People often observe that Sia Furler looks surprisingly normal close up. As though a singer would only do a photoshoot with a paper bag over her head – as she did in 2013 – if there was something wrong with her face. When we meet in London, just before Christmas, she’s wearing her blond hair in a topknot, a seersucker nightshirt, with stone-washed jeans and a black suit jacket: all the understated grooming of an off-duty LA celebrity. She has mobile, expressive features and there’s a lot of eye contact for someone whose last album was accompanied by a campaign of “complete inaccessibility”. She has a funny way of talking about herself. “I’d been awake for seven minutes before I came in here,” she says. “I’m just trying to show up for work, that’s what I’m doing. Be good at my job, and be a good girl. I’m not here to complain about it, because being a part-time popstar is fucking awesome.”
Sia Furler is a conundrum. She’s a one-woman hit machine writing songs for the world’s most powerful pop stars (Rihanna, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Adele) and guesting on tracks for Kanye West and Eminem. She’s also a multimillion-selling solo artist in her own right. On the one hand, she churns out the kind of abstract-inspirational, blockbuster songs, with simple (some might say banal) lyrical concepts, which have ruled the airwaves since Rihanna’s Diamonds. On the other, she is an avant garde performance artist never seen without a wig covering most of her face. She is open about her battles with drugs and depression, and eye-wateringly frank about money. Yet somehow, she is completely at home in the tight-lipped world of A-list Hollywood. In her multiple musical identities, she’s in some ways the personification of 21st century postmodern pop. But she’s also pretty ordinary.
In the past 12 months, the disappearing woman has been slowly revealing herself, inch by inch. You may have seen her standing in a corner on Ellen Degeneres’s show, belting her song into the wall while an 11-year-old dance prodigy freestyled around the stage. Recently, in advance of new album This Is Acting, she has started wearing a shorter wig that shows her mouth when she sings – “which takes a bit more work”.
Furler has always had a sticky relationship with her solo career. She cut her teeth on acid jazz in the 90s, then recorded vocals for Jamiroquai; she could be seen, excitable and barely able to sit still, performing luxurious vocals for the millennial chill-out band Zero 7. She came to England from Adelaide in the late 90s to join her Australian boyfriend who had moved to London. Just days before she arrived, he was knocked over and killed by a cab. His death deepened an affair with drugs and alcohol that began when she was 17: someone had told her to have a drink to calm her nerves before she went on stage and she never looked back.
Over four solo albums her songwriting proved wry and catchily complex – but as far back as 2008 she was starting to hide, performing the idiosyncratic Buttons on Later… With Jools Holland in the dark, dressed as a DayGlo gingerbread man. Furler struggled with touring, hated the “depersonalised spaces” of hotel rooms and was plagued by fatigue. In 2010, she was diagnosed with the thyroid condition, Graves’ disease – “I basically shat my pants for eight months and shook like I had Parkinson’s”. There was undiagnosed bipolar hypomania, too (she thinks it was caused by smoking too much weed as a child).
“I had established this identity that I could not maintain,” she says. “This quirky weird, cute, bubbly thing, and part of that is definitely my character, but I could not keep that up if I was suicidally depressed at least one year out of every three.”
After a one-off songwriting job for Christina Aguilera in 2009, an opportunity for a career behind the scenes began to present itself. She wrote Diamonds for Rihanna, and Perfume for Britney Spears – and was at peace with their “cheesiness” once the cheques started coming.
