Australian singer/songwriter Starley stopped by the KiSS studios and spoke with Jax about her journey to becoming a singer, life in Australia, her intense workout routines and of course her breakout hit ‘Call On Me’!

Starley explained to Jax how she’s been involved in music her whole life, “Well, since I was a kid I’ve basically been singing and performing. I actually stopped doing that at a certain point because people wanted to change me, change the way I look and just be completely different person, so for me I decided that I was just going to be  songwriter and stay in the background. Then, I moved to London when I was about 19…got signed to a little publishing deal and was doing that for a little while and then after about 5 years of heavy grinding I had a lot of near misses and I wasn’t really seeing the success that I had hoped for, I was at a low point and was pretty depressed, then I moved back to Australia because I missed my family and I missed being at home and I sort of just wanted to get a perspective on everything and re-focus, so I was going to basically quit music and become a personal trainer.”

It was at this point that Starley had resigned herself to working on making personal fitness a career when something happened to bring her musical dreams back to the forefront, which then resulted in her smash hit, ‘Call On Me’.

She said, “Right when I was about to pack everything up, I use music as therapy, I was in my bedroom back at my parents and I was writing four chords, I was just playing four chords and I wrote ‘Call On Me’ on those four chords and that’s how it came to be!”

Most songwriters are able to envision the voice they want to bring their words to life and for Starley, she knew right away who she wanted to sing, ‘Call On Me’…herself.

She told Jax, “When I finished that song I sort of felt, ‘Man, no one else can sing this song like I can sing it, and I really want this message to be out there…and I’m going to do it as an artist and see what happens.”

Earlier that morning, Starley stopped by Breakfast Television to perform a beautiful stripped down, acoustic version of ‘Call On Me’.

 

 

Another big television show she recently played on is NBC’s The TODAY Show, a gig that she called “my first really big thing”, but she isn’t allowing it to get to her head in anyway, “every moment I’m just kind of taking it in as I’m going because if I just stop to think about it, it would be so overwhelming. Coming from Sydney and not even being an artist before, this is really huge for me, so I’m just taking it one step at a time and just trying to keep up with everything.”

Jax asked her with whom she would love to collaborate with, and she answered, “I listen to a lot of Coldplay, Sia, I love Sia, Ed Sheeran.” 

As for her favourite singer of all time? That’s Mariah Carey, “My favourite all-time singer is Mariah Carey. She writes and sings her songs and performs them amazingly, definitely 90s Mariah is my favourite ever.”

 

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