Music is, without a doubt, a rock for many people. Its ability to drag us kicking and screaming through hard times is unquestionable, and as an outlet for stress and personal expression – both positive and negative – it’s hard to think of anything more valuable.
For Sammi Constantine, music proved to be exactly that, the outlet that helped her to overcome huge hurdles in her life. Pouring her hardships into her music, and sharing them with others, not only allowed her to recover from an illness that knocked her off her chosen path, but also set her about forging a new one.
Sammi’s first, unquestionable passion was dance; for as long as she can remember, she was taking classes up to five days a week, when her family could afford it. “I’ve been dancing since the age of three, with my forte being classical ballet,” she recalls, “but I also took contemporary, jazz, hip hop and everything in between. I dabbled in the musical theatre world for a few years, landing a few lead roles that include dancing, acting and singing.”
Dance seemed like her calling, but at the point where it was time to begin pursuing it as a career, life, as it has a habit of doing, intervened.
“I was very seriously considering a career as a professional ballet dancer and I was already taking classes at the Australian Ballet Company whenever they had workshops on, as well as auditioning for any shows locally that would help build my resume.
“I was convinced that dance was it and saw nothing else on my path,” Sammi says, “until my world kinda got flipped upside down. In 2009 I was officially diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa and Depression.”
Turning to music
Flipped upside down is putting it lightly, with Sammi’s illness becoming so severe that she was forced to give up dance, the one thing she’d anchored herself to for as long as she could remember.
“I was admitted to “The Adolescent Eating Disorder Inpatient Program” at Westmead Hospital. I had already been working with multiple doctors and counsellors for years but nothing seemed to be changing for me, so my parents decided to take serious action in order to keep me alive.
“At 16 years old I spent a little over five-and-a-half weeks at Westmead and went through a painful re-feeding process to get me back to a normal healthy weight.”
While the lines between the world of dance and ballet and these sorts of illnesses have been clearly drawn throughout the years, Sammi insists that her problems stemmed from somewhere internal, rather than the art form she loved.
“A lot of people assumed it had something to do with being involved in the dance world,” she says, “but I know that’s not true. I’ve always been a perfectionist, and I also admit to having a very addictive personality.
“So unfortunately for 13-year-old me, I started to lose a lot of confidence in myself and began restricting my food as a form of control and as a way to deal with things that were happening in my life. ”
Sammi’s new single ‘The Game’ is definitely a show of confidence
It was this low point, however, that brought Sammi closer to a new passion: writing music. With control out of her hands completely and her main creative outlet taken away from her, Sammi had to look elsewhere, and songwriting soon became not just a way to pass the time, but one of the keys to overcoming her illness.
“I’ve always been a performer since the day I could walk,” she says, “but it took until the age of about 14 when I realised I was half decent at singing and started to write – and picked up a guitar for the first time.
“During my time in hospital I was on bed rest for more than half of it, leaving me with nothing much to do other than attempt to catch up on school work and write about what I was experiencing in a journal,” she explains. “Keeping journals eventually lead to poetry, which then turned into lyrics.”
Those lyrics were the seeds that have since grown into a burgeoning music career, and a completely different outlook on life. “I continued to struggle with dangerous eating habits and depression until around my 18th birthday,” she says. “It’s almost been 6 years ago now that I was officially cleared of Anorexia and Depression. I will never go back.”
Opening up
Sammi was excited by her new path as a musician, but it wasn’t an easy transition for her to make, owing especially to the deeply-personal nature of her journal-like lyrics.
“At first I was terrified to perform my songs publicly,” she admits, “because it felt as though I was standing up in front of a crowd just to read out my diary to them.”
“My writing style is quite dark and metaphoric. I think initially I wrote my songs as if they were nothing more than poems, and thought that way I could hide the true meanings.
As her confidence built, though, so did her ability to open herself up to an audience.
“Having released enough of my own music, I’m more inspired than ever to tell my stories and to share my lyrics,” she says, before adding “even if they are from the deepest and darkest corners of my mind.”
Sharing those dark corners isn’t just helpful for Sammi, either, and it’s through sharing these sorts of experiences that artists can find the most meaningful part of songwriting – a genuine connection with the people who are listening to you.
“The first day that somebody told me that my music had helped them through something they were going through, I knew music was what I had to do,” she explains. “It wasn’t a selfish ‘want’ anymore or even a thing I was ‘good at’.”
