Exclusively Sia: The Chandelier Was Never Just a Song
"Exclusively - Sia" is one of 312 single-artist channels in Kalisha's Exclusive collection — one continuous stream, nothing but her catalog, running around the clock. It's a smaller, quieter corner of that lineup than some of its neighbors, and it's easy to underestimate how much life sits behind the songs it plays.
Sia Kate Isobelle Furler started out fronting Crisp, an acid-jazz band in Adelaide, Australia, in the mid-1990s. When the band split, she moved to London and spent several years as the touring and session vocalist for the trip-hop duo Zero 7, before signing her own solo deal in 2000. Her early albums — Healing Is Difficult (2000), Colour the Small One (2004) — found a cult following but never a wide one.
In 1997, her boyfriend Daniel Pontifex was killed in a car accident. He was 24. Sia has said in interviews that the loss sent her into years of heavy drinking and drug use, and that at her lowest point she was suicidal and went into rehab to survive it. By the end of the 2000s, worn down by touring and increasingly uncomfortable with fame itself, she announced she was quitting as a public performer altogether — not slowing down, stopping.
What she didn't stop doing was writing songs. Working anonymously through the early 2010s, she wrote "Titanium" for David Guetta and, in 2012, "Diamonds" for Rihanna — a No. 1 hit she has said she was certain would be turned down. She won Australia's APRA Songwriter of the Year three years running, 2013 through 2015, without most of the world knowing her name, let alone her face.
Then, in 2014, she came back — on her own terms. "Chandelier," the lead single from 1000 Forms of Fear, is about exactly the years that preceded it: drinking and partying as a way of not feeling anything at all, dressed up as a party anthem right up until the chorus admits otherwise. Sia performed it, and everything after it, with her face hidden behind an oversized wig and bow, letting dancer Maddie Ziegler carry the song's identity in its video instead of her own. She'd become one of the biggest pop artists in the world by refusing to be recognized on the street — visible as a voice, invisible as a person, on purpose.
That's the song still running, in rotation with the rest of her catalog, every time someone opens this station. It was never really about the chandelier.
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