Guy Sebastian on tragedy, inspired songwriting, religion & the importance of music streaming

The original Australian Idol and current X Factor Australia judge, Guy Sebastian, is a man with little time on his hands these days. When he’s not got his judge/mentor hat on alongside Iggy AzaleaMel B and Adam Lambert for the Channel 7 reality show, Sebastian is in his Sydney studio, working on album Number Eight.

With a focus of our short window of time together supposed to be centred on Sebastian’s new single “Set In Stone” (officially released today), attention soon drifts to the influences the songwriter has found himself inspired by as a result of a heavy year of international writing trips. While his movements in the pop/R&B realms over the last few years have made Sebastian not only more of a household name in Australia, but also a known figure internationally, he admits that when it’s come to making this new record – his first since 2014’s Madness – it’s been difficult to land a clear sound and direction.

“I’ve had heaps of fun,” he says. “In Europe and the UK, I’ve been making a lot of music, I’ve been writing a lot – more than I’ve ever written before. It took me ages to get the sound that I wanted for the album. Literally, just to get my head around what I wanted to the album to sound like, took eighteen months. It’s funny, because you’ll write and write and then you end up throwing most of it away, because it took you that long to figure out what you don’t want to do.”

“Suddenly, I’ve clicked into the sound of the album and I’m like, “Oh sick – that’s what I’m doing,” and then all of my writing changes. It caters to that sound. This has all come together over the last three or four months, it’s been nice. With “Set In Stone” too, it’s nice to get another ballad out there.”

Time spent in Indonesia writing with the likes of Trey Campbell and Jon Hume spurred Sebastian on creatively, he admits, though the new single had a far darker origin story behind it. While the ballad wound up focusing on his wife Jules, Sebastian wrote the song after witnessing a roadside death while in Bali.

“It was just absolutely awful.” he remembers. “I witnessed someone die in an accident; I was roadside with him and holding his hand as his breaths started getting further and apart. It was a gory scene and I felt so sick afterwards; I still get a bit shaken up thinking about it. When I sing the song, I’ve got to switch off; when it happened, it was in the late afternoon and I was meeting some friends. I didn’t even call my friends, I didn’t rock up; I just went to the closest bar and I sat in a bar and just drank. I rang my friends and I rang Jules, I rang my brothers and my best mate, but I was on the phone to Jules and I was like, ‘I just want to come home’.”

“It was just after a year of being away all the time, being away from everyone and fuck. When things like that happen, you realise what’s important and so that night, on the way home, I wrote this chorus called “Set In Stone” – it was more about family and Jules. The next day, we finished it on this writing camp; I went into the session and was like, ‘I’ve got this that I wrote, this is what it’s about,’ and the girl I was writing with, she started to tear up. We decided it was a bit convoluted, being about family and all that stuff, so we just made it about Jules.”

While “Set In Stone” acted as a way for Sebastian to work through shock and grief, he admits that using music as this kind of vessel hasn’t always been how he’s worked in the past.

“I’m not that guy who also has to process stuff through music,” he admits. “Sometimes I’ll just sit down and write a song. I’ll sit down because I’ve just bought a new synth or a new sample bank and I’ll start messing around with the sounds and suddenly it’ll trigger a song; it’s not always as an emotional release. With “Set In Stone” [though], it definitely was, I was in tears singing the melody into my phone.”

Now 35, Sebastian thinks back to the early opportunities that came his way as his profile first started to rise. Before Eurovision, the collaborations with the likes of Lupe Fiasco2 Chainz and Jordin Sparks and most definitely pre-Idol, Sebastian was a med student at the University of Adelaide going down a rather different career path. His story is well known and publicised: emerging from a heavily religious upbringing, he broke into the music business with an image that would undergo many changes in the years to come.

“I had my parents going, ‘We believe in you, but seriously? A muso? Make sure you have a back up plan,'” he remembers. “I was in bands and stuff; I toured and was gigging and doing session work, but I never thought that would happen for me. I did Medical Radiation at university; I did radiotherapy and went all the way to working at the Royal Adelaide Hospital for prac year in the Breast Cancer Unit. I wasn’t strong enough. I was like, ‘This is shit, I can’t do this; I’m so depressed every day. I just need to do music.’ Now, kids don’t think of back ups. They think, ‘This is definitely a possibility, with all these shows around; I can totally be on YouTube. If I’m good, I can make it.’ I didn’t grow up with that sort of belief.”

“For me growing up, I was a bit scarred by the fact that they were so controlling,” Sebastian admits, opening up about the role church played in his upbringing. “If you’re in the wrong place, it can be very manipulative and controlling for their own gain. You don’t learn to live by your own decisions and then when you are in a position where you can’t work things out for yourself, you just haven’t done it before. I’ve seen so many people make shocking decisions in life because they were always just dictated to, a little bit. That was also something that was massive for me; because I was so massively involved in that life they almost pigeon-hole [you] and they make you think, ‘That’s not an option for you and if you do that, then you’re choosing the devil’. It’s so messed up. It’s easy to write off church now if you’ve had a bad experience, but I’m glad I’ve gotten to see the way other people handle their own religions. I’ve met some pretty awesome people who are religious, but they’re in good places. It works for them.”

Working with musicians and emerging talent over multiple seasons of The X Factor has introduced Sebastian to a wide range of stories and people of differing backgrounds. Now operating and releasing music in an age where music platforms and the Internet have become crucial in the establishment and, in many cases, the making of superstars, Sebastian comments on the way the industry has changed since he first broke into it.

“On The X Factor, the people who are the most fearless and have such a clear direction of what sort of artist they want to be are the 15 year olds!” he laughs.” The 14, 15 or 16 year olds, they’re so fearless and they’re like, ‘Nope – this is who I want to be, this is the sort of person I want to be because I follow these sorts of people on YouTube. I follow these people on Spotify; that’s who I am and that’s who I want to be’.”

“We get older people in their 20’s and stuff come in and go, ‘I don’t know; I can do anything, I’m quite versatile,’ and you sort of don’t know what to do with them because they might be able to sing, but they don’t have a clear direction. I think what the kids and my kids are going to have access to is just going to make everyone so much better at such a younger age, with that access.”

Lambert, Azalea and Sebastian | The X Factor Australia 2016
Lambert, Azalea and Sebastian | The X Factor Australia 2016

“I put heaps of it down to streaming,” Sebastian offers, thinking about how his own sound has continued to develop and connect with many. “Someone asked me to put a playlist together the other day and I was actually really excited by the idea, excited that someone might look at the playlist and find things that I’ve discovered over the last year [too]. They’re things that I never would’ve had access too. The equivalent would be when I first walked into Borders years and years ago and you could actually listen to CDs without buying them, you could sample them; I used to just sit in Borders all day and discover these artists. The first time I heard Brian McKnight sing, I was at Borders and I was like, ‘Oh my God – this is in the ‘import’ section, this is insane!'”

“Nowadays, kids can just click on ‘Discover Artists’ or it’s like, ‘If you like this person, you might like this person…’. You go down that rabbit hole of discovering incredible songs. Spotify has been amazing for me; for some people it’s Tidal or Apple or whatever, I got Spotify early on so I just stuck to that. All the playlists I’ve made and stuff, I think it’s really stepped up my production and it’s definitely stepped up my approach to songwriting. The more you listen, the more inspired you get.”

“Set In Stone” is out now. Guy Sebastian can be seen on The X Factor on Channel 7, Sunday and Monday nights.

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