There are a great many things you should know about Sarah Mary Chadwick. The New Zealand-born and Melbourne-based singer-songwriter, who has released a striking solo album almost annually in recent years, makes wrenching, confessional music. Initiates to her music are often taken aback, which she is bemused by. Nor does Chadwick believe that her albums, including January’s Please Daddy, are personally cathartic.

Sarah Mary Chadwick plays in Sydney this month and in Melbourne in March.Credit:

What you need to know about Sarah Mary Chadwick is that the only transaction she’s interested in is between herself and the music she can’t stop making. Everything and everyone else – and she’s cheerful as she says this – is welcome but essentially superfluous.

“People let lots of things get in the way of producing work and I don’t really.”

“It’s impossible for me to approach it any other way. This has always been very much for me. I enjoy it, I get value out of it, and that can never be broken,” says Chadwick, sitting in a Brunswick East cafe and keeping an eye out for her favourite neighbourhood dogs. “I’m just not that demanding of other people. I need to do it, but once you make a record your ownership of it is ended.”

Chadwick arrived in Melbourne in 2005, having grown up on a farm outside the town of Taumarunui, been expelled from high school in Hamilton, and become the vocalist for snarling alternative-rock quartet Batrider. She transitioned into a solo career, simultaneously spent years working in the “macho environments” of restaurant kitchens, and by her own estimation has worked with countless GPs, nine psychiatrists, two alcohol counsellors, and – productively for the last five years – an analyst.

“Other people don’t have my tenacity,” the 37-year-old Chadwick says. “Lots of people that I know who were making music to a far better degree than I was don’t do it anymore. People let lots of things get in the way of producing work and I don’t really. I’ve always been my own worst enemy and if I can keep myself in check nothing else bothers me.”

Please Daddy was recorded during a difficult personal period for Chadwick – “I’m really good now,” she adds – and the record documents that period rather than despairing about it. The folk-rock backing, leavened with flute and muted brass, swells behind her unadorned voice, and a number of the songs have an echo of grand 1960s balladry.

“With this record I wanted to be Elvis-y, Leonard Cohen,” says Chadwick, who plays a game with her best friend, housemate, and the album’s drummer Tim Deane-Freeman where they take turns playing “big” songs to each other. He might lead with Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up in Blue, which she would reply to with I’d Rather Go Blind by Etta James. For Chadwick, who’s also a prolific artist, it’s just the latest turn in a career she’s “chipping away” at.

“I know I have skills and I can put a song together, but that’s not a particularly impressive skill,” Chadwick says. “But then I was thinking about it, and writing a song is amazing because it has 100 words – some repeated – and there’s unlimited scope. That’s all I need.”

Sarah Mary Chadwick plays at the Petersham Bowls Club in Sydney on Saturday, February 15, and Howler in Melbourne on Wednesday, March 11.

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