If there's one thing that Kate Miller-Heidke never wants to be, it's pop's wacky person. "I think, at heart, I'm still a folk musician," she says. "That's the music I was weaned on; these beautiful, honest, confessional, raw lyrics.
I think that's always been my main way of expressing myself and my emotions." At a glance, it would be easy enough to dismiss such a statement as mere precociousness. Indeed, the 25-year-old girl in the clip for Words, the bombastic first cut from Miller-Heidke's long-awaited debut album, , would strike you as anything but the introspective type.
With her shock of peroxide-enhanced locks, off-kilter attitude and soaring, swooping vocals, the young Brisbanite comes across more as an eccentrically talented theatre student run off the rails than a soulful chanteuse. In a sense, it's not far from the truth. Much of Miller-Heidke's musical vernacular comes from theatrical roots.
A trained vocalist from the age of 14 (and as she puts it "a born show-off"), she started not at an open mic night but on centre stage as a professional opera singer. "I just loved the sound of my own voice," she says with a laugh. "Originally I just wanted to be able to sing like Mariah Carey," she giggles again.
"I suppose most 14-year-old girls do. But then my teacher kind of nudged me towards a classical path. "I guess being involved in classical opera, and the melodrama of that, kind of informed my style to an extent.
I've always been a big lover of musical theatre and of the weirder aspects of pop music like Chrissie Amphlett and the Divinyls and Queen." Spend any amount of time with the folk-inflected ditties that bind , which was recorded by Brisbane uber-producer Magoo and released this month through SonyBMG, and you'll find an intensely personal complexity running through her unusual songcraft. Immersed in the foibles of relationships, the likes of and ache with the kind of close-knit, domestic details rarely explored in pop music.
Scattered among themes of love and love lost are references to email, TV and depressively downing chocolate milk. As she explains, the experience can be a bit much for pop audiences not used to hearing such intimate particulars. "People do sometimes find it a bit confronting," she says.
"Especially when they're used to hearing more generic-type lyrics - like broad, emotional sweeps - whereas I like to focus on the small details of things.
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