Olivia's new album offers a path through grief - The Age

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Olivia's new album offers a path through grief

After 53 years in showbiz, a new, heartfelt album gives Olivia Newton-John time to reflect, and to look forward.

By Neil McMahon, for The Age

If you ask Olivia Newton-John to look back, she will often tell you it’s not as easy as all that. There are many memories, many milestones, much to savour – but the past is another story. It’s today that is essential. Of the landmarks in her storied life, she sometimes needs reminding. She once lost one of her Grammy trophies, but isn’t sure which song it was for. As a rule, she says: “I’m not good with dates and names.”

So many dates, so many names. And still they pile up. She celebrated her 68th birthday in Australia in late September. A couple of weeks later, in The Tonight Show studio in New York, ONJ was in the house and the host Jimmy Fallon was … well, pumped. “I’m so excited,” he said at the kick-off. By show’s end – when the pair joined forces for a spontaneous rendition of You’re The One That I Want – Fallon was … well, even more pumped.

“I’m freaking out,” Fallon declared, by way of confirming that at this stage of her career Newton-John carries the marker of entertainment legend with her wherever she goes. The name alone opens every door, her face and voice familiar to generations. That same week, she sat down with US TV icon Dan Rather for an hour-long exploration of her life and times, in between a media roundabout that included a glowing red-carpet embrace with a blonde icon of another era, Sarah Jessica-Parker.

Across 53 years in show-business, there’s not much she hasn’t done and not many she hasn’t met. Newton-John’s American presidents – those she’s met or performed for – date back to Ronald Reagan, and of the current White House contenders she is two for two, having sung for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Her Tonight Show hosts go back even further. Jimmy Fallon was three months from being born when Newton-John first graced the iconic set in June 1974 – her host was Johnny Carson, midway through his 30 years in the chair; her fellow guest was Truman Capote. On her second appearance in 1975, laden with recent awards in the early days of her American success, Carson said to her, “You just won another award as The Tonight Show’s favourite singer”. On her third appearance in 1976, she shared the Carson couch with Frank Sinatra.

It was all wonderful, of course. But then, life in general has been a surprise. And the biggest surprise of growing older? “That it’s wonderful,” she says, describing her greatest joy as finding “true love” late in life, with her marriage to American John Easterling in 2008. “Life is not so stressful. I think when you’re young you worry so much about every little thing. I’ve been in this business and doing what I do for so long that now I can enjoy it much more. And relax. You think, I’m going to retire by the time I’m 40. And then it’s 50. And then 60. And then I’m turning 68 and still working. How great is that?”

SOME YEARS ago, a publisher threw Newton-John an advance to write her memoirs. She tried, but decided the tell-all genre wasn’t for her. She returned the money and kept on living – rather than re-living – her life. “I’m still not there yet,” she says, “because I’m living life too much to sit down and write about it.” Writing about her past holds no appeal; what she has instead discovered in her later years is that writing about her present delivers personal rewards beyond even the stratospheric recognition that defined her chart-topping glory days in the 1970s and 1980s. In those days, the songs were almost always written by someone else. Today, she is more often that not her own lyricist.

On her latest musical project, the just-released album Liv On, she shares songwriting credits with two collaborators and close friends, the acclaimed American singer/songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman and the Canadian performer Amy Sky. And in keeping with the path Newton-John has taken publicly and privately since her breast cancer diagnosis 24 years ago, the music is deeply personal and about as far from the perfect pop sensibility of Physical as it’s possible to get. It’s about healing – and more specifically, about grief and loss.

Newton-John’s experiences in that regard are well known – from her battle with cancer to the disappearance in 2005 of her boyfriend Patrick McDermott – but for this project the motivation was part of coming to terms with the breaking of a more defining bond: the loss three years ago of her older sister. Rona, a model, was the Newton-John sister who first left Melbourne in search of fame and fortune in the 1960s. In 2013, aged 70, she was diagnosed with, and swiftly ravaged by, brain cancer.

“That was a very difficult time,” says Newton-John. “It was shocking, it was very quick. I wrote a song in her memory. That was my way of dealing with grief, through music. I work my way out of grief with song.” When friends heard the song, “they were asking me, Do you have any more songs like this because we’ve never heard a song like this. There’s nothing really out there for grief. Time went on and I thought, Gosh, it would be amazing to create an album of songs for people who are going through difficult times. Beth Nielsen Chapman is a dear friend of mine, I said to Amy, Wouldn’t it be amazing if Beth joined us as a trio?”