All the while, there was the little problem of the growing solo career. David Guetta’s 2011 single Titanium, co-written with Sia and featuring her vocal, sold more than 1m copies in the UK; her 2013 song Elastic Heart featured on The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. The “blond bob” – hiding her face under a wig – began as a means of survival, but was getting a life of its own. It became a fantastic marketing ploy, a bit of mystery in an era where every female singer “Instagrams pictures of their trip to the gynaecologist”. Lena Dunham wore the wig to dance around to Sia’s Chandelier on Late Night With Seth Meyers (Steve Carell and Samuel L Jackson had declined). Ironically Furler, whose instinct was to become more and more reclusive, was now being talked about because no one could see her. “It was about not having to deal with the unfairness of being a pop star,” she says. “Not having to worry about camera angles catching your double chin. Everybody in the entertainment industry is insecure. We have been tap-dancing our entire lives for your approval and you won’t meet anybody who is in the entertainment industry who isn’t a bit fucked in the head. That’s how we got here, so if you can imagine a room full of us, it’s pretty hilarious. It’s exhausting.”
A couple of years back, Sia attended one of Beyoncé’s residential songwriting sessions in the Hamptons, where she was installed for one month alongside five other topline writers and five producers, all working in separate rooms, all competing for tracks on Beyoncé’s last album.
“While we were there I invented this fake reality TV show for VH1 called Topline Bitches,” she says. “That was the first time I had worked in the vicinity of any other topline writers because I don’t really need to – it dilutes my earnings for a start, and also my creativity. It was just fascinating, because we’re all in the house together and we’re all trying to get the cut. I’m pretty sure she recorded somewhere in the vicinity of 105 songs, and I know she recorded at least five or 10 of mine – and only one of them [Pretty Hurts] made her album.”
It’s a strange window on a multimillion-pound industry as exclusive, and as full of mysterious giants, as the Hollywood film world. In the evening at Beyoncé’s house, no shop was talked. Instead it was “would you rathers” round the dinner table, Furler says, referring to the classic game of alternatives enjoyed by children and adults alike (her example: “would you rather have a mouth shaped like a butt, or a butt shaped like a mouth?”). There were other hypothetical challenges, too.
“Would you touch a pile of vomit that’s on top of a pile of shit that’s on top of $3m, with your tongue, for $3m?” she recalls. “I was like, I don’t know if I could do that. Beyoncé’s already got $300m, and she was all about it! She was like, “Yes! Yep!”
This kind of rigorous honesty is all part of the ongoing therapy that Furler has been undergoing since her near-meltdown five years ago (she calls it her “12-step shit”); she came close to suicide twice, even scratched out a suicide note in 2010 when living in New York.
In her brisk manner there’s the feeling of someone who has learned to firm up their “sloppy boundaries” with people, but there is nothing media-trained about her spontaneous machine-gun laugh or naughtiness. “It can be difficult navigating the line between tabloid gossip and authenticity,” she admits. Clearly, she worries about upsetting the delicate ecosystem of the exclusive world in which she has found herself.
When Rolling Stone reported that a songwriting session with Katy Perry was aborted after just one hour, Sia wrote to the paper to make it clear they were still on good terms (“I knew Katy would see it because she has a Google alert on her name.”). Perry was too analytical for Furler, approaching everything like a puzzle. She works best with “beta types”, Furler says. After writing sessions for Adele’s latest album – none of her songs made the final cut – she texted and apologised in case she had been too dominating. She talks of being enticed into song-writing sessions with Rihanna or Kanye West, only to find they never turn up.
Of her various co-writers, she works extremely fast with Greg Kurstin (Adele, Lily Allen), explaining that the pair are neurologically programmed to use the same chord changes. Chris Braide (with whom she wrote Perfume) is another whizz. Jesse Shatkin (Chandelier) is more painstaking; he sends her his bits of songs after he’s finished with them, “because I cannot sit in a room while someone’s fannying about. It makes me crazy – I literally don’t want to spend more than four hours in the studio.”
Now, sometimes, it's smarter for me to do the song myself than give it to someone else
Recently, Sia’s best friend, the children’s author Dallas Clayton, told her to be careful about telling people how quickly she writes her songs, and how easily she brings in the millions, because it might make others feel bad. She has said that her writing pace – sometimes as fast as 14 minutes per track – is just another sign of her compulsive personality. She may write more than her peers, but explains that the flip side of productivity is lack of quality control. “I love the idea of how fast can we make the song, but I don’t think that I’m necessarily like a super-talented songwriter. I think I’m just really productive. One out of 10 songs is a hit. So where a lot of people will spend three weeks on one song, I will write 10 in three weeks. Maybe the song that they sculpt is going to be as successful as just one of the 10 that I wrote.”
