Sia: The Life Story Behind the Hidden Pop Star
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Sia Kate Isobelle Furler was born on 18 December 1975 in Adelaide, South Australia, and she became one of the most recognisable voices in pop while doing almost everything she could to keep her face out of the picture. Her father, Phil Coluccio, played in bands, and her mother, Loene Furler, was a singer-songwriter, so music was not a hobby brought in from outside the house but the ordinary sound of home. Adelaide in the 1970s and 1980s was a long way from the centres of the music industry, and Sia has spoken about growing up in a household where creativity was normal and money was not always plentiful. She attended Adelaide High School, sang wherever she could, and by her late teens was already performing in local bands. Nothing about that beginning promised a global career, and the years that followed were full of false starts, grief, and hard travel before the world learned her name.
Adelaide: A Musical Household With No Easy Path
Sia grew up in a house where instruments were lying around and singing was part of daily life, and her parents’ work as musicians gave her an early sense that a song was something you built, not something that simply arrived. Her father played guitar and her mother wrote songs, and Sia has described herself as a child who sang constantly, imitating voices she heard on records and on the radio. Adelaide High School gave her a conventional education, but her real training happened in rehearsal rooms and small venues around the city, where she learned how to hold a note, how to follow a band, and how to keep going when almost nobody was listening. She later said that Adelaide felt small for the ambitions she was forming, yet it also gave her a certain toughness, because a performer who starts in a small city learns to earn attention rather than assume it.
Music in the Furler household was not polished or commercial, and that mattered, because Sia’s voice developed a rough, emotional edge that no singing teacher had smoothed away. She listened widely, from jazz to pop to the rock records her father played, and she began to understand that a voice could carry feeling even when it cracked or bent out of shape. As a teenager she joined local groups and sang backing vocals, learning the discipline of fitting her voice around other musicians instead of always leading. Those early years did not produce fame or money, but they produced a singer who could adapt, and that adaptability later became the reason so many producers wanted her in the studio. The Adelaide years were the foundation, even if almost nobody outside the city noticed them at the time.
By the time Sia left school she knew she wanted music to be her work, but she had no map for how a girl from Adelaide reached the wider world, and the first steps were local, unpaid, and uncertain. She sang in bars and at small events, took whatever gigs came, and began writing her own material, discovering that her songs tended toward the confessional, with melodies that rose suddenly and lyrics that said more than they seemed to at first. Friends and fellow musicians in Adelaide remember a singer with an unusually strong voice and an unusually stubborn streak, someone who would keep singing through a bad sound system or an empty room. That stubbornness carried her through the years when the industry showed no interest, and it is worth remembering because the later fame often makes the early struggle look shorter than it was.
Crisp, London and the Long Apprenticeship
In the mid-1990s Sia joined the Adelaide acid jazz band Crisp, and the group released the album Word and the Deal in 1996, her first recording in a professional setting. Acid jazz was a niche sound in Australia, and Crisp never became a national success, but the album gave Sia studio experience and a credit she could point to, and it showed she could work inside a band rather than only as a solo voice. When Crisp broke up, she did what many Australian musicians of her generation did and looked overseas, moving to London in 1997. London was expensive, crowded, and indifferent, and Sia has spoken about working hard simply to survive there, taking singing jobs wherever they appeared. The move did not bring instant success, but it put her in rooms with producers and musicians who worked at an international level, and that education was worth more than any single gig.
London in the late 1990s was full of singers looking for a break, and Sia’s first years there were spent singing backing vocals, including work with the funk band Jamiroquai, whose frontman Jay Kay led one of the most successful British acts of the decade. Backing vocals are invisible work, and Sia did a great deal of it, learning how to blend, how to take direction, and how to deliver a performance in one or two takes when the clock was running. She released her debut solo album, OnlySee, in Australia in 1997, but it sold very little and was barely noticed outside a small circle. The disappointment could have ended the attempt, yet she stayed in London, kept writing, and kept accepting session work, building a reputation among producers as a singer who could be trusted with a difficult vocal line. That reputation, built slowly and without publicity, became the bridge to the next stage of her career.
