DELTA Goodrem’s return to the pop world has been greeted with praise for her new, sexy look. “What, did I look hideous before?” Goodrem jokes.
“I think I just look like an older version of what I was at 17. I guess I don’t have short, spiky, dark hair any more. I was on steroids and had puffy skin and a lot of water retention. I was never going to look all that crash-hot after all the chemicals. I had a combover at 18.
“No, it’s a compliment. Maybe people are picking up on the fact I feel very comfortable in my skin, very relaxed.”
A re-energised Goodrem, 22, is preparing for the release of her third album, Delta. It’s been three years since her last, Mistaken Identity.
Goodrem deliberately took herself off the radar after weathering the public backlash that came after selling a million copies in Australia of her 2003 debut, Innocent Eyes.
“I’ve seen a really horrible side of what I do,” Goodrem says. “I’ve seen backlash happen. I’ve seen over-exposure, which makes an artist uncool. You can be a hero, then vilified within a day. But I’ve seen wonderful moments, too.”
Her time away was also what Goodrem calls a year of healing.
She now looks back on 2004’s Mistaken Identity as rushed — written and recorded while she was still recovering from chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Part of the workload included filming a movie, Hating Alison Ashley.
“I was completely nuts,” she says in hindsight. “I’d burnt myself out. By the end of Mistaken Identity I thought, ‘This is nothing of what I am. I know I can do all of this a lot better’.
“I was over-exposed. I felt the Delta Goodrem out there wasn’t who I am. I was stronger than that. I had more to say than that. I’m not a robot. I’m not mechanical. But I felt like I was being mechanical, going through the motions.
“I have feelings. I felt like it wasn’t me any more. I needed to go away and freshen up, to get excited about music again. I’d become stale.
“You don’t get into music for business, but there’s so much business you need to talk about. I’m not a businesswoman. I’m a 22-year-old trying to make the best decisions I can.”
She’s proud of Mistaken Identity, but understands it confused fans who’d been drawn to the positivity and pop thrills of Innocent Eyes.
“I’m still proud of the album, but the timing was too fast,” she says. “I hate the album title now. Mistaken Identity meant something totally different to the listener than how I was looking at it. I was too much in the bubble.
“Mistaken Identity meant to me that I didn’t know this person who was green (her hair had turned green during chemotherapy) and angry. Everything I’d known up to the age of 18 had changed. I needed to do a 360 to get back to where I am again. I needed to believe again.
“If I had come back any earlier than now I wouldn’t have been able to cope. I needed to embrace being in the public eye, putting music out there. I’m in an enjoyable place.
“There are little storms, but I love it again, whereas on the last record I’d think, ‘Oh, do I have to go and do this again?’ Because I was mad. I was really angry . . . I needed to let everything heal.
“I’d just had my dream come true. My first album had come out. I wanted to keep going, I didn’t want anyone to stop me. I wanted to do the fun stuff, the performances. I missed out on doing them.
“Then I met Brian. He brought a smile back to my face.”
Brian McFadden came into Goodrem’s life when their record companies brought them together for the duet Almost Here. It became a No.1 hit and while promoting it they became a couple.
McFadden was in the throes of splitting with wife Kerry Katona, mother of his two daughters. Goodrem was labelled a homewrecker by the UK papers that had feted Katona for years.
McFADDEN and Goodrem have, for the most part, kept silent about the situation, apart from pointing out there was no overlap from one relationship ending and the other starting.
More importantly, time has provided the strongest comment. They have been together almost three years, Goodrem’s longest relationship.
“I had to weather the storm,” she says. “I knew it hadn’t happened the way it had been portrayed. We had to hold on to what we had. We’re a great team. We have a great relationship. We’re really good for each other. We had to believe in ourselves and let the negativity pass. We’d say ‘Time is a healer, we’re stronger than this, we have to hold on’.”
Goodrem has been open about resenting McFadden’s two young children, who regularly stay with their father.