The other night Rihanna came over to Furler’s house for the first time, and Furler played her half of the 25 songs she had up for offer. “She chose four that she was interested in listening to more, or adapting in some way, and I was surprised at her choices because she did not choose the obvious hits,” she says. “What she seems to be attracted to at the moment is less commercial. I’m fascinated to see what’s going to happen. I definitely have one song on her new album.” She breaks off. “I need to pee. I’m happy to keep shouting through the toilet door.”
You get hardened to rejection, she says. Elastic Heart and Chandelier were intended for Katy Perry, but came back to her. On her new album, Alive and Bird Set Free were rejected by both Adele and Rihanna. According to Adele’s management, the latter was “too much like a Sia song”, which was possibly something of a turning point. The track was the first time there was “friction between commerce and humanity” for Furler, as she puts it. She had “a longing” to keep the song for herself, but knew Adele would make more money with it. “But as my profile grows, my value increases as a pop star,” she says. “It’s fascinating to watch. Now, sometimes, it’s smarter for me to do the song myself than give it to someone else who three years ago I’d have desperately hoped would sing it.” She explains that some of her famous charges will now get B-list rotation on the radio (“let’s say, 50 spins a day”) whereas Sia the solo artist will currently get A-list rotation (“100”).
There’s a clash between the traditional idea of the creative solo artist, living and breathing their own material, and this businesswoman who happily admits that her album is made up of rejected songs; that she is “her own back-up plan”. Looking back on her early solo albums, Furler says: “I think I was a cleverer lyricist, but I don’t choose to be any longer. When I started to write for pop people I was like, wow, this stuff is incredibly simple. I mean, extremely rudimentary and almost naive.” Listening to the new album is like surveying the blueprints for the pop songwriting industry. You can imagine Rihanna singing the reggaeish Cheap Thrills (which she rejected – “they wanted another Diamonds,” says Furler); Broken Glass is a torch song like Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball, only rather sweeter. Furler sings with such tremulous gusto she seems to be more emotionally involved than those singers often are. Yet her real story remains hidden. Lyrics such as “I was born in a thunderstorm / I grew up overnight / I played on my own” appear to be intimate but they could, of course, have been baring the souls of half a dozen other people. The album title, This Is Acting, seems spot on.
Furler and her husband, the director Erik Anders Lang, are currently working on a film called Sister starring Maddie Ziegler, the child dancer she cast in the video for Elastic Heart alongside the actor Shia LeBeouf. The world got its knickers in a twist, watching the prepubescent girl clambering on the back of the grown man dressed only in a flesh-coloured skin suit. But Furler is having none of it. “I’m down with empowering little girls and little boys,” she says. “It was so important to me that there was nothing in the choreography that would sexualise her in any way. I grew up with these weirdos: Kate Bush, Adam Ant, Boy George, Cyndi Lauper. I want to help show that little people can express themselves in a non-sexual way, but still be extremely expressive.”
If anything, the drama playing out in the video, between the ravaged LeBeouf and the child (“she represents my inner freako”) looked more like a dysfunctional father and daughter at play. When Furler started working with Maddie, the dancer was the same age Sia was when her father, the blues guitarist Phil Colson, upped and left the family home. The rest of her childhood was unhappy. For five years in adulthood she did not talk to him. She told the New York Times that he was jealous of her success, that he wouldn’t even let her do back-up vocals on one of his records – though they have since reconciled.
Like many fathers and daughters they had shared a musical bond, taking long drives from Adelaide to Melbourne and singing in the car. Back in the room, she slides into a song by the child star Eddie Hodges, banging on an imaginary steering wheel: “I’m gonna knock on your door, ring on your bell, tap on your window too. If you don’t come out tonight, while the moon is bright, I’m gonna knock away and tap until you do! – That song encapsulates my childhood musical experience with my dad.”
