Sia talks battling years of depression, says autism diagnosis is “best thing that ever happened to me”

Sia‘s back with a new song, “Gimme Love,” with a new album, Reasonable Woman, coming in 2024. She recently revealing she wrote the song and made the album while fighting a “severe” bout of depression.

Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1, Sia explained, “I had just been, every now and again, writing a song here or there for the last six, seven years. I got divorced and that really threw me for a loop.”

Sia and her first husband, Erik Anders, split in 2016. She tells Zane, “That was such a dark time that I was in bed for three years, really, really severely depressed. And so I couldn’t really do anything for that period of time. And then I started again, just little bits and pieces here and there, but it was really hard to get me out of bed.”

“And then finally it just turned out we had enough songs to make an album,” she continued. “I just rely on my management to tell me when we’ve got enough good ones.”

As for “Gimme Love,” Sia says it just “blurpled out,” adding, “I didn’t think anything of it. I felt like it was lazy songwriting.” She feels there are “way better ones” on the album.

Sia also opened up about her autism, which she first revealed in May. She told Zane she got evaluated after her friend Kathy Griffin suggested she might be on the spectrum.

“It turned out that I’m a level two autistic. There’s three levels. And one is Asperger’s, two is pretty autistic, and three is nonverbal,” Sia said. “So it made a lot of sense to me, because I’ve suffered my whole life, really suffered, and I didn’t know why … [the diagnosis] was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.