“I was a 20-year-old girl. I didn’t know how to respond to someone I loved having kids,” she says. “I was honest about it, I resented them. That’s completely how I felt. I’m sure other people have gone through that. It can be a daunting process but I’m over it now.”
Goodrem says she acts as the girls’ friend rather than a stepmother.
“I’m 22,” she says. “I’m not their mother. If they need me I’m their friend.”
McFadden has documented their relationship in the single Only a Woman Can, an Irish No.1 earlier this year. The lyrics — “she changed my life, she cleaned me up, she found my heart” — are a tender ode to his girlfriend.
Though Goodrem is clearly loved up, she’s quick to distance the love songs on Delta from McFadden, who co-wrote most of them.
“I don’t want to say anything is about one specific thing. It defeats the purpose of music sometimes; people get an image in their head.”
Doesn’t she want to declare their love on a hit song?
“I’m a lot more private than that,” she says. “Of course I love Brian — he’s my best friend and we have a wonderful relationship. The songs are written from a great place. He’s definitely taught me not to be so serious, to laugh at everything, to laugh everything off.
“We brought what we both needed in our own personalities. We brought a lot to each other, in a good way.”
Goodrem is anxious for fans to connect with the lyrics. She even dumped the album’s working title, Condition of a Heart, for the more straightforward Delta.
“I don’t want a complicated album,” she says. “I want people to take this album home and wrap it around their own lives the way they did with Innocent Eyes. The songs are about personal experiences, but I don’t want people to think ‘Oh, that song is just about what Delta did’.”
However, one song — God Laughs — has Goodrem’s DNA all over it. The lyrics detail in brutal honesty the end of her parents’ marriage: “Mum was going crazy together to keep it, Dad’s two lives, he was keeping it a secret, when we found out we couldn’t believe it . . .”
“Ah, there’s not a lot of mystery there,” Goodrem says cautiously. “The lyrics pretty much say what happened.”
The lyrics continue: “It’s been hell if I had to be truthful . . . it leaves a lot of mess someone has to clean up. It happened here to the family I love.”
“I’d never want to hurt my family in public,” Goodrem says of the song. “Obviously the lyrics say what they do, but I’m not going to exploit that. When things are thrown at me in life, I feel I’m meant to go through them to help other people, I really do.
“A lot of people go through family break-ups, but most kids don’t have an outlet for expressing they’re feelings.
“Everyone’s moved on. My brother’s in Adelaide, my dad’s in Melbourne, my mum’s in Sydney, I’m in London. I never knew my family would be in different places, but we are. I’ve learnt to accept that and move on. I’m lucky I had my family together for as long as I did.”
Goodrem may put on her happy face for the media in general, but she never forgets those who have crossed her.
One breakfast-radio team made jokes about her cancer and suggested she was using her illness to sell records. She hasn’t spoken to them since.
Earlier this year she confronted a newspaper journalist who’d written negative articles about her, many during her battle with cancer.
“I’m not neurotic like ‘That person said something bad about me’, but there’s a respect factor,” Goodrem says.
“I hate dismissiveness or rudeness. We’re all human. There’s no need to be rude to someone. I don’t mind anyone criticising my music, that’s art, it’s personal taste. Not everyone’s going to like it, I understand that. But I’m also not scared of confronting people because I’m confident in my work.
“I feel I’ve let go a lot of those things and gone ‘whatever’. I needed to deal with the hurt you get when you’re first burnt. I had tremendous support early on, but then I got burnt and those burns were deep. I had to let them heal. I had to confront those demons, but I also know there are so many bigger issues in the world to worry about.
“It was all about letting go for me, letting go of the Innocent Eyes period, putting a full stop to that. I had issues about mortality. I had such a solid family. I had to let go of all that.
“Music is like waves. Sometimes they’re big waves, sometimes they’re smaller waves, but as long as you keep surfing forever you’re fine.
“I don’t know what I’m going to see in this next year or two, but I want to be able to handle it better.”
