INTERVIEW: Vanessa Amorosi on 25 years in music: "I'm really longing to come home and connect with everybody I grew up with, and celebrate these songs...go back to my roots where it all started."
Interview: Shalane Connors
Published: 11 March 2026
If you had to choose one voice that personifies the Australian music scene in the early 2000s, a name high up, if not at the top of the list would undoubtedly be Vanessa Amorosi.
Musical from a very young age, Amorosi started performing around Melbourne from the age of 12 and signed a record deal aged just 16. After releasing her debut single ‘Have A Look’ in 1999, she became a major star with her success growing with every release.
Her iconic dance single ‘Absolutely Everybody’, released at the end of 1999, hit the top 10 in Australia and remained on the charts for over six months. After Amorosi’s starring role in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, she had a global breakthrough when ‘Absolutely Everybody’ became a massive hit across Europe, including hitting the top 10 in the UK. It has since entered Australian popular culture of one of the country’s most enduring and beloved pop song.
In 2000, Amorosi’s debut album The Power hit number 1 in Australia, and more top 10 singles followed, including ‘Shine’ and ‘The Power’. It is a level of success that Amorosi has maintained over the past twenty plus years, with top 10 albums Somewhere in the Real World (2008), Hazardous (2009) and City of Angels (2022), and hit singles ‘Perfect’, ‘Mr Mysterious’ and the multi-platinum, number 1 smash ‘This Is Who I Am’.
This April, Amorosi marks twenty five years in music with a celebratory tour across Australia. Starting in Newcastle on 10 April, she will play nine shows before wrapping in Brisbane on 1 May.
Each performance of the show will be unique, with Amorosi recounting stories and moments from her career, how her songs were crafted and brought to life and uncover previously untold stories from her journey.
“As I celebrate 25 years, this tour is a tribute to who I was, who I am, and everything in between,” Amorosi says. “It’s also a celebration of how far these songs have come. Performing still brings me the same energy and connection it did from the very beginning. I’ve taken time to reflect, refine, and shape the strongest version of these songs. I’m excited to share this tour, celebrate it and make new memories.”
One of Australia’s greatest artists of the last 25 years, this tour will be not just a celebration of Amorosi’s outstanding career and portfolio of music, but the opening of a new stage of her creativity for her as her artistry continues to evolve. Shalane Connors recently met Amorosi to chat all about the tour and reflect on her long career.
Hi Vanessa! Oh my gosh, congratulations on 25 years in the music biz. How does that feel?
It's crazy town when I think about it, because it just feels like yesterday - until I listen to the records, and my vocals, and my songwriting, and I go, yeah, that was 25 years ago!
Has your approach to songwriting has changed over time?
Yeah, definitely. You experience life, so you have different things to write about, you become more educated, and you experience more, both musically and personally, and it just all reflects on your music. And my vocal, it’s used all the time, so it's higher, deeper, lower, there's more chops, there's more tone to it, there's more soul to it. All those things just develop with life and just doing your craft every day.
You're about to embark on an Australian tour, and you've already sold out most of the dates. That must feel pretty great to have such a loyal fan base, as well as such longevity, in an industry that is generally quite unstable. What do you attribute this long term success to?
I feel it's because I've grown up with everybody and the songs have taken on their own journey. It's like stepping back in time when I get to go home and and do shows. It's like the whole audience and myself all go back to being children, or like looking at a photograph and reliving the memory of that photo. That's what music does, it's a recall button. That's the beautiful thing about it, and that’s what I'm really looking forward to. For the last three years, I've done so much overseas and so much on the road musically that I'm really longing to come home and connect with everybody I grew up with, and celebrate these songs. Just go back to my roots where it all started, how this journey just built and built and built and took me on some crazy safaris! To come home and celebrate these songs and bring 25 years of that full circle back to the starting base is a huge thing.
You’ve been performing around Melbourne since you were just 12, is that right?
Yeah, I was discovered in a Russian restaurant! I started off at a small Russian restaurant, and then I got snatched up by the bigger Russian restaurant, and then I was the wedding singer, the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, top 40 singer. The beauty of actually having that gig was I had to sing top 40 from all around the world. I had to sing gypsy music, Jewish stuff, a whole bunch of really different European stuff. I feel that's the reason why my melody collection is quite diverse. When I go into writing sessions my melodies are always quite different because of that worldly influence as a kid. Even though I do blues and I do the jazz and I can do the rock stuff, I also have this little Euro gypsy kind of thing too! And I think that's from my early days of needing to work that European top 40.
Wow. Did you ever imagine as as that teenager, that you would become this global powerhouse?
No, I was just happy to be able to sing and to make some money. My whole family are all musicians, so I was just hoping that maybe I could do the same thing and try and survive off it. All the people I've grown up with that are musicians [I could see] it’s a really hard lifestyle, so surviving it and being able to keep food on the table and have a family, that's a huge achievement. So I'm blessed in that sense, and I don't take that for granted, because it's an art. Anybody that survives off art, it's tough. It's a choice, and it's tough.
You were thrust onto the global stage in 2000 which was the peak time for objectifying women as sex icons, with a hyper focus on body image and all of that. Were you affected by that, and have you felt change in how women are treated in the industry over the last 25 years?
