Kasey ChambersKasey Chambers plays the East Coast Blues & Roots Music Festival between March 28 and April 1. Not Pretty Enough is in stores now.
2001 was clearly the year of Kasey Chambers, who brought country music to Homebake and won a Best Female Artist ARIA. She’s entered the new year happy, pregnant and with new single Not Pretty Enough, the latest tune from her excellent second album Barricades & Brickwalls.
“There’s sort of a whole lot of different levels to that song,” says Kasey. “I wrote that song two-and-a-half, three years ago. It was sort of aimed at commercial radio, saying ‘If that is the reason you don’t play my songs, because I’m not pretty enough or whatever, well I don’t care, because it’s who I am.’ On another level, it’s also a sort of a love song. I think it’s one of those songs that people get a whole lot of different meanings out of. The message of the song is it’s OK to be yourself, you can still make your mark on the world by just being who you are.”
How far into your pregnancy are you?
“21 weeks, just over half way,” says Kasey. “I’m starting to fall asleep at nine o’ clock at night, so it’s gonna kill me when I have to do gigs again. There’s lots of nappy changing in store. When the baby’s born, we’ll be doing gigs here and there but not doing full-on touring for five weeks like we’ve done before. I’m kind of playing it by ear a bit, because this is my first baby and I don’t really know what to expect. I’m just going to wait and see. It might happen that I’ll say ‘I can handle this, we can go out on the road’, or it might be the total opposite!”
Was the ARIA award a shock?
“Absolutely,” says Kasey. “Even when you don’t think you’re going to win, there’s that moment where they’re reading the nominations out and you get that little tinge of hope and there’s butterflies in your belly. But that night, I didn’t even get butterflies, because I was just so sure that they weren’t going to read my name out when they announced the winner. I was sitting there, thinking ‘Just prepare your loser’s face!’ and then I actually turned to the person next to me and said, ‘Did they just read my name? Oh my God!’ I was very surprised. You can tell by my very bad acceptance speech!”
Are you happy with the response to Barricades & Brickwalls?
“Oh yeah. Generally, I try not to expect too much, so I don’t get too disappointed,” says Kasey. “It was the second album and everyone says it’s the hardest. Especially when The Captain went a lot better than we ever thought it would, so there are these thoughts in the back of your head and you’re just wondering how it’s all going to go. But, I’ve been over the moon about Barricades And Brickwalls. The response we get when we play these songs live has been great, so I’m just really happy.”
The record also includes collaborations with such disparate artists as Lucinda Williams and The Living End, and a version of Gram Parsons’ Still Feeling Blue. It is proof of Kasey’s love of diversity.
“I think that comes from my Dad more than anything,” says Kasey. “Even though his roots are with Hank Williams and The Carter Family, he still listened to Creedence and The Eagles, which now probably don’t sound that different to a lot of country music. I think that’s what has helped me avoid being stuck in one area. As much as Gram Parsons and Powderfinger (who Kasey covers on her new single) aren’t on the surface that similar, they’re both really rootsy. The sort of music that gets played because they love music and they have a passion for what they do. I’m really drawn to music like that.”
Country music used to be considered music for old people, but that’s clearly not the case anymore. Do you find there’s a wider audience for country music?
“I reckon within the last year in particular, just going out and touring, it’s just amazing. My audience is so diverse now,” Kasey observers. “Half of the room is full of 14 and 15-year-old girls. Now we go to the cities and I get people who come up and say ‘You and Killing Heidi are my two favourite artists’, which is really nice.”
I think it’s quite telling that you played Homebake.
“That was really scary, to be honest,” says Kasey. “I was actually quite worried beforehand, because there was all these dance acts on and these punk bands, and then there’s little ol’ country me from the Nullabour. I was really flattered that they asked me to play, but when it came time to go out on stage, I was thinking ‘Oh my God, they’re going to start throwing things’. But then we went out on stage and it was just amazing. There was hundreds of people there and they knew all the words to my songs.”
Kasey looks set to have a whole lot more people knowing all the words. Watch her go.