Around the turn of the century Sia was still largely unknown to the public, but inside the London music scene her name was starting to travel, because session singers who can write their own songs are rare and producers notice them. She wrote constantly, filling notebooks with melodies and lyrics, and she began to develop the style that would later define her: big, emotional choruses sung in a voice that sounded as if it might break, paired with words that were direct and unsentimental. The London years also brought personal loss, including the death of her boyfriend Dan Pontifex in a car accident in 1997, an event she has spoken about as a deep wound that shaped her songwriting for years. Grief did not make her famous, but it deepened the writing, and listeners who later connected with songs like Breathe Me were hearing a voice that had already learned how much a song could carry.
Zero 7 and the Voice People Remembered
The turning point in London came through the electronic duo Zero 7, formed by Henry Binns and Sam Hardaker, who invited Sia to sing on their debut album Simple Things, released in 2001. Her vocals on tracks such as Destiny and Distractions gave the record its human centre, and the album became a success in the downtempo and chill-out scene, selling well and earning the duo a Mercury Prize nomination. For the first time, Sia’s voice was reaching people who had never heard of her, and the distinctive, slightly husky tone that listeners remembered belonged to a singer whose name was printed in small type on the sleeve. She toured with Zero 7 and sang on their second album, When It Falls, in 2004, but she was still presented as a featured voice rather than a star in her own right. The experience taught her how a song could travel without its singer being famous, a lesson she would later use deliberately.
Zero 7’s success showed Sia that her voice could carry a record, and it also showed the industry that she was more than a session singer, because the songs she sang on became the ones people asked about. Destiny in particular became a defining track of the early 2000s downtempo sound, played in cafes, on radio, and on compilations around the world, and Sia’s vocal on it is still the version people remember. Yet the money and the recognition were modest, and Sia remained a working musician rather than a celebrity, flying between London and Australia and taking jobs as they came. She has said that the Zero 7 years were happy ones, because the music was good and the pressure was low, and that freedom allowed her to write without worrying about charts. That combination of a memorable voice and a low profile would become the pattern of her whole career.
Working with Zero 7 also introduced Sia to a way of making music that suited her: producers building tracks around a vocal, rather than a singer fronting a band, and the collaboration model stayed with her for years. She learned to write quickly to a backing track, to try unusual melodies, and to trust a first take when it had feeling in it, habits that later made her one of the most in-demand songwriters in pop. The duo’s albums were not pop blockbusters, but they were respected, and respect in the industry opened doors that a hit single might not have. By the time she left the Zero 7 orbit to concentrate on her own records, she had a catalogue of songs, a network of collaborators, and a voice that producers recognised instantly. The apprenticeship was over, even if the public still had no idea who she was.
Breathe Me and the Slow Rise of a Solo Artist
Sia’s solo career advanced in small steps rather than one leap, and the album Colour the Small One, released in 2004, contained the song that finally made her name known to a wider audience. Breathe Me was a quiet, fragile ballad that built slowly toward a chorus of unusual power, and its use in the final scene of the television series Six Feet Under in 2005 gave it a moment that no amount of radio promotion could have bought. Viewers who had watched the show for five years heard the song as the characters’ lives flashed forward, and many of them went looking for the singer, discovering a catalogue that had been growing quietly for years. The album itself had been released first in Australia and then in Britain and the United States, and its slow spread showed how a single television placement could change a career that had been built on patience.
Healing Is Difficult, her second album, had come out in 2001, and Some People Have Real Problems followed in 2008, reaching the top twenty in Australia and the United States and producing the single Soon We’ll Be Found. We Are Born, released in 2010, was brighter and more pop-oriented, with the single You’ve Changed and the song Titanium written during those sessions, although Titanium would first become famous in someone else’s hands. Each album sold modestly compared with the stars of the day, but each one added listeners who stayed, and Sia’s live shows built a loyal audience that valued the voice over the spectacle. She performed with a band, sang without elaborate staging, and let the songs do the work, a style that suited rooms of a few hundred people far better than arenas. The slow rise was frustrating at times, but it meant that when the breakthrough finally came, she already had a body of work behind her.
The solo years also taught Sia what she did and did not want from fame, and she has spoken openly about struggling with depression, alcohol, and the pressure of promoting herself. She moved to New York, then Los Angeles, and began to think seriously about whether she wanted to be a performing star at all, or whether her real strength was writing songs that other people sang. That question shaped the next decade, because she decided to step back from the spotlight as a performer and to sell her songs to the biggest pop stars in the world, a decision that made her rich and famous in a way she had not expected. The solo albums of the 2000s were therefore not a failure but a laboratory, the place where she learned to write choruses that could carry a stadium, even if she was singing them in a small club.
