A Conversation with Kasey Chambers

Country Universe’s Kevin John Coyne spoke to Kasey Chambers in September about her new album Backbone, and its accompanying book, Just Don’t Be a Dickhead: And other profound things I learnt. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

You can read Jonathan Keefe’s bullet review of the album here.

Kevin John Coyne: This is your first album in six years, and it’s certainly one of your best. It’s a powerful collection with themes like how relationships change over time, and on trying to anchor yourself with your values in a changing world without losing your optimism and hope while you navigate painful experiences. I drew a lot of strength from listening to it and I’m excited to talk about some of the songs!

Kasey Chambers: It’s filling my heart because you put your creativity into this stuff and you don’t ever know if it’s going to translate. I know how much I am connected to things. Sometimes I’m really connected, sometimes not so much, but it’s really hard to know whether it’s going to translate to other people. And that’s just left in the hands of the Music Connection gods, and that’s out of my hands. So it’s really beautiful when it does connect to somebody, you know, even if it’s one person or 10 people, or 1000 people. I think I have faith that it will connect to the right people. 

Kevin John Coyne: For an album that’s so grounded in where you’re from, there are so many signs of how music travels, too. I love your cover of “Lose Yourself,” and how you find a connection from your story to Eminem from Detroit, with a song that’s about a very specific place that he’s still anchored to as home. And then you have Ondara from Kenya on this album, which brings another entirely different region of the world into it. It feels country, and it feels universal, but it also feels specific. 

Kasey Chambers: You just gave me goosebumps when you made the Eminem and Onadara connection!  I personally believe that it has more to do with the amount that I am connected to what I’m doing, [more than] where I came from, or the land that I come from, and then I put that into my songs. I don’t know if it’s so much that people are connecting to what I’m connecting to so much as just people are connecting to my connection. 

Kevin John Coyne: I will tell you that one song I keep going back to is “Arlo.” 

“Time is a vulture, my how you’ve grown” left me crying on the train! 

It hit me as a parent but also as a son. I feel like that song is everything I’d want my mom to be feeling about me in her heart as well. Like, you’re proud of me, even if we’re going in different directions, and that you’re holding me in your heart, even if we haven’t spoken. Maybe you don’t understand every choice that I’ve made but the love is there. That song is such a gift.

Kasey Chambers: What’s really special about it is that you are giving me, actually, a whole other perspective by saying so. You’re relating yourself to Arlo in this and that is totally different for me! I wrote the song for Arlo’s birthday, and it was his birthday going from from 12 to 13. So it’s a big change, because he’s a teenager now. He’s like a little boy one day, and the next day he’s this cool teenager that doesn’t need me anymore.

It’s really beautiful though, that you just even said that different perspective, to think of that song from Arlo’s point of view. Obviously when I wrote it, I wanted to write it for him, but it ended up very clear as I started writing it, I realized it was a song for me and a song for every mama who has to let her child grow up, particularly a boy. You know, I’ve got all that about to happen with my daughter as well. So there’s probably another song coming soon. Looking forward to a whole different one, that, “Oh, my God, I’m tearing my hair out”  kind of thing, you know.

That song is really special to me, and it’s one that is really personal. I talk about specific things, like when he found the little bird wounded in the backyard, and things like that. And so it’s very specific to my story and my relationship with my son. So I must admit, I didn’t know if people were going to relate to it. I guess once I started playing it live, I could see all the mums in the audience, and I was like, “Oh, okay, so it does strike a chord. They feel that too.” 

I think that really epitomizes that it’s not really up to me what your interpretation of the song is, as long as I connect to it in my own way that’s really true and authentic. I think that’s going to be enough to carry it to the person who needs to who needs to connect. 

So even though I might write a song about living in the outback of Australia, and that is so far away from what someone who reads your article about me, who might live a completely different life. But I don’t really think that any of us have to live through the same things, to feel the same things, to connect to them. That is such a beautiful thing about music, and that’s just this gift that we all have with music. Not just musicians, but we all have this beautiful gift to be able to connect with somebody from the other side of the world . Even going back a step where you mentioned Eminem and Ondara. So you look at me, Eminem, Ondara: three people, musicians that have lived completely different lives, completely different childhoods, completely different music genres, on paper maybe zero in common, and yet, there is a connection there. Eminem doesn’t know he has a connection with me yet, but he does.

I’ll make sure you get a copy of the book. There’s a little story in there about how you can find a family anywhere in all these unlikely places. That family is not just about being blood related to somebody. That you can connect with people from completely different walks of life and you can learn something from each other. You can click. You can have all these resonating, stirring feelings in you, and not even really know why. 

I think I first started realizing that when I started traveling to America. Because even though I had grown i[ on American country music, I didn’t think I would ever tour America, or anyone would be remotely interested in my music in America. Because I was just this kid from the Nullarbor who is influenced by American music, and I’m just stealing all the things that I learned from listening to their music, but I’m writing about the Nullarbor and all these experiences I’ve been through. How could anyone over the other side of the world possibly ever relate to that or even be remotely interested? 

