Six Feet Above
Sia
Waiting To Exhale
Sia, known to the Australian government as Sia Kate Isobelle Furler, is familiar with fate, deja vu, fortune reversals, and other tricks at the universe’s disposal. When she awakens in the morning, celestial entities tremble, the Earth’s polarity relocates, and God cracks his knuckles. But for right now she has one worry: “I’m just going to park somewhere legal so that I don’t have a crash.”
It’s a fairly reasonable yet important decision considering her cosmic alignment. With the “Six Feet Under” TV series finale last summer, Sia’s career began to rise in North America minus the benefit of radio play or even an available album. Her two-year-old track, “Breathe Me,” backdropped one of the most powerful sequences in television history and turned her modest, three-letter moniker — which had existed on the season’s soundtrack for months without its powerful context — into an economic boon for facial tissue manufacturers.
It’s a stark contrast to where she was days before the episode aired, a flash-in-the-pan in her homeland settling into a B-role as a guest vocalist on Zero 7 albums with lingering mental problems. “I’m just happy people are hearing my songs,” Sia laughs. “Because for two years they weren’t hearing my songs. Those two years were a little bit shit.”
She entered the U.K. top 10 in 2000 with “Taken For Granted,” filling her 22-year-old mind with all the wrong thoughts. “It was really fucking exciting,” she pauses, “[and] it went straight to my head. I was a bit of an asshole for a couple of weeks, and I realized it was hugely anticlimactic. I hadn’t become thinner, cleverer, sexier, more attractive, more loveable, or less depressed, and I thought, ‘O.K., this isn’t what I thought it would be.'”
It took forever cobbling together the follow-up, Colour The Small One, and when it did arrive in 2004 [re-released in the U.S. by Astralwerks in January], it went nowhere. “I did four interviews with music press only. I had no idea of what I was doing. I thought that people would just discover it like a secret. Chinese whispers music. But I was totally living in a fantasy. Before that, I had no idea about the process, the planning, the marketing budget, all the press. When I first signed a record deal, I had no idea how radio works. Nobody picked up on its options. Island/Universal had it in the U.K., so they had first options [in the U.S.]. Island, Interscope, all of them had options and none of them picked up on it. I guess there’s some 350 releases in the world per week or something and they didn’t like mine.”
She continues, “I had like two years of extremely uncomfortable feelings and then suddenly it was like everything made sense. I think things happen all the time now that are of equal disappointment or drama and I respond to them differently. I have a better idea of the bigger picture.” One of them involved further disappointment with record labels when she tried to pry herself out of her downtempo pigeonhole. “I just got happy. And I started writing stuff you’d like to do high kicks and salutes and play leg guitar. So I did that album; they said, ‘Ooo! You’re dropped!’ I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a real bummer.'”
Sia has loosened up so much that attaining an arbitrary level of success completely disinterests her. Describing her former self as “You might have thought I had some slightly desperate energy with jazz hands — ‘Let me entertain you,'” she now cackles at questions and her own responses with a full-body laugh. She hasn’t even watched the “Six Feet Under” scene in question yet. If she were anymore indifferent about the industry, she’d be Kate Bush. She’s almost as concerned her favorite show is finished. Almost.
“Yeah, it’s bittersweet,” she says. “Although it’s only slightly overridden by the fact it’s my song playing at the end! So I have a deep sense of smugness going on as well.” Yet she hasn’t seen it.
“It’s one of my favorite shows and I couldn’t have manifested anything I would have liked more than for this to happen,” she admits. But? “But I watched all I could on the telly at first, and then we moved to the country and there was a conker tree in the way of the digital satellite. So I couldn’t get [the show anymore]. The tree wasn’t on my land, I couldn’t cut it down, so I had to rent the DVD. Now I haven’t seen this last series and I refuse to watch the last episode until I can see all of them preceding it. I’ve only heard how intense it is. I’m so gagging to see it.”
Since August, “Six Feet Under” fans have been gagging to hear more. “Breathe Me” has become the surprise centerpiece on Colour The Small One, an album riddled with lyrical self-doubt and ruminations on a life unraveled. Confessional exposes are dime-a-dozen these days, something Sia gamely jokes is her forte. “Breathe Me,” she says, “is just about a neverending inner dialogue. Just a mad moment of paranoia and fantasy that’s drifting within one human being. Based on general insecurity and anxiety. You know, the usual? What’s every song about?”
The worry, however, is the album becoming not only inextricably linked to the show, but two years on, not a piece of her anymore. “I’ve moved on — I’ve really moved on,” she chuckles. “I’m not depressed anymore, but I still relate to it. I was that person then, and it represents a time for me. It doesn’t irritate me having to talk about it again. It’s not like there’s millions of you lining up and asking the same question.”
There are bound to be more. The abandoned pop project will live again as an animated superhero called The Aged Crusader, and her relationship with Zero 7 developed into another album and imminent tour, which should arrive Stateside in the spring. Until then, that burdensome pressure is gone.
“There’s more important things for me,” she says. “It’s great to make a living doing what I like, but I’m big fan of dogs. [Maybe I’ll] become a dog breeder or a dog lady. I’m minding a dog who poos in the house and I’m renting and I make a lot of mess. I spend most of my time cleaning up, picking up dogshit, doing dishes, I don’t really listen to the radio so I never hear my songs. I’ve got 12 friends and nobody [else] ever recognizes me. I don’t feel it at all, this apparent success that’s happening. And because I’m not negotiating any record deals — my management do all that — I just concentrate on writing songs for the next project.”
So the ups and downs? Sia has a grip, finally.
“It’s good failing regularly because it teaches you how you might actually succeed if you stop doing all the things you did in the past,” she snickers. “You know, like having integrity — Get rid of it!”
— Steve Forstneger
