Unlocking the songs from inside: Sarah Blasko doco captures the creative struggle of songwriting

Sarah Blasko is first and foremost a performer. Always has been, always will be.

In what she describes as one of the hardest years of her life, 2016 saw her lost, uninspired and without some of the people she had worked with for the past 12 years.

Her love of the stage is what she turned to in a bid to reconnect with the creative fire within her that had turned to a glowing amber, and as she describes it, “manufacture a vibe”.

As artist in residence at Campbelltown Arts Centre in November last year, Sarah set out to do something equally unique and astonishing for her new album – write songs in an empty theatre filled with all of the toys a musician could dream of, and film the entire process to turn it into a documentary.

Of course, she never set out to capture the process on film – that suggestion came from Brendan Fletcher, a director whom Blasko has collaborated with previously.

“He and i have worked together on a couple of video clips like from my first record,” Blasko toldTMN.

“I’ve known him for a really long time and I feel very comfortable with him. And he received this funding budget to make a documentary for the ABC, and he wanted to make it about me.”

“I didn’t know that I was writing an album I just knew that I was going somewhere to write.”

“But right in that environment I suddenly did, when I decided that’s what we were going to do and then Brendan decided he was going to come and film. It wasn’t until we got there that I realised ’oh yeah, this is actually a lot of pressure to come up with something, anything and maybe we’ll come up with nothing’”.

Blasko explains that there was a certain freedomthat came from the ability to perform on stage without having a full audiencein front of her.

“We did everything we could to just throw away our inhibitions. But then I think to write you have to be able to let go and to try silly things… sort of try whatever you can to just let go and find, because you can’t be assessing yourself while you’re doing that.”

Not to give away any spoilers, but one of the most exciting parts of the process for Blasko was to go away and continue working with the 28 creations she had come up with during the two-week residency – choosing to build on top of the songs, rather than scrapping them.

“Often when you write and you record demos, often you sort of try to recreate elements of the demo but you try and do it for real kind of thing. You start working with a producer or whatever. But this time I just kept working on it as a continuation.”

“Collaboration is really important. But I think to me personally it’s very, very important also to feel like I’m getting my own hands dirty and getting right in there. I took it home and I did a lot of recording myself, and I would take it to another studio,” Blasko continued.

“So it was very much in my hands the whole time. I didn’t work with a producer, and I guess it just reconfirmed with me that I get a lot of satisfaction in what I do from keeping things within my own hands because I enjoy the craft of it. I enjoy the process of it.”

You can view theopening credit to ’Blasko’ below. It airs tonight (November 14) at 9.30pm AEDT on ABC andiview.