Nielsen Chapman already had one composition that perfectly fitted the bill. After her husband died of cancer in 1994, she penned Sand and Water – a moving contemplation of making peace with a profound loss. “So it was perfect,” says Newton-John. Nielsen Chapman, also a fellow breast cancer survivor, loved the idea, and the trio came together to write an entire album on the same theme.

“One of us might have a lyric and one of us might have a melody or, bits of each,” Newton-John says. “We just flowed. It just came through us and we wrote three or four songs each time we got together. Then we decided we’d each sing one of our own songs that we were known for.” Newton-John re-recorded her 2006 composition Grace and Gratitude; Nielsen Chapman revisited Sand and Water; and Sky her Canadian hit I’ll Take Care Of You. “We did backups for each other,” says Newton-John. “It was a work of love.”

And it’s a work, she says, that would have been beyond the ambitions of the ingenue who first sat on The Tonight Show couch 40 years ago. For all that much of the young Olivia Newton-John remains instantly recognisable today – the unaffected charm intact, along with the Australian accent that so disarmed Johnny Carson in 1974 – life and career and the ups and downs in both have delivered hard-won gains. Confidence, wisdom, perspective. In this interview, she is thrown pieces of her past at random – things said by her and things said about her, decades ago. Does she recognise the woman they describe?

Mostly, yes – but mostly, it is not the woman she is today. Indeed, sometimes the memory inspires gales of laughter, such as when offered this quote from a 1978 interview with Rolling Stone magazine: “I’m a sceptic, in that I don’t expect it to last… I always expect everything to be a disaster so that when it’s a success I’m just knocked out, rather than expecting it to be terrific and when it doesn’t happen I collapse in a heap. So I’m prepared at any time to fall on my face.”

“Really? I said that?” she exclaims through laughter. Yes, really.

“Gosh, I’ve changed since then,” she says, though she recognises where the sentiment came from. She had just made Grease – a monster success – but in the back of her mind was a film she had made a few years earlier in Britain, Toomorrow – a forgettable cinematic flop. “I think I’d learned to be a bit more realistic,” she says. “Someone said this to me when I was very young and I’ve always remembered it – and I think it’s just in my nature anyway: don’t believe your handouts. Don’t believe what people write about you, good or bad. I think I’ve always had a good sense of reality. I’m always thrilled when something great happens but I’m prepared that the next thing won’t be. I came from an academic family and my dad would give you a Well done. That was the top of the list. You had to really excel to get much praise and I think that’s probably good.”

Then there’s this quote, from the music bible Creem in 1973: “As yet….she has little confidence in herself as a songwriter. I’m seldom even game enough to play them to anyone, she confessed.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” she says. “I wasn’t confident with my songwriting at all. I had these great songwriters like [long-time friend, producer and fellow Melburnian] John Farrar around me so you kind of get intimidated. It’s a growing thing.”

In 1974, Melody Maker quotes the 26-year-old Newton-John thus: “As I get older I’m finding it more difficult to be what people expect me to be. I feel sometimes that I want to say something about something…” Today, her first reaction to that is more laughter. “I don’t know!” she says. “I really don’t know what that meant.” But she sees the line drawn from then to today – when finding a way to “say something” through her music or her philanthropic work has become a defining feature of her career. “I think it’s to do with getting older … it feels really wonderful to do something that’s important and to help people.”

Her most famous endeavour in that regard is the Olivia Newton-John Cancer, Wellness and Research Centre at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital, a labour of love for she which spent a decade raising funds and with which she remains intimately involved. It is her proudest achievement, and a cause she connects to every other endeavour. When she performs in Las Vegas, a portion of ticket sales go to the hospital. And her new album comes with a tie-in, too: the simultaneous launch of a global online gathering point (onjcancercentre.org) for people to share stories of love and loss.

She says it’s aimed at shifting the way we think and talk about grief.

“It’s an awareness campaign and also a campaign to get people to share their journeys so we can create a community of living on, of hope, and memories.” It is passions such as this that drive her now, and that keep thoughts of retirement at bay. “I go through periods where I think I might stop and then something interesting comes up,” she says. “Especially in music. Music and creativity never stop. I don’t think you ever get to old for that. You do what you love.”