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| Saturday , July 26 , 2008 |



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Songs of a survivor
- Meet Delta Goodrem, the newest Australian pop import

A pop star, soap actress and cancer survivor, Delta Goodrem is already famous in Australia, Britain and Japan. Now her sights are set on larger pastures — and who better to turn to for advice than Olivia Newton-John.

While other stars before her have failed to match their international success with fame in the US, Goodrem, 23, who recently released her US debut album Delta, hopes to follow in the footsteps of her role model, fellow Australian Newton-John.

“Olivia’s been an incredible guiding light with me,” Goodrem said in an interview this week. “She’s always given me really great advice... She’s beautiful and we have a beautiful friendship.”

| But as for the advice she received from Newton-John — best known for her role in the 1970s hit movie Grease — and several US No. 1 albums and singles, Goodrem was tight-lipped. “If I told you that I’d have to kill you,” she said, laughing.

While there are few US reviews for the album, Goodrem has found a friend in famously harsh celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, who described her first single In This Life as “deelish”.

And Billboard’s Chuck Taylor wrote: “With successes from Leona Lewis, Katy Perry and Natasha Bedingfield proving that the public hungers for quality female pop, timing is a bull’s-eye for Goodrem’s deliciously tasteful US bid.”

For Goodrem, who performed a duet Right Here With You with Newton-John at Los Angeles Gay Pride celebrations in June, her US debut has been a long time coming.
A battle with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, diagnosed when she was 18, derailed her career while her debut album Innocent Eyes was at No. 1 in Australia and No. 2 in Britain and she was acting in the soap Neighbours.

“A lot happened very quickly — my debut album became something very magical in the sense that so many people took it home, one in four homes (in Australia) had that album,” she said. “This wonderful moment was happening and then I got diagnosed with cancer and it was this extreme situation.”

After successful treatment, which saw her lose her long blond hair, Goodrem, who has won eight Australian Recording Industry Association Awards — the Australian equivalent of the Grammys — returned with 2004’s Mistaken Identity.

Delta, her third studio album, was released in Australia last year, hitting No. 1. She describes the album as having a “theme of letting go, of moving forward, of believing again in this life.”

The singer-songwriter, who wrote a song for Celine Dion’s 2007 album Taking Chances, said the album allowed her to move on from her cancer battle and the divorce of her parents and begin to believe again through her relationship with Irish singer Brian McFadden, a former member of the boy band Westlife.

McFadden, to whom Goodrem is now engaged, co-wrote half the songs on Delta.
Although much of her music is piano-based, she describes it as pop. “At the same time it’s sentimental, it still has meaning, it still has weight to it,” she said, “It comes from a deeper place than what the literal lyric sometimes says.”

MICHELLE NICHOLS, REUTERS