachmaninov, Schubert, Bach and some of the less acclaimed works of Paul McCartney.
In her High School years, Blasko hid a love for music as one who leads a double life, carrying with her the impression that to make music one had to know a set of rules no more alluring than those that govern geometry.
Later in her teens, she started a band with her sister, and, as other girls were sneaking out at night to indulge in the sins of drinking and the company of boys, they began sneaking out to revel in the devilish sounds of live jazz and blues. One sacrilegious intervention, perhaps, in the eyes of her fellow parishioners, and Sarah's songbook no longer bore just hymns.
In the years that followed, Sarah and her young band found their musical feet by writing, recording and playing live. When the members went their separate ways, Blasko decided to continue as a solo artist and, eventually, set to work on her first EP, "Prelusive" - a six-track treasure of beats, guitars and vocals all homespun on a yarn that overlooked a suburban primary school.
Her next set of home recordings would form the basis of her debut album, "The Overture & the Underscore", but she would venture far from home to fully realize them.
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