Alive (S Furler/A Adkins/T Jesso Jnr) 2015 and Cheap Thrills (S Furler/G Kurstin/S Henriques) 2016, and The Greatest (S Furler/G Kurstin/B MacKichan) 2016 and Unstoppable (S Furler/C
Braide) 2016/2022 and Move Your Body (S Furler/G Kurstin)- Sia Furler 2017.
In late 2013 Sia co-wrote two tracks for Brittany Spears Brittany Jean album- Perfume and Passenger – and in 2014 she executive-produced Kylie Minogue’s Kiss Me Once album and co-wrote the title track and Sexercise. Sia also contributed soundtrack work to Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby (2013), The Hunger Games : Catching Fire (2013), Annie (2014), and Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), and found time to co-write Pretty Hurts, and provide background vocals for Beyonce’s single, which sold 1.5 million copies. Below L-R Record Artwork- Kylie Minogue, Beyonce, Brittany Spears.
Sia revealed that she was now a vegan and joined other celebrities in speaking out for animal welfare, she also married documentary filmmaker Erik Anders Lang in 2014 at her Palm Springs home, but they announced their separation in 2016. Sia is a workaholic who literally submerges herself in an unrelenting schedule of simultaneous projects, her output is prodigious, but it was the cause of the collapse of her first marriage.and it had a devastating impact on her, about which she revealed some years later “I got divorced and that really threw me for a loop,” she said. “That was such a dark time that I was in bed for three years, really, really severely depressed. And so I couldn’t really do anything for that period of time.” (Apple Music 1, 2023). Below- Sia and Anders Lang, Album Artwork, Sia and PETA promotion.
In 2016 Sia released her seventh studio album This Is Acting, which comprised mostly songs written by Sia for other artists that were not included on their albums, and in a kind of kiss-off to those for whom she had labored and did not use her songs, she described song-writing for others as “play-acting”, devoid of the conviction and emotional depth she would impart to her own songs, hence the album title. The album was a global hit, and would feature hit songs rejected by such artists as Adele (Alive), Rihanna (Cheap Thrills), Shakira (Move Your Body), and Lovato (Unstoppable), all of which were hits and collectively generated total units/sales of 17 million, while the album amassed a tidy 3.5million unit sales as well. Below- Sia Through The Years.
The album marked yet another significant progression in Sia’s career, in which she had started in an uber-cool indie world with Concept 7, then moved on to mid-level pop majesty, took a break to become a hit songwriter and rid herself of addictions and illness, to then segue to near-icon status. The album theme is not surprisingly about emancipation – from fear, doubt, and embracing her status as an iconic singer/songwriter/producer- as she took a deep dive into the mainstream music pool, interpreting songs that many had rejected, and brilliantly turning them into megahits. The other obvious theme was Sia’s victim-to-victory journey which colors much of her work, as it manifests itself in mid-tempo anthems, that flaunt her many-layered vocals and her producer’s electronic wizardry. Lyrically a Sia album becomes truth cloaked in cinematic mainstream music, visually enhanced by diverting video themes, while at the same time, mysteriously devoid of images of the artist herself, because you can’t “sia.”
Cheap Thrills became the huge global hit when lifted of the album in 2016, it was a reggae-tinged synthpop party anthem, and more ear candy for dance fans, with anodyne lyrics that extolled the party vibe and hitting the clubs with your partner, “ Come on, come on, turn the radio on/It’s Friday night and I won’t be long/Gotta do my hair, put my makeup on/ It’s Friday night and I won’t take long til I/Hit the dancefloor, hit the dancefloor…”
There were two videos for this one, a performance video that featured Maddie Ziegler and two male dancers (Wyatt Roicker and Nick Lanzisera), wearing nude-coloured outfits, with black and blonde hairstyles and gloves, moving to intense choreography, with Sia similarly attired singing in a rear corner of the stage. The other vid was a lyric video featuring Sean Paul performing a new verse as faceless couple wearing wigs (two dancers Minn Vo and Stefanie Klausmann), win a dance contest on a retro 1960s black-and-white TV show reminiscent of American Bandstand 1960s, with retro television cameras, directed by Lior Molcho, which has been viewed more than 1.8 billion times to date, Cheap Thrills went to #1 in over thirty countries and sold in excess of 11 million units/copies, maybe Rihanna regretted not recording this one.
