On Sharing Stages With Idols & Stalking Plans

Country New South Wales girl Fanny Lumsden is a true do it yourself, forget the music industry machine type of artist, both in terms of her recordings and her live tours. She joined us recently while on the road in Bundaberg to tell us how she prefers to build her career from a grass-roots level in order to keep her very much in touch with her fans.  

"We could have gone down the traditional label route, but we decided to do everything community-based," she says referring to her second album, which has been completely crowd-funded and should be released sometime this year, "that's really worked for us over the last few years. We crowdfunded our first record and released it completely independently. 

"We also do this tour called the Country Halls tour," she says. "This year will be its sixth year. We put a call out and we had 40 halls apply this year for our Country Halls tour. That's another strong community-created thing. And we've just decided this way of doing things isn't broken so let's just continue it." 

For Lumsden, it's a matter of having to find new ways to run her career in this day and age when there is less money available to the industry and the old models are simply not working anymore. "You definitely do need to find new ways of doing things," she concedes. "I've never really done the traditional model. It's more about when opportunities that were going to come up have not come up and we've just said, 'Oh, how are we going to do this?'  

"So we've done the Country Halls shows that we've produced ourselves; that tour has gone from pretty much nothing. Six years ago we did three little halls and this year we've had 40 halls apply, and last year all the halls were sold out so it's really come into its own."

Lumsden and her band are taking a breather from the Country Halls tour in late July to jump onto the line-up of the Broadbeach Country Music Festival. The festival features an incredible bill, of which she is very happy to be a part, and there are two artists in particular she is looking forward to catching. "Our first set we are playing right before Kasey Chambers on the main stage," she reveals. "I think my 12-year-old self would have wet her pants with that little sitch back in the day of me singing The Captain in my bedroom." 

And headlining the festival is the illustrious country-rock band America of A Horse With No Name fame. "It's pretty amazing that they'll be there!" she exclaims. "When I saw them on the line-up I was as thrilled as everyone else. 

"I might have to stalk them," she jokes. "Just follow them around."