Guy Sebastian - AUSTRALIAN RECORDING ARTISTS - HEADLINE ACTS

DANCERS & SHOWGIRLS

CLASSICAL & OPERA
String Quartets
Orchestras
Profile Musicians

MULTICULTURAL ACTS

WEDDING ENTERTAINMENT

AUDIO VISUAL HIRE

THEMES & DECORATION

TO LIST YOUR ACT

CLICK HERE

Home

Services

Our Clients

News & Events

Contact Us

AUSTRALIA'S LEADING SUPPLIER OF CORPORATE & SPECIAL EVENT ENTERTAINMENT

AUSTRALIAN RECORDING ARTISTS

GUY SEBASTIAN

BASED: Sydney, Australia

He may have sold a staggering half a million records already, but Guy Sebastian is back with a third album, CLOSER TO THE SUN, feeling much more confident, self assured and completely at ease with his place in the world and his sound. Indeed CLOSER TO THE SUN is the record Guy was born to make.

'I know exactly what I want to hear now,' Guy says. 'You know, I didn't exactly enter the industry in a normal fashion. It kind of happened so quick...'

Guy Sebastian, you may recall, was the inaugural winner of the high rating and hugely popular television series Australian Idol. You may have heard of it. His dominance of the song translated instantly to the charts with record breaking sales of for his debut album Just As I Am.

The success carried effortlessly into second album, Beautiful Life, where Guy took more control of his craft, with self-penned hits Out With My Baby and Oh-Oh seducing radio stations and fans across the nation. A sell-out live tour showed the country he was more than just an as-seen-on-TV star with big hair, he was a genuine musician who oozed talent.

So it was uncanny that before starting his third album Guy had a crisis of confidence. 'I spent a bunch of time writing songs overseas and I just couldn't feel it. It felt like I was writing an album just for the sake of writing an album. I switched off for a while.' Indeed, there was even a time Guy Sebastian considered moving away from music. It didn't last long.

'This wave of insecurity came over me 'I'm not good enough, I can't live up to the pressure' but I broke through that and I'm glad I did. I just wish I'd done it earlier. In reflection though, I really needed the year to get in the right head space and get to a point where I could believe in myself again, as soon as that happened, the writing just flowed.'

So Guy went back to what he did best - writing at home, on his piano, with his friends. 'This album comes from a bunch of ideas I had at home and now I realize that's the way an album should be written,' Guy says. 'I don't think you should travel around the world to get songs, I think they should come from jamming. That's where the best ones have come from for me anyway.'

One song, Take You Home, was the turning point, where Guy wrote himself a personal mantra to motivate his songwriting. 'I wrote that to realize I had to go back home, back to basics, to see what I do this for.'

Then came Taller, Stronger, Better. Guy and his mates Gary Pinto and Susie Ahern were hanging out one night in Melbourne after reality TV show It Takes Two (where Guy mentored swimmer Sarah Ryan). Before long, the inspirational song, not so much a big ballad but a ginormous one, came to life. 'It's almost going back to the more gospel Angels Brought Me Here vibe. Gary, Susie and I put down a 120 track choir between the three of us,' Guy reveals. 'It's just our three voices but we sing in all these different voices, trying to emulate a choir. We wrote it one night, it got quite late, I remember there was a 3am Maccas run involved, but it all came together pretty quickly.'

There's more than fast-food fuelling the record. There's also a healthy dose of, yes, rock. Elevator Love is the most rockin' moment Guy Sebastian has ever been involved with. And no, get your mind out of the gutter, the title isn't about what you're thinking it is. 'It's a metaphor,' Guy explains. 'From the title you think it's about making love, it's a metaphor about love that's so up and down, you never get it right but you like it that way. I've been in a relationship like that before; as soon as stuff levels you wonder what's wrong.'

Elsewhere the album delves into more soulful areas. Title track Closer to the Sun is a gorgeous almost hippy epic inspired by Lenny Kravitz and the Beatles. 'It's about coming from somewhere laidback like Adelaide to living in a rat race like Sydney and hoping some ship comes down to take you away. I was actually thinking about Lenny Kravitz and that video where he goes away in a spaceship.'

Meanwhile there's even a love song to soul music on Taking Me Over. It was inspired by a night in New York where Guy discovered soul clubs blasting out the music he grew up listening to, hence the lyrical shout outs to Stevie Wonder and Donny Hathaway.

'I went into one place in New York and was watching this incredible old school soul band. The bar girl was Australian who was working there while she was traveling. She'd seen me up the back, and asked the band to get me up on stage and sing. I had no idea she'd even seen me and then the next song they asked me up. I was this multi cultured dude, I wasn't a black guy like them, I wasn't a white guy like the guys in the crowd, I had this fuzzy hair. But when I sang I was so inspired and I've never sung like that before, it was like I departed this earth and went to some soul land. It was an amazing experience, I wrote the song about that.'

CLOSER TO THE SUN also contains a song written by Seal, Can't Stop a River, one of the few tracks Guy didn't pen. 'It's almost a male version of You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman,' Guy says. 'It's really cool.'

Another highlight, Cover On My Heart, was written about a mate Guy used to work with at a warehouse. 'That's one of my most favorite ballads I've ever written,' Guy says. 'It's about a guy I used to work with at a warehouse who was the sort of dude where life bit him in the butt. This guy was obsessed with this lunch truck girl, he hated his job, but she was the only reason he stayed at that job. I reckon she was into him, she gave him her number but he was too scared to do anything. One day she just stopped coming in. That drove him nuts, he was so depressed, he actually even wrote down one time what he'd say to her. So the chorus says 'I was going to tell you today, I even wrote the words I would say' so the song is all about him. I hope he doesn't take offence!'

In keeping it real, Guy Sebastian has made his most honest, and most natural, album to date. It's no wonder he's thrilled.

'I didn't have a lot of input on mixing or production or even writing on my first album,' he says. 'Even on the second, I was still growing, it was all a bit new to me. But now I realize my only baby is the music. It's all I have to care about. When you listen to this album there's a real consistency to the sound, it's quite organic. There's not a lot of programming, it doesn't sound like an R&B record, it sounds like a pop/rock record sung by an R&B guy. I'm really happy with everything about this record. I'm really happy with how my voice is sounding. I've been involved with everything, right down to the artwork. I know exactly what I want now. I feel a real ownership of this record.'