Call Her A Singer Or Call Her An Actress, There's No Difference To Clare Bowen

Clare Bowen is in Atlanta, Georgia. It's a day off for the Australian-born actress, a rare one these days, and as she says, this particular break involves, "shuffling around the hotel room with my fiance, with my hair everywhere, wrapped in a robe." A little bit of home life, albeit in a hotel room, for someone whose career these days doesn't allow for too much down time.

In 2012, Bowen was offered the role of Scarlett O'Connor in the American ABC television series Nashville. Essentially her big break, the role has grown and her character is an integral part in the series, currently in its fourth season. She's in Atlanta as she's performing as part of the Nashville tour, where a number of the cast perform songs from the series, and part way through the tour, she's heading home for her own tour, her first in Australia. She's making the most of this day off.

"To be able to look after my family through making art is like, it's kind of unheard of almost. I feel very lucky."

"It's a huge thing, and I'm so grateful," she says on the Australian run in late May. "I didn't know what to expect, so for the thing to have sold out in under ten minutes is completely mind-blowing for me.

"The position I've found myself in, there aren't any words for how grateful I am to be doing what I'm doing, and to be able to look after my family through making art is like, it's kind of unheard of almost. I feel very lucky."

Bowen is, of course, known primarily for her acting. Beginning with roles in Australian series' Home & Away, All Saints and The Cut, she's appeared in film (The Combination, The Clinic and Not Suitable For Children) and on stage, playing Wendla in the Sydney Theatre Company's musical production of Spring Awakening.

"Music was my connection to the rest of the world," she's been quoted as saying, referencing her relatively isolated childhood and her initial love affair with music. Thus it was really only a matter of time before a role like the one she plays in Nashville came along, enabling her to combine these two passions.

"Well, if you want to combine the two, there's never been a difference," she says when asked if a career in music was always the goal, or whether acting was number one. "Music is what happens when you've got no words left to express what you're feeling. I knew that I wanted to tell stories from when I was very young. I didn't know how I was going to do it. I think everything happens for a reason. It's all just storytelling."

"I knew that I wanted to tell stories from when I was very young."

Those who have watched Nashville will know Bowen can sing. Her upcoming Australian tour is a legitimate exercise, not merely a marketing gimmick cooked up by the slick PR cats at ABC over in the States. The fact she now carries such a profile is a bonus — as of writing, all shows bar one have sold out — but there's little doubt she'll be able to carry it off with aplomb.

"People can think what they like about me, I don't care," she says simply when asked if the possible perception of her as an actor-turned-singer will triumph over her as an actor and singer. "The most important part of however people perceive you, at least for me, is that people know it's me.

"I don't perform live as Scarlett O'Connor, I perform as me. And I don't have any ego about it at all — if people think I'm more of an actor than a singer, that's cool. Some people would probably think I'm more of a singer than an actor. T-Bone (Burnett, Nashville's previous Executive Music Director, among many other things) said to me, 'you're trained as an actor, and you're trained in classical music' — my whole upbringing was those two things neck and neck, nothing overtook the other… But he said 'you've been trained as an actor and you have a voice that can do all of these different things, so lets just do all of these different things'. So people can make up their own mind, I don't mind which they think I'm better at. Or maybe they'll let me do both."

She laughs as she says that, an almost self-conscious laugh. Talking to Bowen, you get the impression she's as humble and kind as the character she portrays on television — albeit in this instance with a soft Australian accent, a far cry from Scarlett O'Connor's Mississippi twang. (Incidentally, Bowen wrote O'Connor's backstory, which the show's writers then used to build the character).

The musical side of things for Bowen will come to a head later this year with the release of her debut album, a record which will "have my fiance's fingerprints all over it" (Brandon Robert Young is an accomplished Nashville-based songwriter). But until then it is, as Bowen would put it, all about telling stories — a childhood dream come true.