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Guy Sebastian: Drumming up Enthusiasm
Guy Sebastian regales listeners with a story of being star-struck to the point of paralysis at meeting Beyoncé for the first time as a fellow judge on The X Factor
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Guy Sebastian regales listeners with a story of being star-struck to the point of paralysis at meeting Beyoncé for the first time as a fellow judge on The X Factor. His voice drops to an awed near-whisper when he recounts performing with a 60-piece orchestra at the Sydney Opera House before the Pope and then during a 90-minute set for Oprah Winfrey.
It's all in a day's work for Sebastian and has been for 10 years since his Australian Idol win, but he sounds astounded, like a newly minted lottery winner.
'It's one of those moments where I'm the little boy from [small-town] Kelang in Malaysia,' chuckles Sebastian, whose father is of Sri Lankan Tamil descent, while his English mother has Portuguese ancestry.
During a recent visit to Jakarta, the international recording artist sat down for an interview to discuss his overnight stardom, how fatherhood had changed his music and about what happened to his iconic afro.
'Well, it's not on my chest,' he laughs, peering jokingly down his shirt. 'Going through Idol and everything, there was this big fuss about my hair. Back home, there were posters and stickers about it. McDonald's even had a placemat [that read] 'Go the fro!' and it was on Pepsi billboards. I think I was just a little bit tired of the gimmick.'
Sebastian floored the judges at his Idol audition, interpreting Stevie Wonder's 'Ribbon in the Sky', but Ian 'Dicko' Dickson, Australian Idol's acerbic Simon Cowell counterpart, deadpanned: 'You look like crap, so you have to work on that.'
'I wasn't a very insecure person, so in my head I was looking at Dicko with his hairstyle and his clothes and I thought, 'The last person I'm going to take style tips from is that guy',' he chuckles. Although sporting a more flattering post-Idol crew cut, Sebastian won the first-ever season in 2003 and went on to become the only Australian male artist in chart history to achieve six number-one singles.
To fan the furor of his Idol win Sebastian's debut album, Just as I Am, was a six-day rush job that included three songs written by this once closet songwriter-guitarist who had earlier quashed his musical aspirations to major in Medical Radiation.
The lead single, 'Angels Brought Me Here', a ballad written especially for Idol and arguably Sebastian's claim to fame, was the highest-selling single in Australian chart history until 2011. His vacillations between pop rock, funk, R&B, jazz and a self-touted 'soulful pop' have been on-point, with 22 ARIA (Australian Recording Industry Association) Music Award nominations and the EDM-influenced 'Like a Drum', the lead single for his eighth upcoming studio album, currently on high rotation on the airwaves.
'Someday I know we're gonna beat again/Just like we did when we were young/Someday I know we're gonna beat again, gonna beat again like a drum,' Sebastian sings over a high-tempo folksy chorus of 'ooh, ooh, oohs'.
'I guess everyone sort of has that experience of feeling you have something that you desperately don't want to lose,' he says of the song's meaning. 'It works as a ballad and it works as an up-tempo track.'
Welcoming the birth of his son Hudson, now aged 2, with wife Jules Egan (he is now also father to a three-month-old boy) and reflecting on the world Hudson would inherit nudged Sebastian to take to a political soapbox in his seventh and latest studio album, Armageddon (2012), penning hits like 'Battle Scars' (featuring American rapper Lupe Fiasco) and 'Get Along'.
'There's a lyric in ['Get Along'] that says: 'It's easy if they're faceless to hate the other side.' It means that if someone doesn't have a face, like if you haven't had personal contact with them, you can't love them. It's much easier to say, 'I hate that person because he's gay, or because he's black, or because he's Asian, or because he has red hair'.'
The music video is a documentary shot by filmmakers Phillip Graybill and Hayden Topperwien befitting a UNICEF campaign that follows homeless people, scavengers, monks, impoverished children and retired old men (so scrawny their ribcages protrude) down the backstreets of cities in Madagascar, Kenya, Dubai, Jordan, India, Cambodia, Vietnam and even Jakarta.
'It's nice when people have a mutual respect for somebody else's culture and somebody else's religion and I think if the world was able to just peacefully allow other people to believe what they want, imagine ' imagine ' we wouldn't have any of this stuff going on.'
While the song touts idealism -- as does 'Big Bad World', in which Sebastian coos to his son, 'No you don't have to worry/I won't let the big bad world get you' ' becoming a father was his 'scariest' eye-opening feat, he confesses.
'My child really made me take notice of the world that he was going to inherit. I started to analyze things and pay attention to things that I wouldn't have normally.'
While Sebastian admits he loves a good dance track, the melody must hold water on its own, minus any glitzy post-production additions. He cites Swedish progressive house DJ Avicii as an example.
'I think it has to be a song that you can just sing in a room with a piano or a guitar [...] But I love that in music there's a real shift to just great songs in the dance world. It's about having a pop structure'.
With the Memphis Album (2007), Sebastian manifested his longtime dream of recording to analogue tape and it features covers of songs by the iconic soul singers, like Otis Redding, Al Green and Wilson Pickett, that he grew up yearning to emulate.
Now applying finish touches to his eighth studio album, due for release in late October this year, Sebastian is retreating inward for a more autobiographical gestalt: Madness is the tentative title.
'I've written a song called 'Madness' that I really like and I think it's a nice title. It kind of sums up my life in the last few years, too. There are some fun, up-tempo tracks like 'Like a Drum'. Some are like that and then there's a lot of emotional ballads as well,' he says.
'There's a song called 'Lightning' that has a rapper on it as well. I've worked with Lupe [Fiasco] again and there's a female duet on there, too. I'm just finalizing all of that so it will come together soon.'
Photo courtesy of Sony Music entertainment Indonesia