Writing Hits for Other People
By the early 2010s Sia had become one of the most sought-after songwriters in pop, and the list of artists who recorded her songs reads like a chart of the decade. Titanium, written with the French DJ David Guetta, was released in 2011 with Sia singing the vocal, and it became a worldwide hit, reaching the top ten in many countries and introducing her voice to dance floors everywhere. She then wrote Diamonds for Rihanna in 2012, a song that went to number one in the United States and became one of Rihanna’s defining singles, and she co-wrote Wild Ones for Flo Rida, another huge hit. Other artists who recorded her songs included Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Britney Spears, and Celine Dion, and the royalties from those songs gave Sia financial security for the first time in her life. Songwriting also suited her temperament, because she could write a hit in a studio in Los Angeles and never have to appear on television to promote it.
The songwriting years changed how the industry saw Sia, because producers who had once hired her as a voice now came to her for the song itself, and her ability to write a chorus in a single session became legendary among her collaborators. She has described writing Diamonds in about fourteen minutes, a story that has been repeated so often it has become part of her legend, and whether the exact time is precise or not, the point is that she worked fast and trusted her instincts. She wrote in a style that was direct and emotional, with images that were simple enough to sing along to and strange enough to remember, and that combination worked across genres, from Rihanna’s pop to Beyoncé’s R&B. The success also gave her leverage, because when she decided to return to performing, she could do it on her own terms, with a record deal that respected her wish to stay out of the public eye. Songwriting was the engine of her fortune, and it remains the skill that underpins everything else she has done.
Writing for others also taught Sia how pop stardom worked from the inside, and she saw clearly how much of a star’s life was spent being photographed, interviewed, and judged on appearance rather than on music. She decided that if she returned to the stage, she would separate the voice from the face, and that decision led directly to the most famous image of her career: the oversized blonde wig that covered her face. The songwriting period was therefore not a detour but the preparation for the next act, because it gave her the hits, the money, and the confidence to make a record that nobody could ignore. She signed with RCA, recorded 1000 Forms of Fear, and prepared a comeback that would be built around the music and a single, unforgettable video, with her own face deliberately absent from both.
Chandelier, the Wig and Choosing Privacy
The album 1000 Forms of Fear was released in 2014, and its lead single Chandelier became one of the defining pop songs of the decade, reaching the top ten in many countries and earning Sia Grammy nominations. The video, directed by Sia and Daniel Askill, featured the young dancer Maddie Ziegler, then eleven years old, performing an intense, athletic routine in a bare apartment while wearing a blonde wig matching Sia’s, and it became one of the most watched music videos of all time. Sia did not appear in the video, and when she performed the song on television she did so with her back to the camera or her face hidden, a choice that turned privacy into a statement and made the wig itself famous. The strategy worked, because the song was everywhere while the singer remained a mystery, and the public’s curiosity only increased the attention. Chandelier also showed that a pop star could succeed without playing the usual game of covers and interviews, at least for a while.
The wig became Sia’s trademark, and she wore versions of it for years, sometimes with a large bow, sometimes covering her whole face, while Maddie Ziegler became her on-stage stand-in, dancing at award shows and on television while Sia sang from the side of the stage. The arrangement was unusual and widely discussed, and Sia has said she adopted it partly to protect her privacy and partly to make a point about how the industry treats women’s faces. Elastic Heart, the next single, also featured Ziegler, this time dancing in a cage with the actor Shia LaBeouf, and the video drew both praise and criticism for its imagery. This Is Acting, released in 2016, was built from songs Sia had originally written for other artists, and it produced the hit Cheap Thrills, which reached number one in the United States. The album’s title was a joke about the fact that the songs had been written as performances for other people, and it underlined how completely Sia had taken control of her own image.
The privacy strategy had a cost, because it invited constant speculation and because the use of a child dancer as her visual double raised questions that Sia has had to answer more than once. She has said the wig gave her freedom to walk down the street unrecognised, and that freedom mattered to someone who had struggled with the pressures of fame and with her mental health. At the same time, the music kept coming, with the Christmas album Everyday Is Christmas in 2017, the supergroup LSD with Labrinth and Diplo releasing an album in 2019, and the album Reasonable Woman in 2024, which included collaborations with Kylie Minogue and Paris Hilton. The wig is now less of a mystery than it once was, and Sia has appeared with her face visible more often in recent years, but the years of hiding it remain the most distinctive chapter of her career, and they proved that a voice, on its own, can be enough.
