Sara Storer has become one of Australia's most celebrated musical storytellers and is now releasing her first Greatest Hits collection. Talk to people about Sara Storer and the same words keep being used: 'real', 'unaffected', 'authentic'. It's partly a way of acknowledging that she's lived the life she sings about - growing up on a farm in Victoria's Mallee, her grandfather a pioneer of the district, then teaching in tiny bush towns in Queensland and the Northern Territory. But authenticity alone doesn't make a great artist. Sara has a hungry writer's eye, her songs full of vivid, telling moments and narratives that seem to drop the listener into a freshly minted world. The voice that tells these tales is open and unguarded; the music seductive yet energised. Her songs speak with great directness and immediacy, as if we had found ourselves on the road, or round the campfire, with the characters of the song. Sara won the Best New Talent award at the 2001 Country Music Awards, and then.
