Kasey Chambers
Dragonfly
2017
Kasey Chambers has been among the finest country singer-songwriters around since her debut album The Captain released in 1999. She hasn’t released an inessential album since then, but the most important album of hers is Dragonfly, her 2017 opus that features the skeleton key which unlocks an understanding of her entire body of work: “Ain’t No Little Girl.”
“Girl” is a self-awakening delivered as a a guttural scream. Her declaration that she won’t be a heartbroken little girl because her man is leaving positions it as a pivotal turning point in her work, marking how her maturity and independence mean she isn’t worried anymore about being pretty enough and she can be her own damn captain, thank you very much. Her ferocious performance feels like she’s finding her own voice after using it in the service of others for countless years.
Chambers more explicitly makes this point on the raucous autobiographical “Talkin’ Baby Blues,” where she tosses off this line with a laugh: “Am I not pretty enough? Who gives a f–k!” The same spirit surfaces implicitly on the album’s very best tracks, where Chambers repeatedly finds herself taking stock of where she is in life and committing to a new way forward, whether that means realizing she isn’t loved (“Summer Pillow”) or realizing that she is (“Satellite”) and responding accordingly.
She also takes some bigger philosophical swings on two more album highlights: the bitter and disgusted “You Ain’t Worth Suffering For,” and the pensive and forward-looking “This is Gonna Be a Long Year.” So much of what makes Dragonfly compelling is her figuring out that classic question posed by the Serenity Prayer. She’s always had the courage to change the things that she could change, and the strength to accept the things that she couldn’t change. On Dragonfly, we meet the Kasey Chambers who now has the wisdom to know the difference, and it’s made her work ever since that much more insightful.
Additional Listening:
Kasey Chambers has been fairly prolific during the CU era:
- Storybook is a fantastic covers album that is worth seeking out on CD for the world class cover of Patty Griffin’s “Top of the World”
- Bittersweet previewed the revelatory Dragonfly with “Is God Real” and the title track
- Campfire stripped her sound down to the bone, with the haunting “Early Grave” being one of her finest compositions ever
- And finally, her newly released masterpiece Backbone just missed the cutoff for this list, but you can expect it to feature prominently the next time we look back
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Also certainly worth mentioning her work with Shane Nicholson, especially Rattlin’ Bones.
Agreed, Andrew! Her catalog is so rich, and those two records with Shane still managed to be top-tier. “One More Year” from Rattlin’ Bones, on any given day, might be my favorite song of hers.