Sia gets semiserious

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      While the artist known simply as Sia happily acknowledges her ability to juggle numerous tasks at once, getting her to trumpet her own brilliance is another matter. Her self-deprecating streak is evident right off the top of the interview, when she asks for a couple of seconds so she can say goodbye to a team that’s dropped off some promo shots.

      “Thank you so much,” she says, making no attempt to cover the receiver at her Los Angeles home. “These Polaroids are so good—I look like a girl. Sometimes when I take pictures, I look like a tranny.”

      Let no one suggest that Sia Furler is anything less than supernaturally skilled when it comes to multitasking. During her first few minutes on the line with the Georgia Straight, she manages to green-light the aforementioned promotional photos, fish a stray dog treat out of a chair, stop by the toilet for a quick pee, and change clothes for a shoot she’s about to head to in a nearby park. In between all of this, she enthusiastically dissects a career that’s starting to achieve serious liftoff with her third and latest full-length, Some People Have Real Problems. But getting her to admit that things are going great is another matter.

      Laughing, she contends: “The only thing that generally happens when I put out an album, or do some TV shows, or have posters go up in major cities, is that a whole bunch of people I haven’t heard from in a long time ring me up or send me a text going, ”˜Hey—I just saw you. We gotta hang out.’ And as much as I’d love to, it’s obviously a totally inopportune time, because it’s the only time that I’m actually busy in my life.”

      Sia isn’t being totally honest when she claims that an increase in phone calls is the only thing she’s noticed recently. Even before the North American release of Some People in January, it was obvious that, after a decade in the business, she was finally receiving recognition for her solo work. When Sia played Vancouver last October—arriving with an on-stage array of stuffed animals and Day-Glo masks—she sold out the Media Club well in advance, delivering one of the month’s big buzz shows.

      “That was a really great surprise,” she says with a laugh. “We’d done a show before that in Toronto, and fuck-all people turned out. There was something like 35 people in the room. That was really embarrassing. I was like, ”˜How did that happen?’ And my managers were like, ”˜We just realized that we’re promoting an album that no one can buy unless they buy it on import.’ Maybe what happened in Vancouver is that it had been leaked and I’d been encouraging people to download it.”

      With Some People now on the streets of North America, the singer’s official assault on these shores has begun. For proof of that, look no further than the current issue of Rolling Stone, where a full-page story focuses on her charmingly insane fashion sense.

      Despite Sia’s propensity for dressing like what Spinal Tap might describe as “an Australian’s nightmare”, Some People is hardly the wacky third coming of Cyndi Lauper. Planting herself in the same part of the coffee shop as Fiona Apple and the new-and-improved Cat Power, the singer delivers a clinic in slinky, chillout-room soul. For all the little touches—the regal string swells in “Little Black Sandals” and “I Go to Sleep”, the robotic synth bursts in “Playground”—it’s Sia’s powerhouse voice that sells the songs. Whether she’s riffing on Laurel Canyon pop (“The Girl You Lost to Cocaine”), too-cute-for-school indie rock (“Academia”), or lush 3 a.m. jazz (“Death by Chocolate”), she’s never less than a force.

      Even though Some People sounds meticulously crafted, Sia insists she’s not exactly Chinese Democracy–era Axl Rose when it comes to the creative process.

      “I write pretty much the way that you would vomit,” she contends. “It’s like ”˜blurt’, and then it’s out. I rarely change anything afterwards. And a lot of the vocals that you hear are first takes.”

      That’s not the only way the singer—previously best known for her vocals on Zero 7’s downtempo hit “Destiny”—dismisses her accomplishments.

      “The whole idea of making an album is weird because it’s glamorized,” she says. “If you ask me, a really good skill is doing something like being able to paint a bathroom without dripping any paint on the tiles or the floor. Nobody glamorizes that, though. I feel a bit naughty, because people who do entertainmenty-type stuff get a lot of attention for this skill that they got when whoever was handing out the skills handed them out. People like me just got lucky. Sometimes we get a lot of money, people want to give us free clothes, and sometimes we get a lot of clapping.”

      For a good idea of how secretly silly Sia finds the whole entertainment business, you don’t need to spend a half-hour being entertained by her on the phone. All you have to do is think about the title Some People Have Real Problems, the clever thing being that the words can be taken two ways. Rest assured that Sia didn’t have Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears on the brain when the album’s name came to her.

      “The point that I was trying to make was that things like bitter coffee, or traffic jams, or the cleaner not doing her job properly don’t matter,” she says. “Some people don’t have any legs, or they don’t have a mom. It’s easy to blow things right out of proportion when you have food and a roof over your head.

      “But mostly the title was a really good reminder to me to not be a wanker about things,” Sia cackles, wrapping up as she heads off to another photo shoot. “I had an inkling this record might make some money and that I may end up in a different kind of reality. What’s important to me is that I avoid losing touch.”

      Sia plays a sold-out Richard’s on Richards on Wednesday (February 20).

      In + out

      Sia sounds off on the things that enquiring minds want to know.

      On writing songs: “I do get a sense of achievement from sitting down and coming up with something. But it’s the same sense of accomplishment as making the bed.”

      On her frame of mind going into Some People: “I was having a hard time when I was making Healing Is Difficult [2000]. I was like party monster, drugs, depression, that sort of shit. Then the next record [2004’s Colour the Small One ] was recovering from all that depression and thinking I was going to go kooky. This one is like, all right, that’s all over now, I’m 32, and I’m starting to get confident.”

      On career self-doubt: “Some People was written over the course of three years where a lot of stuff happened. I got dropped by my record label, and I started writing pop songs for other people thinking that maybe I wasn’t even going to be a solo artist. But then I’d get people around me going, ”˜You’re crazy—you have to sing that song yourself.’ ”

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