But then, when I started traveling there and realizing that it doesn’t matter if we’ve had the same life. It doesn’t matter if you even want the same life. You can still connect in so many different ways. And that’s the beauty of creativity, really.

Kevin John Coyne: The closing song, “You are Everything to Me.” I can really hear the Emmylou Harris influence on that. I connected that to how Emmylou navigated the stage of her career that you’re in now. “Red Dirt Girl,” especially,” which is specific to one part of Alabama and to the 1970s and the Vietnam Era, but it totally resonated with me as a New Yorker. She was probably thinking the same thing as you – “How could this possibly travel to the other side of the world?

Kasey Chambers: It’s just a really beautiful thing, especially if you allow yourself to kind of open up to that. There’s a lot in my book where I talk about leading with an open heart. Rather than try to control everything, which I try to do as well, I’ve learned that so many beautiful things happen when I just lead with an open heart and let things happen. And then you meet these beautiful people, and you let these songs come out, and then you never know where that song is going to connect with somebody. You know, it’s just beautiful. I just love my job so much.

Kevin John Coyne: When I listened to the album for the first time, I was really surprised by how it opened. “A New Day Has Come” is such an evocative opening track. It’s not quite what I expected to first start the album. It took me a while to realize what it was reminding me of: Dolly Parton’s New Harvest…First Gathering opening with “Light of a Clear Blue Morning.” This was your first album post-pandemic, and the song has this feeling of “We’re ready. It’s a new day dawning. We’ve been through all of this, and we’re going to move forward.” It’s almost like a palette cleanser for me. 

Kasey Chambers: This song epitomizes the pandemic for me, and how I felt during that time, and it’s why I wanted to open the album with this. I actually had a few arguments with people saying, “You can’t open your album with this. It’s a five and a half minute song” 

There were all these reasons thrown at me, and I’m like, “I’m not budging.” This song sets up this album and how I feel. I don’t care if people skip it even because it’s too long. It just doesn’t matter. 

The note of intention of my book is based around that song. And what I’ve done in the book is we’ve got QR codes throughout the book. So after you read your little story, you can go straight to the song and listen to the song that relates to that story, so that you can kind of hear the soundtrack to the story you just read. So the opening one is the first track that you go listen to. If you want to.  Most people will skip it. I don’t care.

Kevin John Coyne: I can’t imagine anything else opening the album. I was just thinking about the title track – “Backbone (The Devil’s Child).” It works better as a second track after that opening. You’ve been so raw and vulnerable and open with your autobiography on record. I love hearing even some of things that you’ve reflected on before. I love hearing how with time and you get to new stages of your life, it’s like a kaleidoscope. It’s like the pieces are still the same, the memories are still the same, but your perspective changes a little bit.

Kasey Chambers: Well, that’s all that changes, isn’t it? But it should change. I shouldn’t see those things the same now at 48 that I saw them as when they happened. And I love that. I love that I will see them differently again in 10 years. I love that about growing. I don’t want things to be the same.

I have this thing, and I talk about it in my book quite a bit, where I don’t even have beliefs that I want to stick to for the rest of my life. I have beliefs that work for me now, and that make sense to me now, but I’m open to changing them, if things come in and they don’t resonate with me anymore.

I’m not just going to go, “Well, I decided that this is what I believe. So now I have to believe this for the rest of my life. And I told my kids that this is the way it is. So I have to stick by that.” 

If it doesn’t work for me anymore, then I’m just going to see what else is out there, you know? And I kind of love that it’s so exciting. It makes living so exciting. It makes growing so exciting, And makes change not so scary. Change is so scary, you know.

Kevin John Coyne: I can hear that in your music. I think one really cool thing about your catalog is that what you really can’t do with your albums very easily, is just take one song off of it and drop it into another album.

Kasey Chambers: I know what you mean. So it’s really interesting you say that, because I think of this latest album as my life soundtrack, right? So, in a way, I think you could take “Backbone” and just drop that on The Captain album, and it would fit musically. But because that was my first album after living on the Nullarbor, I couldn’t have written that song then. 

It’s really funny because I was going to say with this album, if you read the book, so many of the songs relate to little chapters of the book. I feel like you’re actually hearing a lot of it anyway without even reading the book. I love that it’s there in the sound and the emotion anyway, because you never quite know if it lands. 

Kevin John Coyne: I’m going to approach the book like the director’s commentary because I’m hearing the album first and the book will give me more insight. 

Kasey Chambers: I’m actually going to steal what you said, and that is how I’m going to describe it, because that’s exactly how it feels. It feels like it might be the Director’s Cut, like at the end, and all the commentary behind it of how we put the movie together.

