In early 2014, a euphoric pop juggernaut smashed its way into the public consciousness. Defined by its soaring chorus, Chandelier was seemingly the ultimate ode to letting loose - an overt clarion call to those seeking to surrender themselves to blurry excess. But its chorus’s buoyancy masked a darker lyrical commentary on addiction.
Chandelier would be the barnstorming hit that finally brought its writer, Sia, to wider public attention.
Born in Adelaide, Australia, Sia Furler had built a respectable career as a prolific, multi-faceted singer and songwriter, achieving considerable success co-penning tracks for the likes of Rihanna (Diamonds), Christina Aguilera (Blank Page, Bound to You) and Beyoncé (Pretty Hurts). She had garnered high regard as a backroom song-builder of significant skill.
“I’ve never seen anyone write a melody and lyrics that fast,” said Chandelier producer Greg Kurstin on Sia’s songwriting abilities in an interview with Rolling Stone “She’ll sing it and write it and it happens in one motion, and then she’s revising. You’ve got to keep up with her, really.”
Her 2011 collaboration with David Guetta on the vibrant Titanium was (for many unfamiliar with her solo work) the first introduction to Sia’s distinctive, powerful voice.
Although Sia's lead vocal was paramount to the song (which hit no. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became an enduring club classic) it later transpired that Sia was unaware that Guetta would use what was only intended to be a guide-vocal on the final mix of the song. It was the same story with her vocal on Flo Rida’s Wild Ones, released the same year and reaching an even more impressive 5 in the charts. But we digress…
Prior to her finding an apparent calling as a songwriter for others, Sia had achieved modest acclaim as an artist in her own right.
Following a stint as the vocalist with hailed downtempo outfit Zero 7, Sia helmed a plethora of albums under her own name, beginning with 1997’s OnlySee and 2001’s Healing is Difficult.
By the time of the release of her fifth studio album, We Are Born in 2010, Sia had grown disillusioned with the heavy demands of touring and the all-consuming pressure of maintaining a profile as an artist.
There was also the flipside of that coin, with the stresses of being a public figure (at least as far as her fanbase was concerned) being equally aggravating.
“I just wanted to have a private life,” Sia explained to The New York Times. “Once, as my friend was telling me they had cancer, someone came up and asked, in the middle of the conversation, if they could take a photograph with me. You get me? That’s enough, right?”
It was these factors that lay behind her shift to becoming a more behind-the-scenes professional songwriter.
It was a move also triggered by a dark period of intense alcohol and drug addiction.
“For one reason or another it never happened for me [as a solo artist]" Sia told Billboard in 2013. "Then I got seriously addicted to Vicodin and Oxycodone, and I was always a drinker but I didn’t know I was an alcoholic. I was really unhappy being an artist and I was getting sicker and sicker.”
Sia spiralled, later sharing that she had sadly planned to commit suicide during a particularly rough patch. Thankfully, her plan was disrupted by a fortuitous phone call from a friend.
“There must have been a part of me that really wanted to live,” Sia recalled to Rolling Stone. “In that moment, I thought, ‘There’s a world out there and I’m not a part of it. But I might like to be.’”
Sia sought professional help for her addictions, as well as her struggles with complex PTSD and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
A calamitous period no doubt, but it’s integral we highlight it, as Chandelier’s lyric draws upon this very real, lived experience.
With a final contractural obligation to deliver one more LP as a solo artist, Sia begrudgingly began work on her sixth album alongside accomplished producer Greg Kurstin. She hoped she could put this album out quickly, then return to full-time pop-writing.
"I thought I’d shit that album out and it wouldn’t do anything," Sia told Rolling Stone. "And that I would be behind the scenes from now on.”
But keen to sign the Titanium star's upcoming new record, RCA Records swooped in with an offer for the album. However, they had to contend with a pretty major stipulation that Sia demanded - there would be no touring or promotional requirements put upon her.
“[As] soon as we were in the house I knew we weren’t dealing with a regular artist,” said RCA CEO (and noted Sia fan) Peter Edge in an interview with Billboard. “We crafted a deal uniquely for her.”
Sia’s new album, 1000 Forms of Fear was presaged by a lead single that would forever change her fortunes; Chandelier.
The song’s instant ubiquity would make Sia one of the most talked about artists on the planet.
Housed within a dynamically sublime arrangement, you’d be forgiven for thinking Chandelier was a fairly route-one channelling of the buzz of gearing up for a big night - a typical pop angle.
But, a closer analysis revealed a far more nihilistic lyric. One that held up a mirror to the pernicious relationship with alcohol and hedonism that Sia had contended with.
“I wrote the song because there's so many party-girl anthems in pop,” Sia told NPR. “I thought it'd be interesting to do a different take on that.”
“When I'm writing a pop song I'll just write formulaically, strategically,” Sia told Elle. “I had the title and the concept [of Chandelier] and as I wrote it, I was just like, 'This is cooler than usual'"
The song’s co-writer (and close studio colleague of producer, Greg Kurstin), Jesse Shatkin recalled that Chandelier was the very first thing that he composed with Sia.
“We wrote Chandelier when we had some downtime during a session with Greg,” Shatkin told Songwriter Universe. “I was engineering part of Sia’s album. We went to the live room (in the studio) which has a drum kit and piano. Sia sat at the piano and I played the marimba. We found some chord progressions that we liked. She was singing over them and recording onto her iPhone. I fleshed it out by creating the track, and she nailed the melody and the lyrics.”
