He was the big haired, big voiced winner of the inaugural Australian Idol and he’s gone on to become Australian Idol’s most successful pin-up boy. Along with the likes of Shannon Noll, Damien Leth and Jessica Mauboy, Guy Sebastian has ridden the Idol fast track to fame and fortune.

Six years on, as many winners and finalists from the subsequent series have faded into the annals of irrelevant pop culture history, Guy Sebastian has removed himself from the Idol machine and built his own persona as a talented and passionate writer, producer and performer.

2009 sees Sebastian returning to Australia after a stint in New York where he wrote album number four “Like It Like That”. Now, with his feet firmly planted on Terra Australis, the singing sensation is taking some time to regroup and look to the future.

We got on the line with Guy while he was in his Sydney home to chat about the journey thus far.

(Guy Sebastian) G’day

(RedHotPie) Hi mate, you sound a bit husky down the line

Yeah, I’ve got a bit of a sore throat, it’s all caught up with me I think, I’ve been working my butt off for the last few months and yeah I’m a bit buggered

A sore throats not really what you want in your profession

No, it’s funny though, my voice can be like this and I can somehow still sing

Have you had your throat insured?

No I haven’t, but I should

So is the wife taking good care of you, are you getting looked after?

Yeah she is, she’s been cooking and doing all sorts of stuff, she’s great, when I’m actually sick, if I feel legitimately crook, I am the worst sick person. I’m such a baby, I’m very dramatic but she’s been awesome.

Like a bear with a sore head eh

Exactly

So you’re back in Sydney now, you were in New York for quite a while yeah?

I was, yeah we spent most of the year there but we’ve been back here for nearly three months just finishing the record which was released on Friday, so now I’m just promoting and we’ve got a tour in February and a bunch of little gigs here and there until then, so yeah just preparing for all of that.

And did you end up in a New York state of mind after your time there?

Oh man we loved New York, all our stuff is still in storage there but I’m thinking after our tour in February Ill head to either L.A or New York, I think it will most likely be L.A but I miss New York. I really love that place, it’s just got such a great soul.

Once you get past the initial hurdle of just how freaking hard it is there, like it’s a really tough city, it’s super expensive and everything but once you get past that it becomes a really cool place to live, everyone’s super helpful, it’s just really cool. It’s almost like everyone’s got your back because they all know how hard it is there.

And you’ve spent a bit of time in L.A, how’s that vibe?

L.A to me, it’s just… it seems like everyone’s trying to make it, like it’s all about who you know; you can’t get in anywhere unless you know somebody. The first question in L.A is ‘what’s your name’ and then it’s followed up with ‘what do you do’. I don’t know; it would be easy to get isolated there I think but yeah, the weather there is great, New York weather sucks, it’s just so cold. But yeah I’m thinking L.A is gonna be the destination.

So the new record Like It Like That has just dropped, how was the process bolting that together?

It’s been quite involved actually because I’ve got a record deal in the States and they were going to release this record, but they were actually going to release my last record first which was like a tribute to Memphis, but I kept sending songs back over to Australia for this new album (Like It Like That) and the label guys in the States kept going, hey we really like that, let’s put that on the Memphis album and they said that for every song, so they’d ditch a Memphis cover and put one of the originals on.

So it ended up being this whole original album, but they wanted me to produce it like the Memphis album but I didn’t want that to be the sound for here, so I ended up with a new record of original songs that didn’t have quite the right production, like it all sounded quite old school, it didn’t really have a modern edge to it.

I ended up going back and reproducing everything which was quite a nightmare. I mean Like It Like That for example was really old school, like real drums, real organic, so we reproduced that and we got it to sound a little more modern, in your face I guess, the way it is now and we did that with a lot of the tracks so yeah, it was a bit of a nightmare getting to the final product but I’m stoked with how it turned out.

Well you can hear a lot of the Memphis album in this new record; did you consciously allow some of that to stay with you for this project?

I don’t think it was a conscious thing, I think it’s just that it started sounding like what I’ve been listening to a lot, it’s like, the success of the Memphis album, I mean I didn’t think that would do well at all because it’s not like pop Motown, it’s a bit more obscure, it’s a bit more bluesy and gritty you know, so when that went well I thought ‘well maybe people here do dig that style” because that’s what I would always choose to do.

