Sarah McLeod rose to fame as the frontwoman for 90s indie rockers The Superjesus. These days there’s a little more rock to her pop, but Sarah’s still going strong. After a year in New York she’s back and ready to unleash her brand new sound on Oz. I caught up with Sarah today to chat about her music’s new direction, life abroad, and why there’s no place like home. 
How does it feel to be back home?
It’s taken me a few days to acclimatise and now I’m really, really comfortable. I think wild horses are going to have to drag me out this time because I’ve dug my heels in really hard. But when I first arrived I was a feeling a little bit “Oh, everything’s too suburban! Where are the homeless people I have to walk over?” It sort of confused me a little bit, but now I’ve worked out where I’m going to live, and I got back with my dog, and saw all my friends, and got back into my old life and now I’m really happy.
So are you back here for good or are you going back to New York?
I’m going to be going to and fro from here to New York probably for the next two years. I think I have to keep doing that. But as far as living, I’m going to live here. I’ve just committed to a 12-month lease on an apartment, so that was quite a big step for me. So I’m going to live here, and just go over there to do what I need to do.
I loved New York when I visited a few years ago. What do I need to see next time I go?
I’ve never really been one for sights. I just like certain areas of New York. I’m very much entrenched in The Village. The Village atmosphere to me is kind of like living on Sesame Street. You get to know everybody and you know where everything is. It’s really easy to get around; you can walk. I sort of hover between the West Village, Soho, and the East Village, and I never really like to travel above 14th Street or below Canal. That’s kind of like a little block of area that I really called my own.
I was extremely happy there. I felt really comfortable there. It was sort of one point of my life where I started working out who I was and what I wanted to do, and I felt really at home. And it changed me a lot, and I’m really happy that I had that opportunity to do that because I’m better for it. I loved it. I’ve got great memories. But now I’m extremely happy to be back here. I’ve picked up a few knick knacks of knowledge that I’ve learned and now I’m working them into my life, and I feel like everything so far is going to plan. And I’m with my dog, and that’s totally cool.
What inspired you to head to the US in the first place?
Well originally I was meandering around the world, looking to expand my musical horizons. I started in Los Angeles and that was pretty cool; I liked it there. Then I went to London, which I liked. I didn’t really drum up much business in LA at all, but then I went to London and started doing well there. I had a remix that was getting played on Radio 1, I was getting lots of gigs and I got a fantastic agent. So that all started taking off. And then, I went to New York and I signed a label deal there. And then the same remix started doing well, and then we put out another remix and that started doing well.
So it was kind of just like sniffing around and trying to figure out who will love me. Where do I go? Where will I fit in? I roamed around trying to figure out where I will fit in. It’s taken me a very long time to feel this comfortable.
Well we’ve always loved you here in Australia.
Great. I love it here too. I’m actually really comfortable to be back here, like more comfortable now than I was before. I think I used to strut around this town feeling “Ooh, where am I?” because I was from Adelaide. And then I came over here and I never really settled in. I really didn’t. I never really got my head around what was going on and where I fitted in. And it wasn’t until I took myself away from it, settled in somewhere else and then came back, now I feel like this is my town. Where I never, ever felt that before.
You’re about to release the new single “Tell Your Story Walking.” What can you tell me about it?
I wrote that as bit of a therapy to myself. When you listen to it for the first time it sounds like it’s a break-up song, with me saying to the other person “Get out of here, I don’t need you.” But it’s actually me talking to myself. I’m sure everyone has this. If you didn’t you’d be extraordinarily lucky. There’s a part of you that tells you when you get to the finish line, it’s something in your brain that says “No you don’t. Who do you think you are? You can’t do that.” And I’ve been plagued by this for so many years, thinking that I can achieve so much and then this wave of negativity will come over me, get me at the last minute and it can screw things up for me. So that song is about dealing with the negative side of your character, and when I’m saying “please start walking” that’s me talking to myself saying “Get out of it. I don’t need you anymore. I’m better than this. I don’t have to listen to you. I used to be able to do it before I got all my jaded, negative stuff in my brain. I was fine then and I’ll be fine now. I’m going to stop listening to you because you’re making my life hard.”
Listening to the song took me back to Pat Benetar, with that whole singing-in-the-hairbrush power-pop girl anthem feel to it.
Unreal!
Yeah! So who were your musical heroes growing up?