In constructing the song, Sia instinctively applied some of the same principles that had yielded gold for others. Impressively, it took no time at all…
"I mean, Chandelier took like four minutes to write the chords, then like 12-15 minutes to write the lyrics," she nonchalanty explained to NPR. "Probably 10 or 15 minutes to cut the vocals."
Its chords spanned Bb minor, Gb maj7, Ab and F minor during the more subdued first verse, Gb maj7, Bb minor and Ab in the rising-momentum pre-chorus (underpinning the hooky 'One, two, three, one, two, three, drink' part) and, for the room-shaking chorus, Gb maj7, Ab, Db/F before returning to Gb maj 7.
It was a musical journey that perfectly housed Sia’s lyrical narrative of searching for a form of salvation in a looming night of untroubled partying.
I'm gonna swing from the chandelier
I'm gonna live like tomorrow doesn't exist
I'm gonna fly like a bird through the night
Feel my tears as they dry
Despite being intuitively written with a wide-appeal, pop mindset, Sia realised that the lyric’s narrative was drawing upon a part of her life that she’d rather forget. This was particularly evident in the euphoria-puncturing realisation of the post-chorus
But I'm holding on for dear life
Won't look down, won't open my eyes
Keep my glass full until morning light
'Cause I'm just holding on for tonight
Feeling both excited by the brilliance of the song, but a little self-conscious, Sia attempted to pitch it to Rihanna. Surprisingly, she wasn’t interested.
“I was so surprised she didn’t take it, because I thought it was the greatest song in the world at the time,” Sia later told Good Morning America.
After tracking the song’s huge vocal, it dawned on Sia that it was clearly always going to be her song.
“When I sang it I thought, 'Oh, this song's for me.' It was one of those pop songs where I was like, 'I don't want to give this away because I actually relate to it.' A lot of the time I don't actually relate to what I'm writing about in pop songs.”
Working with Kurstin, Sia concocted an apt electro-pop arrangement, which left plenty of space to foreground Sia’s mightiest vocal to date.
The initial verse is led by a reggae-leaning hi-hat pattern punctuated with a gut-shuddering sub, whilst in the recesses of the mix, distant crystalline synth melodies twinkle inquisitively. The pre-chorus preps the listener for that freefall of the chorus via a full-blooded 808-flavoured beat.
It’s really that pedal-to-the-metal chorus though that is the most memorable moment of the song. Its thunderous drum track heightens the intensity with a live room sound, supporting that stellar vocal.
It sounded like a monster hit, and an obvious lead single.
But there was one problem - Sia herself had little ambition to be thrust back into the limelight after the rocky road she’d already traversed as an artist.
“I really felt like Chandelier was a big pop song. But we weren’t sure what would happen if I wasn’t willing to show my face and do promo and go on tour and do the traditional kind of pop strategy,” Sia told Elle. “So I had no expectations. Because of that, I was able to take a great risk, which is the risk of failure as a solo artist, because I was already gratefully making good money writing pop songs for pop stars.”
What Sia needed was an avatar of sorts to front the single's music video.
Enter the 11 year-old Maddie Ziegler. A prodigious dancer (and star of reality television show Dance Moms.)
Sia had been a fan of Maddie for a while, and saw in her expressive movements a way of visually articulating Chandelier’s intrinsic vulnerability without needing the artist herself to be on-camera.
“I'm addicted to reality television and it finally paid off because I had been watching Maddie for years and I'd always been drawn to her - she has something very magical and otherworldly. She's like a regular 11-year-old kid and then when she starts dancing it becomes a whole other beast. I'd been waiting for an opportunity to work with her,” Sia told Dazed.
“It was really funny. Sia was a fan of our show. She actually tweeted us, ‘Hey, Maddie, would you like to be in my new video for my new song Chandelier?’ I was just like, Whoa, this is pretty cool,” Ziegler recalled in an interview with Vulture.
Sporting a medium-length blonde wig, similar to the one that Sia herself would eventually wear for the (unavoidable) publicity requirements that the record triggered, Ziegler was depicted exuberantly dancing through a shoddy, dilapidated apartment.
Although it seems as if Ziegler is interpreting the song spontaneously, in actual fact, it was a choreographed routine.
“I didn’t really get the whole concept of it, but I was obviously playing Mini Sia,” recalled Maddie “I had the wig and everything. All the tips and corrections I was getting [were] just, really use your crazy eyes and just be weird."
Directed by Sia herself alongside Daniel Askill, the video became instantly iconic, racking up 2.8 billion views on YouTube and, at one point, ranking as the 13th biggest YouTube video of all time. Ziegler would go on to feature on further videos for successive 1000 Forms of Fear singles, Elastic Heart and Big Girls Cry. She'd become an inseparable muse and sidekick of Sia's over the course of the next few years.
Hitting the top 5 in over twenty countries globally, and number 8 in the US (her first Hot 100 entry as a solo artist), Chandelier dominated 2014. And, its singer, frequently hidden beneath a stylised, oversized blonde wig (and typically accompanied by Maddie) was shrouded in intrigue.
Although a byproduct of trying to avoid the limelight, Sia's obscured face, hidden by her 'bangs wig', only made people more curious about who this mysterious singer really was.
Still widely regarded as Sia’s signature cut, Chandelier remains both a stunning piece of ultra-effective pop songwriting, and a rare recent example a mass-appeal track that houses a nuanced subtext, drawn from lived experience.
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