Sarah Blasko prepares to embark on solo tour

SARAH Blasko is nervous. In a good way. The singer-songwriter is about to embark on her first solo tour — that means just her and her instruments and several hundred people in the audience.

“I do see the humour in the fact that I’m a solo artist who hasn’t done her own solo tour before,” she says on the phone from Sydney, where she lives, “but it feels funny to have these very different nerves at this point in my career.

“It’s funny because I have had to get a rehearsal room for some of it and it is pretty lonely.

“You’re sort of like pretending you’re performing in front of people and stuff. They’re giving me the mirror room tomorrow so I’ll be coming face-to-face with myself.”

Making an album is a chance to come face-to-face with yourself. Right now, she’s putting the finishing touches on her sixth album, due out this year. Now, at 40, Blasko, pictured, has a body of work to look back on. Each record captures a chapter of her life.

“It is interesting because I have gone back and listened to a few things getting ready for this tour. It’s hard for me to be objective about how it comes across but I can taste and smell the location and what I was doing and who I was.”

Her most recent album, 2015’s Eternal Return, was different again in that it was about falling in love, with partner Dave Miller, and heralded the birth of her son, Jerry, now almost two. She recorded while she was pregnant.

“Your whole life gets blown apart in a good and a bad way when you have a child, so everything kind of shifts, but in terms of how it directly affects your songwriting, I don’t know if it does. It’s not like I was one person and now I’m another, it’s just that everything that happens in real life influences what you write about and what matters to you.”

She will perform at Brisbane Powerhouse on June 22. Go to brisbanepowerhouse.org.