When I was growing up I was a huge fan of Cheap Trick. I thought Robin Zander was the greatest singer who ever lived. Rick Neilsen’s the greatest guitar player who ever lived. I was pretty into that. I listened to a lot of Beatles when I was younger because my parents had a lot of Beatles albums. And Chuck Berry, stuff like that. I was actually a child of the 80s so when all the 80s teen movies came out, like I was a huge fan of Back to the Future. And when Michael J. Fox did that thing at the end when he was singing “Johnny B. Goode,” I would have mimicked that a hundred thousand times in my lounge room I reckon. And I think to this day I’ve ruined my kneecaps because I used to jump off my dining table and land on the floor on my knees pretending to do air guitar to “Johnny B. Goode.”
It’s been four years since you released your first solo album Beauty Was A Tiger. Why’s it taken so long to create album number two?
I didn’t think about the last record to be honest. I didn’t feel any pressure whatsoever. I walked straight out of The Superjesus. To be honest I thought “I had success with the Superjesus,” everything we’d put out had done well, and I didn’t have that thing in my brain that thought “Maybe this won’t work.” I think I was a little bit cocky and I just wrote that record and thought “There you go, rock and roll, put that out.” And in hindsight, I listen back to it now and think “What were you doing?”
So with this record I was extraordinarily particular. I really took my time with the choice of the songs and I noticed that my songwriting got a lot better. And with Beauty Was A Tiger, I wrote that record really fast as well. I wrote it in a couple of weeks with the bass player from Electric Six [Chris Peters]. And then when I went to do this record, I actually wrote a whole album’s worth of stuff and then I decided that I didn’t like it. I went into the studio to record it and thought “No, I don’t like it.” I got paranoid.
And then I went to Miami and hooked up with this guy who’s Timbaland’s right-hand man, he did all of Justin Timberlake’s records, Missy Elliot, he also did Bette Midler, he did quite a lot of strange things. He was like an all-star veteran of the business. So then I went and did a record with him. He had the guy who’s like his right-hand man. So together we all wrote an album. I think we worked on it for like a week, wrote and recorded a whole album in a week. And it great, but then I walked away that thinking “There I go again, banging out an album in a week. It’s great, but imagine how good I’ll be if I actually sit down and do it myself and be meticulous.”
I started to notice that a lot of these people that I was working with had no attention to detail, and it would really annoy me. I’d watch them go over things and think “Wait! Hang on! That could be better!” “No that’s fine. Next!” And it started to bother me. So I thought “I’m going to go away and experiment with this and see how I go by myself.”
So then I moved to London and set myself up a studio in my basement in Hampstead, and I sat in there day in, day out, and I did things from beginning to end, and I didn’t care how long it took me. And I was meticulous as all hell, and pretty much wrote a whole new album again. The first song I wrote out of that environment was “Tell Your Story Walking,” and I went “What am I doing? I can actually do this by myself. ” I don’t know why I always fall back on thinking I need some big-time producer to come in and do this for me. I think it’s just a fear thing. I wasn’t trusting in my own confidence to think that I could do it alone. And then I started writing those songs and it was like “Oh! You’re right. Hang on a minute. Let me see what comes here.” And I wrote another one, and another one. I wrote what’s going to be the first five singles on the album; I wrote them in succession, back to back. I just got one wave of confidence.
So I thought, “Obviously I can’t put out that record, even though I’ve already done it.” I have a very understanding investor. So then I rewrote it all, and found a producer who I was a fan of his work. I went into the studio with him. I said to him “I’ve already done most of this.” I used Logic software; he used Logic software. I said to him “I want to co-produce it with you, but I want your help.” So we pulled up all the tracks in the studio, and I’d pretty much already done the meat and potatoes of everything. So then we could just go through and sound replace a lot of the tracks, put more cool sounds onto the tracks that I didn’t have access to. So pretty much all of the midi files were already there, we didn’t really have to play anything new, all the programming was done. He and I just went through it together and put the sparkles on.
Your sound has evolved from indie rock to a dance pop over the years. What do you think’s influenced that shift?
I think it’s just from living abroad for so long. I wouldn’t class myself as so much of a dance act because my album is still really pop; it’s not doof-doof in the slightest, although I have remixes that do that. And my voice is still all scratched up. There’s not really much I can do about that; that’s the way I sing. It’s still very much edgy; I wouldn’t call it dance.
