Anastacia's that kind of girl

By REBECCA BARRY


Anastacia has a weird way of building rapport. Flag the small-talk, the tiny singer with the boombox voice likes to know who she's dealing with by issuing a quick personality test. "If you were a flavour of icecream, what would you be?" she asks as soon as she is on the line.

Um ... chocolate? I mumble. What about you?

"Rainbow," she says decisively. "You know what's goin' on. I have so much goin' on. I'm like, coming from every direction. I'm every flavour there is. Okay, on to your questions, that's fine! My questions are easy - whatever!"

She might have a dangerously colourful personality and speak as though her head is in the clouds - literally, she's that loud - but there is a full pot of gold to be found at the end of Anastacia's rainbow these days.

Last year, she endured a public battle with breast cancer. This year, she is recovering in true Anastacia style, taking her eponymous new album from Europe to America, back to Europe, then on to Asia and possibly Australia, a trip that will take her into next year.

At 30, having overcome initial thoughts that the album title, Anastacia, was "corny" and "booooring", she went with her instincts and realised she had finally come into her own. But it's been a long process.

She wrote it while lapsing in and out of health. There was the seven-hour operation and the 2 1/2 months of radiation therapy. Sometimes her insomnia was so bad and her mind so foggy, it was easier just to put the pen down. She was, in her words, a mess.

It must be difficult talking about it now? "Not really," she says. "I think most people assume it to be because of what I went through, but if you look at Freak of Nature, I wrote that during September 11.

"I was in New York when it happened and I went through the whole thing. I searched for one of my best friends who is a fireman. Most people don't look at that like, 'Oooh', but they're looking at my breast cancer as, 'Oooh'.

"Everyone's going, 'Oh, the emotion and oh, the seriousness of it'. But there are only two songs that I put on this album that had anything to do with what I went through: Heavy On My Heart and Where Do I Belong."

It would be easy to think otherwise. Most of the album is written in a minor key and covers sombre lyrical territory. Time, she laments, "keeps running away"; on Sick and Tired she sings, "I'm sick and tired of always being sick and tired".

While Anastacia maintains the songs represent strength, hope and positivity, they're a far cry from the empowering, dancefloor pop of her biggest hits, Not That Kind and I'm Outta Love.

"It's been said that art is wonderful when suffering is involved and one always assumes ... " her voice trails off. "I mean, look at the work that came out with Heavy On My Heart.

"I don't know that I could have written that song without having the event of breast cancer behind it. But this whole album doesn't mean that."

She perks up when discussing her transition from pop to "sprock", a term she came up with to describe her fusion of pop, soul and rock - on this album the emphasis is on the latter.

"I have a rockier-sounding voice but I had never exercised it so I didn't quite know if, when I did, it was going to be horrible. As many times as people told me I sound like Tina Turner, there was an edge missing from my music, I always felt.

"I wanted more of a rock, guitar-driven edge because I felt it brought out more colours in my voice that I probably couldn't have done with a simpler song like I'm Outta Love.

"It's a great song - cool, lovely, wonderful, it makes you happy when you hear it - but I don't know that without my voice that song is as wonderful as it could have been. So I was trying to go for music I enjoyed without my voice."

Even so, it's That Voice that got her this far. After struggling for 10 years to get a record deal, she went on to make Epic Records a lot of money, selling 10 million copies of her first two albums, Not That Kind and Freak of Nature.

Her third looks likely to repeat that success. For the past two weeks it has topped the European charts, and while it hasn't dented ours yet, across the ditch the first single Left Outside Alone went to number one. But she has never quite reached that level of superstardom in her home country.

"America is not really my main focus, to be honest, never has been. And I don't really need it in my life. I live there, I'm an American, I'm proud but I don't really need fans in every country to feel special.

"I've sold almost a half a million records in America without anything. I've done a couple of TV shows and they're like, 'Whoa! Who's that? That's that European girl!' And I'm like, 'Yeah, it's me'. And I don't care."

You get the impression not much fazes Anastacia these days, even the health-related questions her record company asked not be the focus of this interview. She resorts to the topic without prompting.

"I just don't believe in giving in to the negative and giving in to a terrible situation," she says. "Even with breast cancer, I'm sure someone had a heck of a lot more drama last year than I did.

"I didn't look at it as drama, and other people would have looked at breast cancer as a big dramatic experience. I say it was a blessing, because I was able to find the beauty in it and help others and use it to take the shame out of what breast cancer is to women ... I feel it's my duty to constantly be strong."

* Anastacia by Anastacia is out now.