From sports stadiums to pub stages, Samantha Sharpe has been writing music and performing around Melbourne for some time now, honing her skills and biding her time until her debut baby ‘Gilded Cage’ was finally ready to come out of the incubator, fully-fledged and ready to fly.

Short but sweet, the EP contains five tracks of classic, open-air acoustic guitar woven against introspective melodies that craft strong imagery about love and self-acceptance, each one being drawn from her own personal experience.

The phrase ‘gilded cage’ particularly resonates with Sharpe and informs the tone of the EP overall. “It’s always been a phrase that interested me a lot – it’s the idea that something might look good from the outside, but maybe it’s not what it seems,” she explains. “I spent a lot of time being alone in isolation, I’m a bit of a homebody. It’s the way I’m comfortable, but it’s still isolating yourself and not experiencing things. I know when I was a lot younger and trying to write, I didn’t feel like I had a lot of experiences to draw from. So even though I was comfortable, it maybe wasn’t the best way to be.”

In many ways, this EP is Sharpe’s emergence from her gilded cage and while nervous upon its release, she says “it was just exciting to be able to share my words and thoughts with people and have them really listen. It’s been a long time coming to get the music out and share it and feel confident enough to approach a recording studio and work with a producer. It was all a new experience.”

Despite dealing with themes of isolation and hard experiences, the EP has an upbeat, chin-up energy that Sharpe hopes will inspire hope and courage in her listeners. Her discussion of ‘Masterpiece’ sums it up neatly: “that song came from harder times, but it’s a positive, happy-sounding song and I would like people to believe they are the masterpiece as well because it takes a lot of courage to get to that point.”

Each track is uplifting and spirited with a little bit of acoustic country flair and while the songwriting is Sharpe’s way of exploring her own life through music, there is certainly a hope that other people can resonate with her words and find the confidence to break out of their own cages.