Yeah, it's completely different now. When I started, it was very manufactured pop, and there was a protocol to that factory, and it made people a lot of money. I never really fitted into any of that mould and the only thing that really worked for me was my vocal, and I think that's what saved the day. I was able to write songs that related to people, and I had a vocal. I wasn't this gorgeous looking 18 year old, I wasn't flaunting it. I felt really uncomfortable being sexy, I was a super big tomboy, and I think what made up for it was the songs and just being able to sing. I could sing early in the morning, late at night, I could sing with no sleep. I could just always sing, and it saved my arse. As I've grown up and gotten older, now I enjoy trying to look good and do my hair and wear nice clothes, but when I was 18, I didn't want a bar of it. I really didn't. I didn't want men to look at me. I was weirded out by that, and I think that's just being young and growing up in 1999.
What advice would you give to young women following in your footsteps?
I feel like this younger generation of artists and musicians that are coming out are embracing their individuality, and they're being super unique and different. Nobody has to feel like there's a pigeonhole where they must be this kind of artist with this kind of tag that looks this kind of way. Everybody has a mixture of everything in them, and I think that’s because we have platforms now that show the youth all different genres of music. When I started, we had the radio, and the radio is what dictated [everything], and that's why I said that Russian restaurant helped me, because I was getting worldly influences from the top 40 from outside of the Australia. The great thing now with platforms is it lets you access music from all around the world. There is no ‘if you are a pop singer, you must be exactly like this’. You can incorporate so many different elements to what it is that you're creating.
You also have direct communication with the people that love you. If you're a starting off as a musician, and you're starting to do gigs, and people start following you on that platform, they're there because they love you, and they're already into what you do, so you can start building upon that. It makes it more possible, there's more variety, and you have direct communication with everybody. It's wonderful.
Yeah, absolutely. You are a true music icon, you've appeared on every stage, every events, every chart. What has been your proudest achievement to date as a musician?
I don't know. There's so many moments where I went, Wow, I can't believe I got that, or I can't believe that I pulled this off. There's just so many moments. In general, I'm just very grateful and blessed to be able to still do what I love and still have people that support that and love me for that. Standing this test of time is the amazing thing.
Touring with Joe Cocker when I was a kid through Europe. That taught me so much, because I really felt things had to be perfect - the arrangement, the singing, everything had to be perfect. And then watching Joe just rip these soaring vocals, and watch the band try and catch him because it wasn't planned and every night was different. it felt like it was about to fall off the cliff, and then it just grabbed and synced and locked again. Seeing that moment and then going, 'that's what I want to do. I want to be able to capture a moment with the audience. I want to go on that journey right off the edge of the cliff, and then we all catch it together. That was a big moment for me, and then obviously achieving that myself on stage was one of those moments when I went, wow. We pulled that off, and now I'm addicted to that thrill.
You are responsible for a couple of our biggest anthems. ‘Absolutely Everybody’, of course, and ‘Shine’ is one of my personal favourites. I have to ask, you've obviously sung them thousands of times, do you ever forget the lyrics?
Oh my god yes! Not to those ones, because those ones are like programmed now. Some days, if I can't remember the very first line of the song, it erases the whole song. If I can't remember the first line of the song, I don't know what the song is. That's just because I've spent years, even before being successful, writing in studios, recording songs, writing lyrics, arrangements, and so there's a lot. The last few years I've been with Dave Stewart doing the Eurythmics stuff and they've got so many songs, so it's the same thing - if I can't remember the first line of the song, it does not bring up the catalogue of the arrangement and what the melody is, nothing. Sometimes I do have that with my stuff, I did Night of the Proms at end of last year, and I was doing ‘Absolutely Everybody’ and I went halfway through it but I had sang the second half, so when I got to the second half, I had to sing the first half and it was stress city! So I did have one of those nights, but no one could tell, and I survived. I’ll never do that again!
What's coming up for you, can we hope for another album after the tour?
I'm always chipping away at music, and I've always got stuff ready to go. It's just a matter of settling on what that is, and then also making sure I have time in between touring, because I juggle quite a lot of different hats. I feel like getting to go home, return to my roots and celebrate with everybody, and these shows are going to be a massive party, I feel like that might set a fire for me to try and make some time in the schedule to get a record and then try and plan to do another little run within Australia again as well. It's just a time problem, there's just a lot going on.
Last question, how does it feel to be an icon?
I don't know! I mean, it's amazing when people say it, but I don't really feel like I'm an icon. I love the fact that my songs resonate with people, and I love the fact that I was a part of that, and I get to celebrate that, but an icon? I look at icons to be other big stars in Australia.
That's so interesting, you were a big icon in my life. I think I had my first kiss the year that you were performing at the Olympics, and I look back and I'm like, yep, that's that song!
Oh, it's crazy how it just triggers so many different memories and emotions. I feel like that when I listen to stuff from the 90s, when I'm listening to Black Box, all of that dance music, I just think of stuff that I was doing as a kid, and it's amazing. Music is such a gift. We're lucky.
VANESSA AMOROSI: Celebrating 25 years Australian Tour 2026
10 April - King Street, Newcastle
11 April - Factory Theatre, Sydney
15 April - The Gov, Adelaide
17 April - Magnet House, Perth
23 April - Corner Hotel, Melbourne
24 April - Corner Hotel, Melbourne
25 April - Torquay Hotel, Torquay
30 April - Solbar, Sunshine Coast
1 May - The Triffid, Brisbane
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