By Casey Neill
Vanessa Amorosi is heading home.
The Emerald-raised singer will play the York on Lilydale in Mount Evelyn on Thursday 16 May on her Heavy Lies The Head solo tour, to promote her new single of the same name.
“A lot of my friends are out that way,” she said.
“It’s awesome, I love it.
“It’s a good opportunity to reconnect with everyone.”
Despite growing up in the Dandenongs, she didn’t get much opportunity to perform there.
“I was in a high school band as a kid, but I didn’t do much music in that area,” she said.
“The majority of work I got as a kid was out in Carnegie of all places.
“It’s very unusual for a kid of my age at 12 or 13 to be gigging.”
But she found a Russian restaurant that wanted someone to sing top 40 hits.
“I did that for ages, way before I had any success,” she said.
Amorosi told the Mail that she’d like to spend more time in the region.
“I’ve got a three year old son,” she said.
“It would be nice to take him on Puffing Billy and to Emerald Lake.”
She did recently visit her stepsister, who calls the Dandenongs home, including introducing her son to cockatoos.
“My kid was so excited,” she said.
“We went to a little local bar and got a counter meal.
“That was about the only time we’ve had to get down there.”
Amorosi moved to Los Angeles in 2011 to discover herself and develop her music career.
She told the Mail that leaving leafy Australia for the states “wasn’t as hard as what I thought it was going to be”.
At the peak of her career she spent a lot of time in Europe, including two years in Germany.
“I thought ‘this is only going to be an adventure for a few months’,” she said.
“It ended up taking way longer than that.
“You can’t just step in and say ‘I’m a pop singer from Australia’. You have to prove yourself.
“I was so busy trying to achieve something and improve as an artist, it took on its own little world there.”
She found it hard to have a personal life, and didn’t have her circle of friends to lean on.
But she did meet her husband, and then welcome a little boy into the world.
“I have my family now, there,” she said.
“I’ve come back quite a lot, I just don’t publically announce it.
“This is the first time bringing him (her son) back.
“We’ve been here going on three months now.
“It’s been amazing.
“I really want him to feel like this is his home.
“I’d love to be able to raise my kid here because we are incredibly blessed in Australia.
“I’ve got lots to think about when it comes to that.”
Amorosi is looking forward to sharing her new music with her home crowd.
“This record is completely different to what people expect,” she said.
“It’s really edgy.
“I haven’t gone back and reproduced it to fit into the market.
“It’s more me than ever.”
Since returning home to Australia a few months ago she’s performed the Red Hot Summer Tour, and said audiences had been incredible.
“It’s actually been a really emotional experience for me,” she said.
She worried that people had gotten on with their lives and forgotten her.
“To be embraced the way that I have has been mind-blowing,” she said.
“A lot of the people I grew up with have been there.
“It’s like going back to childhood seeing them again.”
Amorosi said the Mount Evelyn crowd would hear her new tunes plus her hits, like Absolutely Everybody and Shine, to “relive our youth”.
“I look forward to being down that end and spending the day down there,” she said.
