Wow. You and Linda Perry didn’t click?
“I wasn’t feeling well the day I wrote with Linda Perry. She had just finished a writing session working with P!nk. I remember walking into Linda’s studio and thinking it was the size of a football stadium. She had a piano in the middle of the room with pens, pencils, and pads of paper set out on top of it ready for us to use. I usually write in bedrooms, not in rooms like Linda Perry’s football stadium sized studio.
Linda told me that P!nk was coming over with her hog and would take me for a ride.” Sia recalls being in disbelief at what her life was like that day. “I thought to myself, This is not my life! I do not write songs in rooms as big as this and go for rides on hogs with P!nk!” After excusing herself with an explanation that she wasn’t feeling so good, Sia went straight home and continued to write Colour The Small One.
How did you get involved in the writing process for Christina Aguilera’s forthcoming record Bionic?
“Christina had her management call up my management to see about working together,” Sia says. Apparently, Christina had her management make calls to some of her favorite artists and writers to set up possible collaborations. One of the people she was already working with? Linda Perry, the writer behind Aguilera’s enormous smash hit “Beautiful.” Of course Aguilera would team up with Perry for her new album. “I thought to myself, Linda? Maybe I should give her another chance,” Sia remembers.
“Christina had a couple of Zero 7 records and knew that I had written with and for Zero 7. I actually had my managers call her managers to see about having Christina sing on my song ‘Death By Chocolate’ on my last album [Some People Have Real Problems]. I don’t think her managers ever delivered the message to her because I never heard back about it. My management didn’t even know her name! They called her ‘Christine’ with an ‘e’ at the end instead of an ‘a.’ I bet that upset her people.” This time around, the communication between each singer’s management team occurred without questionable interruption. “I have new management now,” laughs Sia.
Christina’s management called Sia and asked if they could set up a phone call for her and Christina to chat. “She called me and I asked her, ‘What do you want?’ basically,” recalls Sia. “She asked me if I had anybody in mind I wanted to bring along to our first writing session, which I did. After our initial conversation, Christina called us back to write a song for her. I called my bass player Sam [Dixon] and said, ‘Let’s go write with Christina Aguilera’ and we did.” In the end, all four songs that Sia and Sam wrote for Christina made it onto her upcoming album, due out this spring. Good news for any songwriter! One of your songs makes it onto a Christina Aguilera record? You’re golden, my friend. Absolutely golden.
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