Later Albums, Film and a Life Off the Stage
Sia’s later work has included film, and in 2021 she released Music, a film she directed and co-wrote, starring Maddie Ziegler as a young autistic woman and Kate Hudson as her half-sister. The film drew strong criticism from autistic people and disability advocates, who objected to the casting of a non-autistic actor and to the portrayal of autism, and Sia apologised publicly and removed a scene involving restraint. The episode was a serious setback, and it showed the limits of the creative freedom she had built, because a project that came from a personal place was judged harshly by the community it depicted. She has since spoken less about the film, and it remains a controversial part of her record, mentioned in almost every profile of her. The controversy did not end her music career, but it changed how people talk about her judgement, and it is part of the story rather than a footnote to it.
Away from the stage, Sia’s personal life has been unusually private for a star of her size, and the facts that are public have often come from brief announcements rather than interviews. She married the film-maker Erik Anders Lang in 2014, and the couple separated in 2016, and in 2019 she announced that she had adopted two teenage sons, both of whom were ageing out of the foster care system. In 2020 she said she had become a grandmother after one of her sons had a child, news she shared with characteristic bluntness and humour. She is a vegan and a supporter of animal rights, and she has used her platform to speak about mental health, addiction, and the experience of being a public figure who did not want to be looked at. In 2023 she married the radio host Dan Bernad in Italy, in a ceremony attended by family and friends. These details are part of her public record, and they show a life lived deliberately away from the usual celebrity script.
Today Sia’s place in pop is secure, with a catalogue that includes some of the biggest songs of the last fifteen years, both in her own voice and in the voices of others, and with awards including ARIA Awards in Australia and Grammy nominations in the United States. Her influence can be heard in the work of younger songwriters who write big, emotional choruses, and in the way some pop stars now think about privacy and image. She continues to record and to write, and her later albums have been received more quietly than Chandelier was, which may be exactly what she wanted after the intensity of the mid-2010s. The story that began in Adelaide, in a house full of music, did not follow the usual path, and that is why it is still interesting: a singer who became famous by refusing to be seen, a songwriter who wrote other people’s biggest hits, and a performer who turned a wig into one of the most recognisable images in modern pop.
My Take:
Listening to Sia’s catalogue in order is a strange experience, because the voice is the same from the first album to the last, but the world around it keeps changing, and the early records sound like a singer still deciding what she is allowed to say. OnlySee and Healing Is Difficult are not the work of a pop star; they are the work of a young Australian woman trying out jazz, trip-hop, and folk, and the roughness of those records is part of their charm, because you can hear a singer learning her own range in real time. Breathe Me is the moment when everything clicks, and it is worth listening to the 2004 recording closely, because the vocal is restrained for most of the song and then opens up in the final minute, and that restraint is what makes the ending feel earned rather than showy. Sia’s best work has always had that shape: a long build, a sudden lift, and a chorus that sounds as if it costs something to sing, and the early albums are the place to hear that shape being discovered.
Chandelier is the song most people know, and it deserves its fame, but it is also the song that makes Sia hardest to judge fairly, because the video and the wig have become so famous that they can crowd out the music itself. The vocal on Chandelier is genuinely remarkable, a performance that moves from a near-whisper to a full-throated cry in the space of a single line, and the melody is built to be sung along to even though it is difficult to sing well. What I admire most about the record is that it does not hide its subject: it is a song about drinking, about the hours after midnight when a party stops being fun, and it refuses to turn that subject into a joke or a moral lesson. The production by Greg Kurstin and Jesse Shatkin gives the vocal room, with drums that push forward and a piano line that keeps returning, and the whole track feels like a person talking to themselves in a mirror. It is a pop song that trusts its listener, and that trust is rare.
The decision to hide her face is the part of Sia’s story that people argue about most, and I think the argument misses the point, because the wig was never only about privacy; it was also a piece of criticism aimed at an industry that sells women’s faces before it sells their music. When Sia performed with her back to the audience, she was asking the audience to listen rather than to look, and for a singer whose instrument is her voice, that is a reasonable demand. At the same time, the strategy had a flaw that became obvious over time: by using Maddie Ziegler as her visual double, Sia replaced her own image with a child’s image, and that created a new set of questions about who was being looked at and why. The wig worked as a short-term solution and as a piece of theatre, but it could not work forever, and Sia’s gradual return to showing her face suggests she knows that too. The experiment was brave, and it was imperfect, and both of those things can be true.
