Kasey Chambers is somewhere between Charlotte and Charlottesville, talking on a cell phone, secure in the knowledge that if her bus breaks down, she needs only to make a quick call for roadside service. Two decades ago, it was not thus. With her parents and older brother, Kasey roamed the remote outback of southern Australia in a four-wheel drive. Her father hunted foxes and rabbits, and traded the pelts. They slept under the stars. Every couple of weeks, they'd pull into a railway station to buy supplies. "A few times when the car broke down we weren't sure what we were going to do," she says. "You can't call someone to pick you up."
Other than being cut off from her peer group during her first 10 years, Chambers, now 24, looks back at her nomadic childhood with nothing but fondness. And it's had a residual effect on her development as a rising alt-country artist. With virtually no pre-teen exposure to pop culture, she had to rely on her guitar-playing father's record collection, which was filled with the likes of Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Jackson Browne. As a result, her own music was birthed more purely. "It wasn't tainted, maybe, by all the music on the charts," she says in a spunky Australian accent.
On "Cry Like a Baby," the lead track of her debut album, The Captain (Asylum), Chambers sings, "Well I'm not much like my generation/ Their music only hurts my ears." The couplet conjures images of a young fuddy-duddy wincing at the sound of loud rock. But that would be the wrong interpretation. "I think (those lyrics) are probably more to do with (my generation's) motive behind the music, which is definitely a lot different than what I believe," Chambers asserts. "I treat it like an art rather than a business. My generation seems to put the art second, business first. There is a lot of music I like from my generation, and I like some heavier, louder music as well. I went through a stage loving Nirvana. Listening to Christina Aguilera hurts my ears far more than Nirvana."
Even though she's not completely out of touch with her peers, Chambers' staunchest stateside fans include such elder fringe-country folk as Steve Earle, Lucinda Willliams, Dwight Yoakam, and Buddy and Julie Miller. Rolling Stone named The Captain one of its top 50 albums of 2000.
Most arresting is her voice. It has the high, clarion sweetness of Iris Dement or Dolly Parton, mixing a girlish innocence with worldly wisdom. The songs — her own, some written as early as age 16 — ooze considerable warmth and melodic breadth. Her lyrics, straightforward, heartfelt, portray an artist beyond her years, with a knack for communicating that often eludes artists double her age.
Her musical life started with family sing-alongs around outback campfires. In the mid '80s, the roaming Chambers clan formed the Dead Ringer Band, playing about half country and half old rock 'n' roll songs to pub crowds. The group recorded their first albums in 1993 and '95, the second one winning an ARIA, Australia's answer to a Grammy.
By the late '90s, Kasey had become the band's focal point. She won a national songwriting contest, beating her dad Bill. Her brother, Nash, became increasingly drawn to production and engineering. The threesome, along with a handful of support musicians, sojourned to remote Norfolk Island, just northwest of New Zealand, and cut The Captain in an old farmhouse.
Despite the modest country scene Down Under, with virtually no alt-country presence, Chambers shot to popularity in her homeland. Newspapers even took to calling her "the Queen of Pop." "We could never make a living just off playing to alternative country fans in Australia, all 10 of them," she says with chuckle. "We branched out and looked for a bigger audience in the mainstream area."
She doesn't anticipate similar success in the States, even though it's not hard to envision American commercial country radio giving Chambers a whirl. "That's not really where the record label is pushing it, which suits me fine," she says. " I don't crave notoriety. Someone like Lucinda — her success is where I wanna be. As far as a singer/songwriter goes, it's the best of both worlds. You put out albums, have some success, but you can walk down the street without being hassled."
Chambers says she doesn't get accosted in her native land much either. For the last eight years, she's lived in a beach town about two hours north of Sydney. She can't imagine moving into the city. Can she see living in the outback again? "No," she says firmly. "I have to shower once a day."
Contact Music & Features Editor Eric Snider at 813-248-8888, ext. 114, or snider@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2001.