I was going as pop as I could because I always thought that kind of stuff doesn’t sell here and it just doesn’t connect here and I mean I went on Idol for crying out loud, I’m not going to turn around and make some obscure album. The Memphis Album, it almost gave me permission to make a soul record, so I did. I went away and wrote a whole bunch of tracks, we got some great horn players and some great musos in so yeah.

Speaking about great musos, you had John Mayer play on a couple tracks, the great man himself

Yeah that was pretty cool, he was actually just gonna come in and do a guitar solo…

So how does that happen, you just call John Mayer up on the phone eh?

Yeah I’ve met John a bunch of times and we’ve got a very close mutual friend, his guitar player is someone he’s been hanging out with and playing music with for a very long time, a guy called David Ryan Harris and he’s brilliant man, this guy’s and amazing singer, great guitar player, great songwriter. David wrote a song for me on my second record called Sweetest Berry and we just clicked.

We’ve remained really good mates, we’ve written half of this new album together. There’s a bunch of songs which I wrote by myself and there’s a bunch of songs that we kind of co-wrote.

I guess David and I have produced a lot of stuff together as well so one day he just said ‘you know, I might just give John a call and see if he wants to sit in with the band, you know, we all get along so he might be keen’. So John came in, he ended up staying for two whole days and played on three songs or something so yeah, that was awesome.

So obviously you’ve got a few things going on in the States, I see your new single Like It Like That has been picked up by NBC in the States for use on their promos?

Yeah I’m stoked; they used it for all their summer promos and other things like the grand final of the Celebrity Apprentice and Biggest Loser and a few other things…

Is America your priority right now?

I wouldn’t say it’s my priority, I just feel like giving it a go you know. I haven’t really tried to go overseas with my stuff much so I just feel like it’s time, like I’m ready. I just wanna give it a bash.

Have you experienced the big fish going to an even bigger pond thing, is it like you’re starting again?

Oh yeah, absolutely, it’s like I’m at the very bottom, like I’ve been doing some residency gigs there and there’ll be like eight people are there and you just got to build it from the ground up you know, you have to start from the bottom. But it’s awesome; it’s a great challenge because my journey here was a lot different. I went on a TV show and that was the thing that gave me my platform to build on you know?

How do you see Idol these days, do you think it’s still a worthwhile format?

I think the format’s great. Yeah I think the format’s great but there’s this preconception that it’s a massive failure if the winner doesn’t go on to release massive albums. The music industry is a lot more complicated than that, you can’t just have a music show that guarantees musical connection because that boils down to songs. It’s very hard if you’re not a song-writer or really in charge of your music, you can’t think, ‘well I’ll just win the show and let Sony make me a record”, it just doesn’t work like that. But I think the format of the show is great, I mean look at America – they’ve got such a massive pool of talent to draw from.

Do you think you were in the minority being a songwriter as well as a performer?

Yeah definitely, I think for a show like that it’s probably a plus, I mean I write, I produce, I engineer, I’m very involved in my music, I’m a bit of a control freak but there are these other people who are a bit more easy going, like you know ‘I’m a singer and you guys can find me songs and I’ll sing them’. I just can’t operate like that, but some people can.

And have you ever experienced the other side of things, the Idol stigma?

Absolutely, there will always be a stigma, I think I’ll always be the guy that won that TV show, do you know what I mean? There are select people who would write you off just because of that but I think if you’re the sort of person who would write someone off because you don’t like the show or something and you’re totally ignorant to their musical ability, well I don’t think anything’s going to change your mind, nothing’s going to sway you.

For me Idol was just a platform; some bands do the battle of the bands thing or Triple J unearthed, at the end of the day, they’re all using media as their platform and that doesn’t stop, you then use the radio, or anything really, I’m doing an interview with you now, I’m using that media to get my music out there you know so I don’t know where you draw the line on what’s credible and what’s not. People can either, write, or sing or whatever or they can’t’, I mean you look at Kelly Clarkson, she’s just a cracking singer, I just think it’s a bit of a useless debate, it’s almost like people love watching other people fail.

Well we’re pretty well known for our tall poppy syndrome

Yeah but it’s like that everywhere though it’s definitely an issue, I mean you see it a lot when you travel which I’ve done a lot over the last few years and I see these stories. Even talking with John, he was saying he’d read a story about me and people had said this or that about me and was like ‘I can’t believe that, we’d get nothing like that here’. But Australia is just such an amazing place, it’s an amazing place to live, an amazing place to be a musician and I’ve had such overwhelming support for this album in such a small country I can only say good things.