Kevin John Coyne: So my colleague Jonathan Keefe saw the credits for the album and goes, “Wait a minute. The song’s called “The Divorce Song.” And she recorded it with Shane Nicholson. Then he sent a mind blown emoji.

“‘Til death do us part. But death didn’t come quick enough.” How has nobody ever said that before?

Kasey Chambers: Well, Shane wrote that line!

The funny thing is, that song is way more special to me than I thought it was going to be, right? So I went to Shane, and we obviously get along really well.  And I said to him, I got this idea of this song, like, maybe it’s a bit about divorce and stuff like that, and it might be this kind of vibe or whatever. But I’m really stuck on it. I was trying to write it on my own, and I just couldn’t. 

And me and Shane have not written a song since we were married, so we have not written a song together since we got divorced. We’ve sung a little bit together, like sometimes we sing “Rattling Bones” or something live, but we have not been creative together. We haven’t recorded together. We haven’t written a song or anything like that.

And it was really just a little conversation, a little seed that was there, and it was the last song I wrote for the record. So it was only about a week before we went in the studio that we finished it. And we wrote it via text message, because we were like, “As much as we get along great, I do not think we would be getting along so great if we sat down in a room and tried to be creative together.”

As much as I know there’s this comical element of the song, I also feel like it is just really heartfelt. Because it really does sum up our relationship, where we can laugh about it now, but we had some fucking hard times. And, you know, we’ve been through a lot together and then apart, and we’re co-parenting and all of that, and we’ve now come out the other side and into a really good place.  

We still have our moments. I’m not saying everything’s perfect or anything like that. But it was a really beautiful celebration of where we’ve gotten to in a divorce. And I think people often put more effort into a marriage, and then once they divorce, they go, “Well, everything should just fall into place. And if it doesn’t, then I’m just going to be fucking angry and pissed off for the rest of my life. And I actually think we’ve put some hard work into it, you know, like making sure that we have a really successful divorce.

In my book, that’s the last line of that chapter. We had to go through the hard marriage to get to the good divorce, but we’re way better at divorce than we ever were at marriage.

Kevin John Coyne: When I heard it, I thought, this is something that’s fairly common now that I hadn’t heard captured in a song before, which is after divorce, how parents that are centering the needs of their of their kids, and find a way to build a world around them to make sure that they have that continuity. I think it’s really beautiful because there are so many songs about marriage and divorce, but I’ve never heard a song before that’s about co-parenting and becoming friends again after the divorce. 

Kasey Chambers: I actually think my children have a more solid family unit now. We have me and my partner, and Shane and his partner, and then they also have a little baby, or he’s nearly two. My partner and I look after him every Tuesday. He comes to our house and we’re his babysitters on Tuesday, because they work. And so he comes and hangs out with us and his big brother and sister. So I think we have a much healthier family dynamic and unit. It’s much more solid and strong now. It’s almost like it’s because we’ve had to really work at it to make sure that it works really well. 

And look, I’m really lucky. I have a really supportive partner, and so does Shane. His partner is one of my best friends now, and she’s just amazing. But again, open hearts. They have very open hearts, and they lead with their hearts. And then my children have this beautiful, healthy family unit.  I always say it’s just such a functioning dysfunctional family. And I love it.

Kevin John Coyne: It makes me think of what you said earlier about how you want to show your kids. “Something might work for me now, but it might not work for me down the road, and I’ll change.”  I’m not surprised to hear they’re happy and stronger now because you’re modeling for them that it’s important for the individual people in a relationship to be happy as well. 

This is me with my education hat on, but everything I’ve seen has been that the kids who are the most successful are the ones who have loving parents in their life, or just love in their life. It’s never mattered what the family structure is.

Kasey Chambers: That’s right. I don’t really think anyone’s family truly ever ends up looking exactly like what you think it will look like anyway. You know before you make a family, you are thinking, “This is what my perfect family is going to look like.” And divorce or no divorce, it doesn’t. It’s not even possible. There is no perfect family. So it’s finding a healthy functioning family, not so much one that looks really perfect on Instagram. I think it’s just a different perspective and going, “I want the real functioning family, not the one that looks all good on the outside.” 

Kevin John Coyne: What I’ve loved about this interview the most, I think, is finding out the subtext really is the text. Because when I heard that song, that was my take on it!

Kasey Chambers:  Well, that’s what I love about this interview, is that I actually feel like all of these songs that you have picked up on, you have felt exactly what I put in, plus some extra stuff sometimes as well, which is just really beautiful. Because like I say, you often don’t know if it’s going to land or or even if the emotion that you put in it is the emotion that people hear, and I can’t ever be in control of that. So I just put it out there and hope for the best.

More of our conversation with Kasey Chambers will be published next month as we cover one of her albums in our upcoming 20th Anniversary feature. 

Backbone is now available in the US. Just Don’t Be a Dickhead releases October 22. 

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