Missionary Position

As the daughter of former Christian missionaries, Sarah Blasko first found her voice singing in a Pentecostal church in her native Sydney.
"I always fantasised about being a singer when I was a teenager because, as you can imagine from those kind of Pentecostal charismatic experiences, there's a great emphasis on music," the raven-haired, 33-year-old beauty explains. "So I suppose that had its impact."

While she always loved the music, Blasko was ultimately left less than enamoured with Pentecostalism itself.
"I gave myself a good ten years off thinking about faith to be honest. Because I found it a very negative experience. And I think it's taken me about ten years just to rid myself of that way of thinking. It was all people casting out demons and speaking in tongues and that kind of thing. So I pretty much turned my back on it. But for the last few years, I've pretty much come to terms that I'm an agnostic."
Although she had a brief spell fronting a band whilst studying English lit at university ("I was in a terrible pop-folk band, which wasn't terribly cool of me – I wish it had been a punk band or something"), her music career took off properly when she struck out solo in 2002. An early EP release was followed by 2004's platinum-selling debut album The Overture & The Underscore. She became a bona-fide star in Oz with 2007's ARIA-winning successor, What The Sea Wants, The Sea Will Have.
"I've done pretty well in Australia, which surprises me actually. It's a big country but the population's not that big and it's not great at being able to sustain a really wide spectrum of genres. There are certain types of things that tend to do well in Australia and I see myself as being a little bit different to most of those things, so I'm pretty happy."
She picked up another ARIA for her third album, As Day Follows Night, which has just been released in Europe. Featuring quirky, intelligent and heartbreaking pop songs, tinged with jazz and folk, Blasko's bewitching vocals are achingly melancholic but still somehow warm and hopeful.
The album was produced by Bjorn Yttling and recorded in a Stockholm studio once frequented by ABBA.
"Bjorn's name was just something that came up on a few records – he'd done some string arrangements for Camera Obscura and he'd worked on Lykke Li's album. And of course I was familiar with Peter, Bjorn & John's music. It was clear from everything he'd done that he had a really broad taste in music and I really liked the way he mixed old-fashioned sounding things, but making it sound quite fresh and modern at the same time. So I sent him an email and the demos, and we met up, and it immediately seemed like the right thing to do."
Over just ten days, the pair transformed Blasko's sad, solitary demos into bold, beguiling pop songs, featuring strings, brass, banjo, double bass and percussion.
"It was really quick," she says. "I've never worked that quickly."
Not that she's complaining.
"It's very much a personal album, but at the same time what was really important about working with someone like Bjorn was that it would've been a much sadder-sounding record if I hadn't collaborated with someone who was quite objective about it. Basically, he stopped me naval-gazing."