Hearing Sandrine sing for the first time is the aural equivalent to those eagerly welcomed, spirit-lifting days when a spring thaw arrives, after a long cold winter. The Australian’s voice is wise-beyond-her-years: warm in tone, hopeful in feel, and infused with a natural sensuality. Her North American debut album with Canadian Label Nettwerk Records, Dark Fades Into The Light, is the end result of an extraordinary musical, emotional and geographical journey that took her from the rugged Blue Mountain range of Australia to the gentler Catskills outside of Woodstock, where she recorded with Grammy award-winning producer Malcolm Burn, the former Daniel Lanois protégé who has produced and/or played with such artists as Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris and Rachael Yamagata.

Sandrine started performing the moment she could stand on stage, or in front of a church congregation. Her minister father loved music, and turned his family into a Partridge Family of the religious kind. He moved them from the Blue Mountains area west of Sydney to New Zealand when Sandrine was six and organized them into an itinerant Christian music group called the Cornerstone Family. Sandrine explains, “ We recorded an album at home and then went on the road. My father got a bus that we converted into a home, and we went around selling albums and performing as a band. At the time I played a really cool instrument called an Omnichord. One of my sisters played piano, another played bass, and my brother played drums. It seemed like second nature to me, singing in front of crowds. In church, everyone sings really loudly no matter what your voice sounds like. That’s where I learned about music.”

Though the church songs left an indelible impression with Sandrine, she rebelled as a teenager and moved out of the family house when she was 15 and into a trailer (or caravan as she calls it) in the backyard. She took a job as a waitress at a café where her customers brought her samples of the secular music she’d been denied the opportunity to hear in the past. Sandrine recalls, “The first record someone gave me was the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, and I just sat in the caravan and listened and thought ‘Oh my God, this is excellent.’ I sat there and wrote songs, and soon after that, I left home. I traveled a lot and picked up the guitar because it’s a portable instrument and I could write on it — which I did for the next two years. Then I came back and settled in Sydney, where I wrote the first album.”

In 2004, Sandrine released Trigger in Australia and immediately caused a stir. The title track made it into the Top 20 of the Australian pop charts and a huge commercial station named her Songwriter of the Year. U.S. major labels took notice and even Gene Simmons of Kiss, who runs his own label, insisted on meeting her when he passed through Sydney. But her rapidly rising profile soon took a surreal turn. Rather than being perceived as the self-motivated singer-songwriter she was, Sandrine was seen by some as a willowy blonde pop confection offered up by a major label. Her artistic gifts were overshadowed by frenzied tabloid speculation about exactly what she meant when she sang that her finger was on the trigger “and I’m thinking of you.” It was further fueled by a playfully racy, webcam-themed video – think Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” if Fiona actually looked like she was having fun romping around in her underwear. The fact that Sandrine was a minister’s daughter lent the newspaper stories a good-girl-gone-bad twist.

“It definitely set me back,” Sandrine explains. “When I would go out to play, people were always surprised by me, almost shocked that I was a real musician. It also made my label at the time hanker to really push me as a new artist.”

When Sandrine was ready to write and record Dark Fades Into The Light, she was determined to do it on her own terms; the first step was to find a producer outside of Australia. She sent out demos to several American producers, including Michael Burn. “A number of people did get back to me, but in the end I really liked the way Malcolm wanted to work,” Sandrine says. “He does stuff really live and in a natural way. My first record sounded quite produced, and I didn’t love it, so I wanted the next album to be a bit raw.”

Sandrine traveled to Burn’s residential studio, which he’d built in a large Victorian house not far from Woodstock, New York. Though they planned on cutting perhaps three songs, their chemistry as collaborators and the nurturing atmosphere of the place encouraged them to keep the tape rolling. Says Sandrine, “I came up there with a pile of songs. Wurlitzers and vintage keyboards were what I was into playing at home. When I got there, I started playing Malcolm’s pianos – real pianos – and found them so great to play and write on. Every day I would get up and play the piano and write a song and Malcolm would be like, ‘That’s pretty good; we should record that.’ In the end, he really believed in what I was doing, so we did the whole album. Half of the songs were ones that I’d come over with; others were ones I came up with on the spot.”

Sandrine’s melodies incorporate elements of classic sixties pop with a dreamy sort of contemporary neo-soul; she makes even her most confessional of songs instantly hummable by embedding them with subtle yet addictive little hooks. As she sings in the upbeat “Where Do We Go?,” which has already gained considerable exposure in France as part of a TV ad for the FNAC music chain, “I made a U turn/And I’m still alive.” Sandrine is now residing in New York State with Burn in work as well as in life; she’s starting to venture back on to the live stage, with gigs at Levon Helm’s upstate Ramble event and at some downtown Manhattan clubs. On such open-hearted tracks as “Let the Love” and “It’s OK,” Dark Fades Into The Light is something of a celebration – of artistic independence and of sheer survival, of daring to fall in love and of the simple joys that come from making music every day.

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LET THE LOVE

TRIGGER

Dark Fades Into The Light
Sandrine
* Original Release Date: January 1, 2008
* Label: Nettwerk Productions
* Genres: Pop/General, Pop
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