Kasey Chambers reveals why she’s loving her freedom at 40
Now a single mum at 40, country music star Kasey Chambers tells Samantha Trenoweth that she feels strong and free, and no longer gives a damn if she’s pretty enough.
It’s half-past nine on Christmas morning and Kasey Chambers is already belting out tunes. Standing in the shadow of a tinsel-decked tree, guitar and harmonica strapped over a sundress, she plays a mix of greatest hits and carols while guests arrive and volunteers dish up 240 Christmas lunches at a homeless shelter on the NSW Central Coast.
“Kasey rang, out of the blue, and asked if she could come in for an hour on Christmas morning. She stayed for three,” says Charles Boyton, program manager at Coast Shelter, grinning. “Kasey’s mum came, too. They were awesome. It was the best Christmas we’ve ever had here.”
This wasn’t for show. “I didn’t have my kids with me. Every second Christmas they wake up at their dad’s. So I figured this would be a nice way to spend the morning,” Kasey explains. “I’ve never been through homelessness. Sometimes, growing up, we lived in our car, but that was by choice. A lot of people don’t have that choice and I think music can make a difference – even if it just makes a difference for one day. I love that
about music. It can lift you out of a dark place, it can make you feel.”
Kasey Chambers’ honest, salt-ofthe-earth, Aussie-girl image, and her empathy, are grounded in a nomadic childhood spent hunting foxes on the Nullabor Plain. Later, her family’s Dead Ringer Band (featuring her foxhunter, guitar-legend father Bill; mother Diane, brother Nash; as well as Kasey and occasional friends and ring-ins like Beccy Cole) slept in the back of a LandCruiser or in swags under the stars as they travelled through every one-horse town from the Bight to the Barrier Reef, playing country, blues and roots music.
Growing up, Kasey says she “thought all families sat around campfires at night, singing and playing guitar”. Her musical education was steeped in woodsmoke, and in Johnny Cash, Gram Parsons, Merle Haggard and Emmylou Harris classics.
In 1992, Slim Dusty recorded one of her dad’s songs, Things Are Not The Same On The Land, and it won the APRA Song of the Year. That changed everything. The Dead Ringers hit the road on a tour that covered 50,000 kilometres in a year. They played
Tamworth and the Gympie Music Muster. It was only a matter of time before a record company noticed Kasey. Her first solo album, The Captain, won her ARIA Awards for Best Country Album and Best Female Artist, and the title song was picked up for the soundtrack to The Sopranos. Her second album, Barricades & Brickwalls, with its single Not Pretty Enough, shot to the top of the charts. She was no longer the kid with the catchy voice in a family with serious country music swagger. Kasey Chambers was a star.
Ten studio recordings later, she is still a star – and a single working mother and the fire behind the Chambers family’s musical enterprise, which now stretches across three generations and a music production house. Last year, Kasey turned 40, which felt like a milestone.
“I’ve found this real strength and almost a comfort in myself this year,” she says, “which is a nice feeling. I still have days when I think, ‘Am I not pretty enough?’ But then I add, ‘Who gives a damn?’ That’s the difference. It’s not that I’m so much wiser or I’ve got everything sorted. It’s that I don’t care as much, at 40, whether I do or not.”
Also, at 40, Kasey has decided she’s entitled to acknowledge the bad days.
“I feel like I generally have my life in balance,” she explains, “but when it’s not, I know it’s not the end of the world. Where I used to fall apart a bit, now I just go: ‘You know what? That’s life.’ I think this applies to any working mum, or any mum who gets overwhelmed. Sometimes you’re going to have s**t days where you feel like rocking back and forth in the foetal position in the corner, and I let myself have those days now. In the past, I didn’t let myself have them. I thought I had to always be this strong, independent woman and put on a brave face. Of course, I’d like to feel like a strong, independent woman every day, all the time, but I don’t and I’m honest about it now.”
These are lessons, Kasey says, that have gelled more solidly in her fortieth year, but they’ve been developing slowly over 10 years or more, learned through relationship break-ups, personal and professional crises, and a bout (now long past) with anorexia.
“I’m one of those people who looks for the positives,” she admits, “and the positive I’ve taken from going through an eating disorder is that I now recognise, early on, when it feels like things are spiralling out of control. I realise now it wasn’t about body image – it was about control. Apparently this is common, but I didn’t know that at the time: the idea I can’t control my big picture, so I’m going to exert control in little ways.
“Now, I don’t believe things are ever entirely beyond my control. I believe that whatever you want your life to be, you can make that happen. Particularly with the beautiful people I have working around me, I believe I can do that. I’m so lucky my manager is my brother, Nash, and he always puts his sister before his artist. He can tell when I need time off sooner than I can. I’ll be like go-go-go and he’ll say, ‘No, it’s getting a bit overwhelming, so let’s slow it down for a while’.”