After her father left, Furler says she listened to much less music, and stopped completely when she started writing her own, in her late teens. Extraordinarily, well into her songwriting career she only had seven albums on her computer – by Elvis, Jeff Buckley, Dolly Parton, Lauryn Hill, Jimi Hendrix, kd lang and the Jackson Five. She has said that music is not really a pleasure for her, but a need, “like shouting”. She only started listening to pop when she moved to LA a few years back, giving herself a six-month crash course in radio hits, taking advantage of the fact she was sitting in traffic jams most of the time.
‘Oh, to be a bread basket at the centre of this table!” wrote one celebrity blog when a particular foursome – Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, comedian Whitney Cummings and Sia Furler – were spotted having dinner in west Hollywood. What were they talking about? Wedding planning? Future collaborations? In truth, the dinner was a rare public outing for Sia, who has not adjusted to paparazzi attention the way her veteran celebrity friends have. “It mimics being hunted,” she says. “You are prey, and the predator is coming for you. Shakes, diarrhoea… it gives me such major, shaky anxiety and they understand. So now I tend to just hang out at people’s houses instead.”
I ask Furler why she thinks the “celebrity besties”, as the blog puts it, want to hang out with her. She says they’ve told her it’s because she brings out their inner child. “It would be lonely, I think, to be an ice maiden,” Furler says. “I can’t imagine how lonely that would be.”
More than once today she mentions codependency, a condition that tormented the old Sia, who thought each of the 50 fans at the stage door needed an autograph and a personal chat or she was failing as a pop star. She provides an unusual angle on the giant, one-woman pop machines rolling around the world on their endless tours.
A schedule like Beyoncé’s “would make me suicidal,” she says, “thinking that for two years I just have to get on this mouse-wheel and go round the world talking about myself, and singing the same songs. I respect the women I write pop songs for, because they work hard in a way I could never do. My whole modus operandi is a four-hour work week. I’m just trying to work out strategies for getting the most out of my life, so that I can spend my time with my friends, my dogs and my husband.”
A couple of years back, Furler helped the Glee star Lea Michele write a song following the drug overdose of her boyfriend and co-star Cory Monteith (it was called If You Say So); they bonded, Furler said sardonically, over dead boyfriends. “I have so many secrets inside of me which belong to other people,” she tells me. On holiday in Mexico, going through a rough patch, she was put in touch with a “huge celebrity” also working through the 12-step programme. Over coffee, the woman “told me so much of her own life, it actually made me feel afraid of myself”, Furler says. “What if I let something slip if I was ever talking to anyone? This stuff would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the gossip magazines. I felt burdened by it, but that passed, and the more I have taken on these secrets the more I realised it was actually good for my self-esteem, to know that I am trustworthy, that I can keep all the right secrets.”
You wonder whether her surgeries, these strange creative heart-to-hearts with the rich and fragile, are her own kind of therapy; a way of constantly facing the worst elements of fame and, in teasing them out of other people, mastering them somehow.
The last time Sia visited her father, he played her a tape of her appearance on the Australian TV talent show, The Have a Go Show, when she was 11 or 12. She was so ambitious, she says, she’d auditioned several times before she got on. “I was an average singer at best,” she says. “I was a slightly overweight, spiky-fringed, rat’s-tailed 80s girl who was just showing up. That’s all I’ve ever really done to get here, just kept showing up. Even when I didn’t want to. That’s what I do. I’ve just got to show up.”
And there we are, one hour down in Sia’s four-hour working week. As I leave, she calls me back and gives me my scarf, which I had forgotten; then bows her head and sweeps her hands outwards in a series of little subservient geisha movements, ushering me out of the room.
This is Acting is out now on Monkey Puzzle/RCA. She headlines Way Out West festival, Gothenburg, Sweden and Helsinki’s Flow Festival in August
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