Sia as a songwriter is a different artist from Sia as a performer, and the songwriting is where her craft is most visible, because a song written for Rihanna has to work without Sia’s voice to carry it. Diamonds is the best example, a song with a melody so simple that it feels inevitable, and lyrics that use diamonds as an image of light rather than of wealth, which is why it works as a love song rather than a boast. Titanium is a different kind of achievement, a dance track with a vocal that sounds defiant rather than pretty, and the fact that Sia’s own vocal stayed on the record is a sign that Guetta knew the song needed her roughness. Writing for others also revealed Sia’s range, because she could write a ballad for Celine Dion and a party song for Flo Rida in the same year, and both would sound like her. That range is the mark of a professional songwriter, and it is the reason her songs have outlasted many of the trends they were written for.
The Zero 7 years deserve more attention than they usually get, because Destiny and Distractions are the records where Sia’s voice first found its mature sound, and they still sound fresh more than twenty years later. The downtempo style of Simple Things could have dated badly, but Sia’s vocals give the album a warmth that the production alone could not have provided, and her phrasing on Destiny, with its long, held notes and its sudden drops, is the template for everything she did later. Listening to those tracks now, you can hear a singer who already understood dynamics, who knew when to hold back and when to let go, and that understanding is what separates a good voice from a great one. The Zero 7 collaboration also matters because it shows Sia as a team player, a singer willing to serve someone else’s record, and that generosity is part of why so many producers wanted to work with her. Fame came later; the musicianship was already there.
Music, the film Sia directed in 2021, is the hardest part of her story to defend, and I think it is important to say so plainly, because the criticism it received was not a matter of taste but of representation. Casting Maddie Ziegler, a non-autistic actor, as an autistic character, and including scenes of restraint that autistic advocates said were dangerous, were choices that caused real hurt, and Sia’s initial responses on social media made the situation worse before her apology improved it. The film’s intentions may have been kind, but good intentions do not excuse a failure to listen to the people being portrayed, and the episode is a reminder that creative control is not the same as creative wisdom. What redeems the story slightly is that Sia did apologise and did change the film, which is more than many directors do, but the film itself remains a cautionary example. It belongs in any honest account of her career, not hidden away.
Everyday Is Christmas, the 2017 holiday album, is a small, odd record that tells you a lot about Sia, because holiday albums are usually safe and sentimental, and hers is neither. The songs are original rather than covers, the production is bright and strange, and the lead single Santa’s Coming for Us sounds like a pop song that happens to mention Christmas rather than a Christmas song trying to be pop. It is not her best album, and it was not meant to be; it was a chance to write cheerful songs without the weight of a personal statement, and that lightness suits her. The album also shows her sense of humour, which is often missed in profiles that focus on the wig and the serious songs, because Sia has always been funny in interviews and on social media, with a dry, self-deprecating style. A singer who can write Chandelier and Santa’s Coming for Us in the same decade is a singer with range, and the Christmas album is the proof.
The LSD project with Labrinth and Diplo is another side of Sia that deserves a hearing, because it shows her working as one voice among three, in a group that had no image to protect and no brand to maintain. The 2019 album Labrinth, Sia & Diplo Present… LSD is playful and experimental, with songs like Thunderclouds and Genius that mix pop, psychedelia, and hip-hop in ways that Sia’s solo records never attempted. Labrinth’s production gives her voice a different frame, and Diplo’s beats push her toward rhythms she would not have chosen on her own, and the result is a record that sounds like three friends enjoying themselves. It did not sell like 1000 Forms of Fear, and it was not supposed to, but it is a useful reminder that Sia’s career has always had room for experiments that were never meant to be hits. The best artists keep a corner of their work free for play, and LSD is Sia’s corner.
Sia’s voice itself is worth describing properly, because it is the one thing in her career that has never changed, and it is the reason her songs work even when the production around them is dated. It is a voice with a natural break in it, a place where the sound cracks slightly before it opens up, and she uses that break as an expressive tool, letting a note sound fragile before it becomes powerful. Her vibrato is wide and slow, her phrasing is conversational rather than formal, and she often sings slightly behind the beat, which gives her performances a feeling of spontaneity even when they are carefully arranged. Other singers can hit the notes in Chandelier, and many have tried, but few can make the song sound like a confession rather than a performance, and that difference is the voice. It is not a perfect instrument, and its imperfections are the point.
