Sia: The Hit Songwriter Who Disappeared on Purpose

In 2013, Sia Furler tweeted her own retirement in one line: "fame is the worst thing that can happen to a person. i choose not to appear in anything publicly. twitter's it!" At the time she'd already written hit singles for Rihanna, David Guetta, and Beyoncé, and had quietly decided the version of success that came with being recognized on the street wasn't one she wanted any part of. Then "Chandelier" happened anyway, and the retirement lasted about a year.

What's unusual about Sia's career isn't just that she built one writing for other people's voices before she became a star in her own right, plenty of songwriters do that. It's that when fame finally caught up to her, she found a way to keep it at arm's length permanently: an oversized two-tone wig that covers her face in every performance, video, and public appearance since. She didn't quit the spotlight. She built a costume that let her stand in it without being seen.

A working songwriter before she was a star

Sia Kate Isobelle Furler was born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1975, and spent her twenties and early thirties as a journeyman act: singing in the acid jazz band Crisp, providing lead vocals for the British group Zero 7, releasing a string of solo albums that sold modestly. By the late 2000s she'd shifted her focus almost entirely to writing songs for other artists, and that's where her career actually took off. "Titanium," written for David Guetta, became a global dance-pop anthem, ironically with Sia's own guide vocal kept on the final track after Guetta decided he preferred it to a replacement. "Diamonds," written for Rihanna, is reported to have come together in minutes rather than hours: producer Benny Blanco has said Sia wrote the song "song, melody, lyrics, harmonies, everything" while waiting for a cab. She also co-wrote "Pretty Hurts" for Beyoncé, a song about the toll of chasing an impossible beauty standard that landed with particular weight coming from someone who'd write her next act largely obscured behind a wig.

By the time she wrote "Chandelier," Sia had a reputation in the industry as one of the fastest, most reliable hitmakers working, before most of the record-buying public knew her name or face.

The song she almost gave away

"Chandelier" itself nearly went to someone else. Sia and co-writer Jesse Shatkin wrote it during studio downtime, and the initial plan was to pitch it, the way she'd pitched dozens of songs before. "I was so surprised Rihanna didn't take it, because I thought it was the greatest song in the world at the time," Sia has said. Shatkin has confirmed the song was floated for Rihanna or Beyoncé before Sia decided to keep it for herself, in large part because the lyric, a self-destructive account of drinking to blot out a life she didn't want to look at directly, was too personal to hand to somebody else's voice. That decision, keeping the song that named her own addiction rather than exporting it, is arguably the hinge her whole solo career turned on.

Wearing the wig, on purpose

Once "Chandelier" made her famous whether she liked it or not, Sia didn't retreat from music, she redesigned how she'd be visible in it. The two-tone bob wig, oversized and usually turned away from the camera, became her actual public identity: she performs with her back to the audience or her face obscured, and lets dancer Maddie Ziegler or other performers stand in for her in videos. She's been direct about why. "I'm trying to have some control over my image. And I'm allowed to maintain some modicum of privacy," she's said. In another interview, describing what drove the decision, she told the story of a friend disclosing a cancer diagnosis and being interrupted mid-sentence by a stranger asking for a photo: "I just wanted to have a private life," she told The New York Times. "Once, as my friend was telling me they had cancer, someone came up and asked, in the middle of the conversation, if they could take a photograph with me. You get me? That's enough, right?"

It's worth sitting with how deliberate that is. Most artists who complain about fame's costs keep showing up in public anyway, because visibility is assumed to be the price of the job. Sia treated it as a design problem instead, and solved it: keep writing, keep releasing music, keep touring even, but remove her actual face from the transaction. The wig isn't a gimmick bolted onto her music. It's the mechanism that let her keep making it.

What the wig was covering

Sia has also been candid, in a way that makes the anonymity read less like eccentricity and more like self-protection, about what she was managing underneath it. She's spoken about a period around 2010 when she was addicted to painkillers and alcohol and had a specific plan to end her life; she's said what interrupted it was a phone call from a friend who greeted her with an old inside joke, "squiddly-diddly-doo," and that in that moment she thought, "There's a world out there and I'm not a part of it. But I might like to be." She's since spoken about diagnoses including Graves' disease, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and complex PTSD connected to childhood trauma. None of that is incidental to the wig. A performer who has described being recognized in public as something to actively engineer her way out of is not being precious about privacy for its own sake; she's describing a coping strategy that happens to have also become an iconic visual brand.

What's worth taking from her career

Sia's catalog makes two arguments most songwriters in this series don't get to make at once: that writing for other people's voices can be a full, successful career on its own, not just a stepping stone to your own, and that the terms of your own visibility are more negotiable than the industry usually admits. She wrote hits for Rihanna and Beyoncé for years before most people could have picked her out of a lineup, and when she finally became famous under her own name, she decided how much of herself that fame actually got to see.

If you're a writer more comfortable handing a song to someone else's voice than stepping in front of it yourself, or an artist who needs someone who can write that fast and that well, go find them.

Sources: Wikipedia, Rolling Stone, Billboard, MusicRadar, NME, Songwriters Hall of Fame