Guy Sebastian: Speaking The Truth

Winning the first Australian Idol in 2003 and having just released his ninth studio album, it’s been quite the ride for Guy Sebastian. The nicest man in pop reveals why he’s no longer interested in people-pleasing, why T.R.U.T.H is his best work yet, and why despite blowing his entire home studio budget, he just had to get his hands on some Genelec monitors.

Like many people, Sebastian hadn’t even heard of Wuhan until, well, you know. Of all places, that’s exactly where he found himself for a music festival in November 2019, just before the coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic was first discovered there.

“I put up this post on Instagram which was one of those posts that did not age very well at all,” he cringes. “I said something like: 'What a beautiful city with beautiful people. And God did I eat some interesting things, but more on that later…’ Yeeeeah, so that really, really didn't age well. To think of that, to now, and what the world's been through is mind blowing.”

Sebastian is in Sydney, Australia – a country which has had a relatively good grip over controlling the spread of the virus when compared to other first world countries.

“Yeah, look, what's a good analogy? It's almost like when you're…” he trails off laughing at himself. “Oh, gosh, this is a terrible analogy...but it’s like when you're in a happy relationship, and one of your very good friends is in a really crappy time in their relationship, and you don't want to be all lovey dovey in front of them.

"We're pretty lucky because we're an island nation, so we were able to lock off from the rest of the world and deal with the issue.”

Shutting out the outside world and retreating to the safety of his home studio (“it's one of those studios that's a room within a room within a room”), Sebastian has been kept well and truly occupied with perfecting his ninth studio album, T.R.U.T.H, which debuted at number one in Australia on the ARIA Albums Chart, making it his ninth Top Ten charting album.

He’s also the only Australian male artist in Australian chart history to achieve six number one singles, and he’s a bloody nice bloke too – not that everyone agrees.

“I think when you come from a beautiful family like the one that I've come from where there's so much love, you never prepare yourself for the fact that there's going to be people that just hate you! It's weird when you're a public person because you’ve got fans that love you, will fight for you and support you, and then there's all the people that don't really care and that will take you or leave you. Then there's this little sect that absolutely despises you, and you're not prepared for it, because...who's prepared for that?

‘I'm very fortunate in the sense that I'm not that divisive as a person or an artist so I hopefully don't have that many people that hate me [Headliner imagines that anyone that has met or spoken to him will find it physically impossible to dislike him]. But if you spend this energy trying to please these few people on Twitter or whatever it is, you spend your energy going, ‘please like me! I'm a pretty good bloke if you got to know me!’ And then you realise you've spent all this time on them.

"There's all these people that were way more deserving of that energy. In life, we spend so much energy on that tiny minority that we want to prove wrong, as opposed to the people that already believe in us as we are.”

This reminds him of a time that this really hit home:

“It was a big lesson for me because I remember a fan wrote to me and I burst into tears after reading his message. He said that he’d sent me tons of messages on Facebook, and that he saw that I'd responded to this clown that had a crack at me who had never messaged me before. Yet this fan never got a response from me. I just burst into tears; I felt like such a fool.

"That is something that I apply to a lot of different things, because you're never going to please everybody in your business. Even in a songwriting session, for example, I would never want to offend somebody, but I've got to be strong and I've got to look at the ultimate goal. That's given me a bit of strength to not be a people-pleaser.”

Headliner tries to resist the urge to like him and moves onto his new album, T.R.U.T.H, which Sebastian created to open up more about his life and the things that he’s been through. Recent single, Standing With You was penned just before the Covid-19-related travel bans came into effect, and – understandably – he was feeling anxious about the state of the world.

Scrolling through Instagram in the back of an Uber on the way to the writing session at The Village Studios in L.A, he happened upon a post written by his cousin detailing his battle with depression, reminding him that beyond this pandemic, people are already fighting their own mental health battles.

“It stopped me in my tracks because I’m close with my cousin, but I had no idea that he was going through what he was going through. He posted it to help other people, and so it shifted my whole focus for the day. I really wanted to write something because even back then it was starting to bubble as far as people's anxiousness and fears about isolation.

"All those sorts of things don't provide a great experience and environment for a lot of people who are already suffering, so I wanted to write a song that was going to let a lot of people know that they're not doing this battle alone.”

Sebastian co-wrote Standing With You with Jamie Hartman, whose songwriting credits include Rag'n'Bone Man’s Human and Lewis Capaldi's Hold Me While You Wait.

“When I got to the end of singing it for the first time, we both started to cry in the studio – and it's not something that happens often in sessions that we just randomly cry! I think we just realised at the end of the song that we had created something special. It was a healing moment for us as well, and my goodness, since releasing it in Australia and in other places around the world, I've received so many messages saying how the song helps people. So it's really fulfilling as a songwriter to have that happen.”

Sebastian won Australian Idol in 2003, securing a spot on the show with his audition song, Ribbon in The Sky by Stevie Wonder – despite one of the judges telling him he looked like crap.

“Can you imagine if they said that now? It was a different time! Yeah Dicko said I looked like crap, but they also said I had the best voice that they had heard,” he chuckles.

“It was a chunk of life ago, but to be honest, I still can't believe it. One would think that it would sink in, but I still have many moments where I just go, ‘What am I doing? How is this me?’ I always describe it as though I'm running alongside myself going, ‘What are you doing? How is this my life? Is this actually happening?’”

A longtime fan of Genelec monitors, Sebastian recently invested in a pair of 8341A monitors for his John Sayers-designed home studio, adding to his existing pair of 1034B main monitors.

“I'm very involved with production, and I have a really great flow with how I write and how I produce. Unless I'm working with a producer in a session, I'll produce a track, I'll do all my own vocals and I'll record some of the instruments. Anything I'm able to record, I'll put down to flesh out the structure, and then I'll hand that over to somebody who's a way better producer than me!”

Sebastian first bought a pair of secondhand Genelecs (or ‘Gennys’, as he calls them) when it was all he could afford.

“Genelecs always pack a punch; they're renowned as being a really clear and punchy monitor. My studio is so acoustically tuned and beautiful, and I had some other monitors then which weren't great, so they really stuck out in the studio. The minute I got the 8341A monitors in here, it was next level. The stereo imaging and my mixes became a lot better straight away.

"After I do a mix I always do a ‘car listen’ afterwards, and it's always way better than what I was doing before. Before, I always thought it was much of a muchness and you just get used to what you use, but I will say having great monitors has made a big difference to me.”