Sometimes, when she senses the pressure is building, Kasey calls for a little light-hearted truancy.
“A while ago, I picked up the kids from school early,” she says with a wink. “I didn’t tell them I was going to – I didn’t know I was going to. I took them to a lolly shop and said, ‘Pick what you want, we’re going to sit on the beach and eat lollies.’ Even my teenager thought this was cool. Then we went to Flip Out [Trampoline Arena] and jumped on trampolines for the rest of the day.
“I’m sure there’s people out there going, ‘But what about their education?’ There are a lot of days to get an education. I grew up in a family where life education was important and my kids are getting that, alongside school. Sometimes I take my kids on tour. They’ve seen Uluru and Darwin and they’ve been to Broome and toured around WA. They’ve learnt a whole lot from those experiences. I don’t take them out of school all the time. I’m also the pain-in-the-arse mum who makes them do their homework. But I think they need a bit of both.”
Kasey’s eldest, Talon Jordi Hopper (whose father is actor Cori Hopper), is 14. Arlo Ray Nicholson, nine, and
“I thought I had to always be this strong, inependent woman and put on a brave face.”
Poet Poppin Nicholson, five, were both products of Kasey’s marriage to musician Shane Nicholson, from whom she split in 2013. All the kids have caught the Chambers’ music bug.
“My kids love to jam,” says Kasey. “Tal plays guitar. Arlo plays the harmonica and the cajon drum. He gets on stage and plays with me quite a bit and it’s funny because he’s the quietest of all my kids. He’s not a performer; he’s just a bit of a muso, like his dad. Poet will sometimes play the djembe drum or sometimes she’ll dance around me on stage and hug my legs. They’re pretty open to the music. Talon used to put his hands over his ears when I yodelled but I don’t blame him. I don’t really know if I like that sound much either.”
All three kids like their mum’s most recent album (there’s no yodelling), and they’re not alone – Dragonfly is widely considered Kasey’s opus. There are 20 tracks, half produced by iconic Australian songwriter Paul Kelly; the other half by Kasey’s brother, Nash. There are moments of pithy humour and hearton-her-sleeve confession. There are some clever, quirky co-writes and collaborations with folk-rock wunderkind – and Kasey’s recent romantic partner – Harry Hookey (described as “sweet as a cookie” in her comic, candid, spokenword Talkin’ Baby Blues). And there are cameos and duets with Ed Sheeran and Keith Urban.
“The first time I had a conversation with Keith was in Tamworth, one of the first years we played there. He came up to me after a Dead Ringer Band gig and he said, ‘You sing like you don’t give a shit. I really like that.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, that was Keith Urban!’ He hasn’t changed a bit. He’s the nicest, friendliest guy.”
Kasey called the album Dragonfly because she read the insect symbolised “the kind of change that has its source in mental and emotional maturity and the understanding of a deeper meaning of life”. She has it written on a slip of paper and pulls it from her pocket to remind herself. “That was exactly how I felt about this record – that I was embracing a change that happened, personally and musically.”
There had also been a physical change. In May 2015, Kasey had throat surgery to remove nodules that had been plaguing her for 20 years. Prior to the operation she was afraid she might not sing again. Afterwards, doctors’ orders prevented her from singing for two months. But when she finally opened her mouth, she was astounded. Out came “the voice I’d heard in my head all along” – a voice that had grown in depth, resonance and versatility – and there was a sense of physical and emotional lightness as well.
“That surgery is one of the biggest things that has happened in my life,” Kasey says, smiling. “I didn’t know it would do that. I knew it would change my voice, but I didn’t realise how much more would change. The stress I had put on my voice, throat and neck – that energy that had gone there my whole life – was released. After the surgery, I remember saying to somebody, ‘I feel like a giraffe’. I felt taller, I felt freer.”
Unencumbered by a romantic partner right now, Kasey is relaxing into that freedom. There have been rumours since she and Harry Hookey reverted to “just good friends” status but, says Kasey, they’re unfounded.
“I’m single,” she insists. “I’ve been single for a while, I love it. I’ve always been open to life and sometimes it’s gotten me into trouble – three kids to two fathers and many failed relationships indicate just how open to life I am. I love life experience for the same reasons I love music – it makes me feel things – and I’m open now to feeling everything … I try not to have rules and regulations about my personal life … you have to be open to feeling things for people. I believe in connection, in energies connecting. That can come from really different places and can surprise you sometimes. It can be right in front of you or it can just appear by chance.”
Kasey remains open to chance and eager for surprises.
“Three kids to two fathers and many failed relationships indicate just how open to life I am.”