Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.
In this series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.
Here are their love letters to records that forever changed their lives.
Sannia – P!nk’s I’m Not Dead
It’s 2006, spherical eleven-year-old with an incredibly edgy side fringe is bitterly disappointed that her mother abandoned her for a business trip to the promised land, America, land of the free. For a kid without a passport who’s only holiday to date had been a day trip from her unflinching hometown of Frankston to the unluckily foggy 12 Apostles, this was a monstrous betrayal. One that could only be remedied by my mother, tentatively pushing a new CD under my bedroom door.
By the time I reached the end of the fifth track of Pink’s [THIRD] record — the politically charged anthem ‘Dear Mr President’ — I was completely spellbound. The “I don’t give a shit” honesty of Pink’s lyrics and vocal delivery coupled with the raw vulnerability of her voice permanently altered the way I thought about singing. Pink’s emotional final chorus in ‘Who Knew’ was one of the first songs to bring tears to my eyes with the line ‘you visit me in my sleep.’ Somehow at the age of eleven, Pink had taught me in three and a half minutes what it was like to love, lose and never fully recover.
After 54 minutes of magic, I was transformed from an early-years-Hermione-esque choirgirl to someone that suddenly wanted to experiment with my own sound. I immediately felt the need to tell my own story with my own raw, unrefined voice, which I had previously limited to the confines of a series of fluffy notebooks.
So thank you Pink, for not being dead after all, and for teaching an emotionally stunted pre-teen how to feel, and express those feelings through music.
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Sannia’s powerful debut single ‘Go And Get Over’ is out now, and you can catch her performing the song live on Friday, July 13 at the Wesley Anne in Northcote.