But I do enjoy the dance side of it. I really like the concept when you send out a vocal a capella to a potential remixer and then they do a whole number on it and send it back to you. And you get lots of different auditions that people send in. And you just listen through and see what you like, and I find that process fantastic. It’s like someone’s taken your songs and changed them completely. I find that really fascinating. Half the time I think they don’t listen to the original, so they don’t use the same melodic structure, they don’t use the same chord progressions, the instrumentation. And they just do something completely different. To me as a songwriter that’s really inspiring. So I really like the concept of having remixes done. And now I’ve got into the whole dance genre, I really enjoy listening to them. I enjoy listening to them just as much as the pop ones, especially when you hear it at a club. If you’re just at a random club, especially if you’re in a foreign country, and then one of your remixes comes on and you’re watching people dancing it’s like “Woah, look at that!”
What do your fans think of your new sound? How you managed to retain them from the Superjesus days?
Yeah. The people who seem to have stuck with me from the beginning, they all seem to be still there. I know a lot of familiar faces on my MySpace page and people who say they were fans of The Superjesus and they love the new stuff. I get a couple that go “I prefer your rock stuff,” but there’s always going to be a couple. But overall, about 98% of people have been supportive.
I wonder whether that’s because there’s still that really strong lyrical base. While there’s still those pop sounds around it, there’s still that depth to it that you don’t find in a lot of pop music.
Yeah, exactly. Especially in the scene that I’ve been working with in America, because I’ve started writing songs for other people as well, and I’ve noticed when you’re in that market and you’re writing songs for acts that are in that sugar-pop mode the lyrics are completely secondary. It’s all about a good groove and a good melody. And it’s all about the rhythm. They really don’t care what you say. And I’ll be like “What do you think of this line here?” They’ll be like “Yeah whatever, but how good’s that groove?”
It’s certainly a different way of doing things.
There’s no need to be profound when you’re writing songs for those kind of acts.
You’ve recently been writing and producing for some really great artists too like Missy Elliot. After spending so much of your life up front, how does it feel to step behind the scenes?
I love it. I really feel like that’s my calling. I think, I’m enjoying now and I reckon I’ve probably got maybe one more record in me after that. After that I want to be a producer. I really like it.
You recently made history as the only Aussie other than Kylie Minogue to hold a US Billboard dance chart possie for more than 19 weeks, which is huge. How does that feel?
I know. How’s that? I didn’t really realise what was going on. I just kept picking up the Billboard and seeing it in the top 10 and going “Oh yeah, cool.” And then I’d get it the next week, and I don’t think I really realised the velocity of it. And then it just kept going, week after week after week and it wasn’t dropping. I noticed all the artists, all the other songs around it going up and down, but my song was just pretty much sitting anywhere between 20 and 13. And it sat there, didn’t really go anywhere for ages. And we were like “Is this rigged? Is there a mistake? Why’s this happening?” So after a while I started thinking “Wow, this is pretty cool.” And then when I heard about the thing about Kylie, I was really excited obviously.
Yeah, what a spin-out.
Especially dance, and in America. For a rock singer from Adelaide.
And it’s such a competitive market, for any Australians to make a real impact over there is massive.
I know. It’s a really hard market for Australians to make an impact in. They say it has a lot to do with the way we sing. A lot of people have commented “It’s going to be difficult for you to make it in this market” because Americans don’t like our twang when we sing apparently, or they don’t connect with it. I know that our accents, Americans love the way we speak. And every American I’ve ever met has gone “Oh my god, I love your accent.” But the weird thing with the singing, that no one can put their finger on, but Americans don’t connect with Australian accented singers. So it’s really hard to get anything going on there when you have quite a heavy Australian accent like I have.
You’re releasing your album here next year. It’s been forever since we’ve seen you touring, so will we get a chance to see you on stage then?
Oh yeah. Are you kidding me? Does the Pope shit in the Vatican? I can’t wait! I’m so excited, I cannot wait. I really can’t. Especially this time, I’m going to put together the best band. I’ve been touring overseas and everywhere I go, every new country that I go to, I have to put together a new band. And it drives me crazy. There’s not one band that I go with. I’m constantly holding auditions. It really takes it out of you. I hate the audition process by the way. I feel like such an asshole. “That’s great dude, but take a hike.” That’s really hard. But this time I’m putting together a really cool band, and I’m really excited, and I just can’t wait to play in my own territory. I want to stay here as long as possible and play every town that I’ve ever played in before and just show them what I’m doing now because I’m really proud of it. I want Australia to be proud of what I’ve achieved and where I’ve come from and what I’ve turned into. I’m really excited so I just hope that they like it!
Image used with permission from Hummingbird PR