SHE has long become the Queen of Australian Country music – seven solo albums and a huge following around Australia.
But Kasey Chambers is more than that – a mother, a voyager, a song writer whose music continues to surprise and grow – the consummate live performer.
She’s also on her way with her band to the Hallam Hotel on 3 December.
“I wasn’t interested in not sounding like me anymore,” Kasey Chambers shrugs, wrapping her hands around her coffee cup; the same hands that have received 29 music awards and raised three children. The same hands that pulled crayfish spines from their knuckles on Australia’s southern coast and hunted foxes under the Nullarbor’s endless blue sky.
It’s 1999 and Kasey Chambers is 23 years old. She’s spent the past five years traversing the arteries of Australia, singing in a family band. They’ve performed to empty stools in deserted pubs and to dust-cloaked festival masses. They’ve slept in motels, in vans and on the road in the rain and snow. It’s been a long road and she’s been living and breathing music for the length of it. But as she’s stepping into the studio to record her first solo album, ‘The Captain’, she still can’t help feeling “naive, a little bit scared and a little bit excited.”
Sixteen years later, these feelings still linger.
“The newest album was very much the same for me, because I didn’t quite know where it was going to go” she admits.
“I had to let go a bit. I’m not good at that.” In 2014, Kasey Chambers released her seventh solo album, and enlisted the help of some local luminaries from Dan Kelly to Bernard Fanning and her dad Bill to pull the whole thing off.
But despite finding new ways to craft her stories, Kasey Chambers is still inimitably her. From the red dust of her nomadic childhood to the surf coast where she’s raised her family, Kasey’s always maintained that her records have been a testament to “who (she) was at the time”.
And her newest album is proof that she’s unwilling to settle for anything less.
“I don’t want to write songs based on what I think people want to hear from me. I hope that in the end, this is what they warm to.”
Kasey will bring her show to the Hallam Hotel, Princes Highway, Hallam, on 3 December. Phone 8786 0200. Tickets available at the venue or through Moshtix.
