The Courier-Mail, Brisbane, 2 September 1999
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HERE
MY, HOW THEIR GARDEN HAS GROWN! FAME, fortune and global accolades are not everything they're cracked up to be - at least if you want to believe the boys from Brisbane's Savage Garden. Darren Hayes and Daniel Jones say they seriously considered not bothering to create a follow-up to their 11 million-selling self-titled debut album. "It wasn't so much that we wanted to break up. We just kept asking ourselves did we really want to make another album," singer Hayes said during a visit to Sydney yesterday. "We were instantly gazillionaires and just a lot of stuff went down, a lot of personal stuff, not between the two of us, but life in general." One of these dramas was the breakup of Hayes's marriage to his childhood sweetheart. "We had problems accepting newfound money, fame, dealing with being a public person," Hayes said. "It started affecting our families and our private lives. So we sat down and said, 'Okay, do we want to make another album?'The answer very quickly was yes, but the question was how." As a reaction to suddenly becoming one of the most famous people in the world, Hayes spent a year alone in Manhattan, losing himself in the obscurity offered by one of the world's biggest cities' "I wanted to put myself out of my comfort zone," he said. "I wanted to experience life. It was a bit of an uphill struggle. "I was alone, I missed my family. But it was great for processing everything that had happened." Hayes finally resurfaced with the bulk of the lyrics for Savage Garden's second album, Affirmation. "I wanted it to be an emotional record. I wanted it to be a quite moving experience," he said. "I know there's a couple of uncomfortable moments on there. But I don't know any other way to do it. "Everything is totally autobiographical, except for the first single, which is a bit of a fantasy." That first single is a sweet mid-tempo ballad called I Knew I Loved You, which radio stations around the country received on Monday. Affirmation will be released in Australia on October 25, two weeks ahead of the rest of the world. The bulk of Affirmation was recorded in San Francisco, Hayes's new hometown. If there was any doubt whether the duo would remain a serious commercial concern in their self-imposed absence, the release earlier this year of a single called The Animal Song, which featured in the Hollywood film The Other Sister, quickly put those fears to rest. That track peaked at number three on the Australian charts and sold close to 100,000 copies here.