The adoption of her two sons in 2019 is one of the most human details in Sia’s public life, and it changes how you hear the later songs, because a singer who has taken in two teenagers ageing out of foster care is living a different life from the pop star the tabloids imagined. She has spoken about the decision plainly, without turning it into a publicity story, and the fact that she became a grandmother the following year, when one of her sons had a child, adds a layer of ordinary family life to a career that has often seemed anything but ordinary. These choices do not make the music better or worse, and it would be sentimental to claim they do, but they do explain why Sia’s later work has a calmer, less hungry quality than the records of the mid-2010s. She is no longer chasing the world’s attention, because she has built a life that does not depend on it, and that freedom is audible in Reasonable Woman, which sounds like a record made by someone who has nothing left to prove.
Reasonable Woman, released in 2024, is a useful place to end, because it is neither a comeback nor a farewell, but a record by an artist who knows exactly what she can do and is content to do it well. The collaborations with Kylie Minogue and Paris Hilton are playful rather than desperate, the choruses are strong without straining for another Chandelier, and the production is polished without being anonymous. Critics received it politely rather than rapturously, and that seems fair, because the album’s pleasures are modest and professional rather than revelatory. But modest and professional is a perfectly good place for a singer in her late forties to be, and the album’s best moments, such as the title track’s directness, show that Sia’s writing has lost none of its clarity. She does not need another global hit, and the fact that she made the record anyway is a sign that she still loves the work itself.
My honest view is that Sia’s career will be remembered for three things: a voice that could make a simple melody feel like a confession, a run of songs written for other people that defined pop in the early 2010s, and a decision to hide her face that forced everyone to think about what a pop star is actually selling. The first of those is the most important, because voices like hers do not come along often, and the recordings will still be moving long after the arguments about the wig have faded. The songwriting matters too, because Diamonds and Titanium are part of the shared memory of a decade, and they would not exist in their current form without her. The wig was theatre, and theatre has a short life, but the songs have a longer one. If a new listener wants to understand Sia, they should start with Breathe Me, then Chandelier, then Diamonds in Rihanna’s version, and they will have heard the three sides of her: the confessional singer, the pop star, and the writer.
One more thing worth saying about Sia is that her Australian identity has always been part of her story without ever being the whole of it, because she left Adelaide young and built her career in London, New York, and Los Angeles, yet she has never hidden where she came from. Australian artists often face a choice between staying home and leaving, and Sia’s choice to leave was practical rather than disloyal, because the industry she wanted to work in was overseas. Her ARIA Awards show that Australia claimed her back once she succeeded, and her continued connection to the country, including her support for Australian causes, shows that leaving did not mean forgetting. It is a familiar pattern for Australian musicians, and Sia’s version of it is one of the most successful.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where was Sia born and when?
Sia was born Sia Kate Isobelle Furler on 18 December 1975 in Adelaide, South Australia. Her father Phil Coluccio was a musician and her mother Loene Furler was a singer-songwriter, so she grew up in a musical household before moving to London in 1997.
Why does Sia wear a wig that covers her face?
Sia began wearing an oversized blonde wig that covered her face around the release of Chandelier in 2014. She has said she wanted privacy and wanted audiences to focus on her voice and music rather than her appearance, and the wig became her trademark during the 1000 Forms of Fear and This Is Acting years.
Who danced in the Chandelier video?
The dancer in the Chandelier video was Maddie Ziegler, who was eleven years old when the video was released in 2014. Ziegler, who first became known on the television show Dance Moms, went on to perform as Sia’s on-stage stand-in at award shows and television appearances.
Did Sia write Diamonds for Rihanna?
Yes. Sia co-wrote Diamonds, which Rihanna released in 2012 as the lead single from her album Unapologetic. The song reached number one in the United States and became one of Rihanna’s biggest hits, and Sia has said she wrote it quickly in a single session.
What is Sia’s connection to Zero 7?
Sia sang on the British electronic duo Zero 7’s debut album Simple Things, released in 2001, including the tracks Destiny and Distractions. She also sang on their second album When It Falls in 2004, and the collaboration was her first widely heard work before her solo breakthrough.
What happened with Sia’s film Music?
Music, a film directed and co-written by Sia and released in 2021, starred Maddie Ziegler as an autistic young woman. It was criticised by autistic people and disability advocates over the casting and portrayal, and Sia apologised publicly and removed a scene involving restraint from the film.