“It’s since turned into not only my outlet to create and continue a healthy form of expression, but also a vehicle to help encourage others, and make them feel less alone and more understood.”
While Sammi unfortunately hasn’t rekindled her life-long passion for dance – “only in my bedroom, and occasionally I let a few moves out on stage” she laughs – her ordeal has pointed her in a direction that is more meaningful to her now than anything that came before it.
“I’m a much stronger and thicker-skinned person now,” asserts Sammi. “I have a motivation and purpose to my music and, when it comes to performances, I’m grateful for the times I had to go through things because I believe I can now be more relatable and real to my audience.”
Recent single ‘Closing In’ was a step forward for Sammi’s sound
The move to pop
That audience has definitely grown a lot in recent times, with Sammi’s move from her earlier acoustic style to a more pop-drenched sound gaining her plenty of new fans – although she insists that none of her trademark introspection has been lost in the transition.
“At first, the few people who were listening were a little confused,” she says, “but soon after they realised that my intention within my writing and lyrics was very much the same, and the only thing that changed was the music behind the lyrics.”
Her early acoustic forays were influenced by the Aussie songwriter staples like Paul Kelly and The Whitlams, but her love of pop and electronic sounds was always there, fostered by the sounds of The Avalanches and pop icon Enrique Iglesias drifting through her childhood home.
“My family isn’t “musical” and no one along the line (that I’m aware of) has ever been a performer of any sort,” she says, “but music has always been something that’s been present in my upbringing. I remember always having music played in the house.”
Her new musical direction was also, in part, influenced by her background in dance – after all, it’s hard to move when you’re perched on a stool strumming an acoustic.
“As a dancer, I was after something that made me move and, as I started working with my producer (Aaron Lee Worldwide), I was introduced to a whole new realm of different sounds and possibilities.”
Sammi has put those sounds to work most recently on her latest singles ‘Closing In’ and ‘The Game’, the latter a song that, while still deeply personal to Sammi, sees her reaching outside of that diary and into her broader experience.
“Like all of my songs it does have some personal experience woven into it, but this time I wrote it about people close to me,” she explains. “I decided to write ‘Closing In’ in first person to articulate the story more clearly,” she adds, “and so that I was more relatable.”
With a sound that sits somewhere alongside the likes of Nicole Millar (or, as triple j’s Gen Fricker put it in her Unearthed review, “Meg Mac if she’d gone more electronic. Can’t wait to hear more!”), and singles that are racking up more and more spins as the weeks go by, Sammi is happy with the decision to set the acoustic guitar aside.
“I love the edginess that electronic pop music gives my acoustic background,” she adds, before letting us in on her biggest influences on her sound, and her lyrics: “Halsey and Aurora. I’d kill for a writing session with both these ladies!”
Sammi blowing up a NZ stage on tour with electro pop outfit AIRPORTS
Honing her craft
Sammi has been fortunate enough to score a few very opportunities for writing sessions already, having made the trip to LA to work with some big figures in music thanks to her management team’s overseas connections.
“I jumped at the chance to soak up the knowledge and learn from some of the industry’s best,” she says, detailing the opportunity she had to collaborate with some writers and producers including, Atozzio Towns (Chris Brown) and Jerry Good (Blackbear / Neyo), as well as, yes, the team behind Enrique Iglesias, who she’d grown up with all those years ago.
“I wrote pretty much the entire time I was there,” she says. “I found the environment much the same as Aus, but the hours that I spent awake due to the constant hustle of LA definitely gave me a whole new perspective of the music industry and how it all works.”
That perspective will come in handy as she takes her music further and further, the struggles of six years ago a distant memory that nonetheless continues to have an influence on everything she does to this day. When we ask what’s next, the answer remains the thing that helped get her out of that hospital bed, and onto a life-changing path.
“Write, write, write!”, she exclaims. “Release a whole bunch of new music in 2017, and spread it as far around the world as possible.”
Sammi is doing that as we speak and, while weather played havoc with her recent set at Mountain Sounds Festival, she’s midway through an Aus/NZ tour with electro-pop duo AIRPORTS that will bring her to Melbourne on March 10 and 12, and Sydney on April 8. Her new single ‘The Game’ is out now.
