Popcast: Sia’s Path from Victim to Victory

Sia Furler, the Australian singer-songwriter, is 38. “1000 Forms of Fear” is her sixth album, and her first since 2010: that all sounds like mid-career time, when maintaining a sufficient audience becomes the job.

But much has happened since the fifth album: her reckoning with addictions, her decision to deflect attention from her appearance — by putting a bag over her head in pictures and turning her back to the audience in performance — and her rapid ascension to the A-list of pop songwriting. She worked on Rihanna’s “Diamonds,” Britney Spears’s “Perfume,” Christina Aguilera’s “You Lost Me,” Beyoncé’s “Pretty Hurts” and Katy Perry’s “Double Rainbow,” and has collaborated as singer and songwriter with David Guetta (“Titanium”) and Flo Rida (“Wild Ones”). She has become wealthy, powerful, famous, notorious.

Jon Pareles, the chief pop music critic for The Times, wrote about the album this week. He’s our guest as we talk about Sia Furler’s sonic curiosity and professional reliability, her tendency to give a lot as a singer and also to hold something back for herself, her “victim-to-victory” and single-image songwriting strategies, the cracks and smudges she puts into her vocals, and her collaboration with the similarly curious producer Greg Kurstin.