Alive was in fact the first single lifted off the album and Adele was one of the co-writers, it’s a mid-tempo, synth-pop song that possessed the same outsized pop production and vocal dramatics of a classic Adele hit, and it was reportedly supposed to reflect Adele’s life. It’s a portrait of someone who is utterly without relational connection, so it actually became a good fit for Sia, a person who is focused on survival, and so phobic about fame, that she hid her face most of the time. The lyrics were raw and confessional “I grew up overnight/I lived alone/I’m playing on my own/I survived…” and “ I wanted everything I never had/Like the love that comes with light/I wore envy, and I hated that/But I survived…” and highlighted the disappointment and deprivation that Sia so skillfully captured with her plaintive, nuanced vocals, “I had a one-way ticket to a place where the demons go/No hope just lies/And your taught to cry in your pillow.” Sia brought her own unique vocal treatment to this song, at the outro her slightly ragged, Chandelier-like shattering chorus, took the song somewhere only Sia knows where to go, and proved that a power ballad can still be, enrapturing and transporting, even in the age of Electronic Dance Music. And given Sia’s gutsy focus on survival amid isolation here, somehow it seemed appropriate that the song Adele and Rihanna rejected, had become a hit for her anyway.
There were two videos made for this song, a music vid which starred child karate star Mahiro Takano wearing Sia’s black and blonde wig performing karate moves in a dark and dingy dojo,; and a lyric video shot in desaturated colours that featured female figures without their faces shown, wearing two-tone black and white wigs, in a space where the lyrics were written on the walls. Alive was an international hit with global sales of more than two million units/copies, it was one of Sia’s most disturbingly melancholic empowerment anthems, and the song and the karate video captured a kind of brutal isolation, that had been the hallmark of much of Sia’s artistic oeuvre.
The third track lifted from the alum was Move Your Body, a pulsating Shakira sound-a-like song for the club scene, a sweaty, carnal call-to-arms filled with an instant catchy chant for dancefloor engagement. Sure it was predictable, and a little formulaic, an obvious attempt at a straight-up Europop dance floor jam, but it was also a gutsy, unabashed 4/4 stutterbeat disco magnet, that inspired the titular demand to boogey and Move Your Body.
A lyric video of Move Your Body was set in a photography studio in an American Mall in 1987, and featured a girl (portrayed by (Lilian Ketchman) and her parents in a glamour photo shoot until she runs off set, where she finds Sia’s signature black-and-blonde wig in a dressing room and tries it on. She then photobombs strangers’ posed pictures until her parents drag her away, but the strangers invite her back for even more photos and dance along with her, it charted across the world, was top 10 in eight countries, and sold more than 1.4 million units/copies.
The Greatest was an additional track added to the deluxe version of This Is Acting, released in 2016, and proved to be an inspired digital download for Sia’s fans as the third single off the album, which featured a verse from rapper Kendrick Lamar. The solo version was written by Sia, Greg Kurstin, and Blair MacKichan, and was a massively thought-provoking electropop song that was inspired by the tragic deaths of 49 people inside the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando Florida in 2016.
The song and the accompanying video featuring Maddy Ziegler and dancers representing the number of people slain during the attack, was praised as a potent work of art, not opportunistic or stereotypical in any way, but consistent with Sia’s musical catalogue about grief, pain and release in everyday life. Mournful vocals, stark emotional highs and lows, explosive drums, and reggae riffs, conveyed the subliminal messages that defined the value of life, and measured the human potential that had been cruelly lost.
The accompanying music video featured Maddie Ziegler surrounded by 48 young people, and this was interpreted as a tribute to the 49 victims of the shooting, as the video tracked the emotions and trauma of the dancers before, during, and after the attack, until all figuratively fall down dead. It was a hugely impactful record, and exploded across global markets, hitting #1 in 8 countries and top 5 in another 28 countries, with total sales of over 5 million units.
Unstoppable was the sixth and final promotional single lifted from This Is Acting in 2016, it was a stomping, empowering, electropop anthem, with lyrics that stridently underlined the girl power message “”I’m unstoppable, I’m a Porsche with no brakes / I’m invincible, I win every single game / I’m so powerful I don’t need batteries to play / I’m so confident yeah I’m unstoppable today…” it was triumphant, fist-pumping, with a raise-the rafters chorus. It may have been originally intended for Demi Lovato, or Rihanna, Adele, or Katy Perry, but ultimately Sia would make it her own. Initially the song was a minor charter for Sia, hitting top 40 in only a few European countries, but it would become a sleeper over the next five years and be re-invented via social media and brand association marketing campaigns, to emerge as yet another hit for the pop titan. The actor/dancer here was Gabby Hoffmann (1942), a child actor from the age of 7 (Field of Dreams, Uncle Buck, Sleepless in Seattle), and in more mature roles in such TV series as Girls, and Transparent. her brilliant performance in this vid was also described as “paneful”.(sic)
In 2016 US Major League Baseball used the song to promote the post-season as well as highlights, in 2019 Lancome used the song in a commercial for their Idole fragrance that starred Zendaya; in 2022 Unstoppable was featured in a commercial for the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, and in the same year it was released to radio as an official single in the USA after gaining popularity via these commercials and the video-sharing app Tik Tok. By the end of 2023 Unstoppable had sold more than 3 million copies, hit #1 in the USA and top ten in Canada, India, and throughout Europe, and reached one billion streams on Spotify, making it the third Sia song to achieve this landmark, after Cheap Thrills and Chandelier.
4The Record 