Chatty and chirpy
when she’s talking about her career as an
über-indie musician, Sia downplays her
sexuality.
Thirty-two-year-old Sia Furler is the blond pixie
asphyxiating herself with a plastic bag, panty hose,
and other devices in the viral video for her bubbly
song “Buttons.” The Australian-born singer is
also the ethereal voice accompanying the wrenching
final scene of HBO’s Six Feet Under, the jazzy
vocal grooving on Zero 7’s “In the
Waiting Line” on the Garden State soundtrack, and the
genre-hopping artist behind three solo albums, including
this year’s Some People Have Real Problems.
But if you haven’t been able to tie her name to
her face to her voice until now, there’s
probably a very good reason.
“I’ve never sold this many records before, and
now I know why -- I’m finally doing the
work,” Sia (pronounced See-ah) says, swiftly followed
by the first of dozens of bursts into hysterical laughter.
“I had my head up my ass. I thought I was
Radiohead on my last album, and I was like,
‘I’m only doing music
press,’ ” and, she notes, “four
articles equals 13,000 record sales.”
Sia, who goes by
only her first name professionally, scored her biggest
chart success the week her textured, soulful Real
Problems debuted on Billboard’s top 200 pop album
chart in January at number 26. It was a milestone for
the spunky singer-songwriter with alternately snarly
and smooth pipes, who’s been bouncing around the
music biz since the mid 1990s, when she was primarily
a jazz crooner who hung around with B-boys in her
native Adelaide. She moved to p London for a change of
scenery, but just before her arrival the boyfriend she was
going to see there was killed by a cab, and “I went
mental,” she admits frankly. After several
drunken months, during which she worked as a waitress
and a nanny, a friend dragged her to a jam session in an
attempt to reignite her love of music.
“I was
like, ‘I don’t know any songs except for
‘Happy Birthday’ and some Christmas
carols, so just play one of [your standards] and I’ll
sing over it,’ ” she recalls telling the
band. When the musicians struck up the funky
“All This Love That I’m Giving” by
’70s soul singer Gwen McCrae, Sia -- coming
from Australia’s hip-hop scene -- freestyled her own
melody and lyrics so easily that an enthusiastic coke
dealer in the crowd introduced himself as her new
manager, an arrangement she accepted for a short time.
When it came time to record her first solo album, “I
thought I’d try to be a girl version of
Eminem,” Sia says of 2000’s urban-tinged
Healing Is Difficult, which reached the
United States a year later. “I was doing a lot of
drugs and drinking a lot, so that album reflects my
fragmented state of mind at the time.”
In 2004, Sia took
an atmospheric, down-tempo approach for Colour the
Small One, and despite a Beck collaboration on one track,
the album “flopped considerably because of all
that rad press that I didn’t do,” she
muses. She attributes the drastic change of the
album’s sound to one tiny detail in her life:
“I was having a nervous breakdown.”
Unaddressed family dramas like divorce and feelings of
abandonment led the singer to engage in destructive
self-cutting behaviors until her managers finally
intervened and sent her to the therapist she credits with
saving her life.
“After
about 50 grand worth of therapy, I got really happy and made
this awesome, fun pop album called H
Crusader,” Sia explains. The only problem
was that her label wouldn’t release her upbeat record
about a superhero. “They were like,
‘You’re a down-tempo artist, you’re
going to confuse the fans.’ And I was like,
‘What fans?’ ” she says, unleashing a
cackle. Bolstered by the “schoolteacher’s
salary” she collects each year thanks to her
contributions to Zero 7 albums and other TV and movie
royalties, she refused to budge -- and was dropped by her
label.
Sia was then in
limbo, working on video projects and writing pop songs
she pictured being turned into hits by Paris Hilton,
Shakira, Britney Spears, and the like. (She still has
the pop jones: She recently released online her own
morose take on Spears’s “Gimme More.”)
But soon after, a music supervisor at Six Feet
Under took to Colour’s aching piano ballad
“Breathe Me,” a move that “totally
resuscitated my career.”
Follow us on Twitter. 
Follow us on Facebook.
Page 1 of 2