KASEY CHAMBERS'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

By Mike Levine

Onstage, Oct 1, 2001

The phrase country music conjures up a host of visual images: the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, the rolling hills of West Virginia, the plains of Texas, and even the streets of Bakersfield, California. One place that doesn't readily come to mind is the Nullarbor Plain in the Australian outback. Yet that incredibly isolated part of the world is where Kasey Chambers grew up and where she developed the amazing vocal and songwriting talents that have helped her become one of the rising stars of alternative country.

Her story is unique. She spent much of her childhood wandering the outback with her nomadic musician family — cut off, for the most part, from modern society. During her teens, Chambers cut her teeth as a performer, touring the Australian pub circuit with her dad, mom, and brother in their family group, the Dead Ringer Band.

Having been discovered by Warner Bros., Chambers made her American debut last year with The Captain, a disc that showed off her distinctively beautiful, almost childlike voice and her impressive and evocative songwriting. At press time, her latest CD, Barricades and Brickwalls, was slated for an early October release in the United States by Warner Bros.

The 25-year-old Chambers is already a household name in Australia, where The Captain has gone platinum and she's won an ARIA award, Australia's answer to the Grammy. But here in the United States, she faces a formidable challenge as she attempts to reach the same level of recognition. In her quest for wider U.S. visibility, Chambers spent the summer of 2001 on tour, opening for Lucinda Williams — a singer she credits as a major inspiration. (Chambers also cites Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris as prime influences.) This fall, she plans another stateside tour in support of Barricades and Brickwalls.

Chambers's music is rootsy and simple, yet powerful. It bears little resemblance to the assembly-line pabulum turned out by many Nashville artists. The refreshingly down-to-earth Chambers is unimpressed by what's coming out of Music City these days. “It's crap,” she says. “It's selling a lot of albums and it's obviously making a lot of people happy out there, and that's cool, but I think the biggest problem with it is that it's hurting other country music. When people find out I'm a country singer, and then they go, ‘Oh what do you do, Shania Twain and Garth Brooks?’ it just makes it harder for artists like me.”

Some might find her opinions offensive; after all, how can a woman from Australia pretend to understand country, which is intrinsically American music? Well, hear this: even though the Australian outback is thousands of miles from the southern United States, Chambers's upbringing was more authentically “country” than that of many contemporary American country artists raised in our suburban, fast-food culture.

THE EARLY DAYS

Three weeks after Chambers's birth in 1976, her parents, Diane and Bill Chambers, bundled her and her three-year-old brother, Nash (who's now her soundperson and producer), into the family car and headed for one of the most remote spots in Australia. “We decided to go to the outback for a working holiday,” says Bill Chambers, who now plays guitar, Dobro, and lap steel in Kasey's band. “We loved it so much we stayed for ten years.”

They lived a primitive lifestyle, sleeping in the open air or in the back of their Land Cruiser. Bill supported the family by hunting foxes and selling the pelts. When the kids grew to school age, Diane homeschooled them. They lived a gypsylike existence, with few modern amenities.

Both parents were musicians. Bill had a strong affinity for American country music — old stuff, like Hank Williams and the Carter Family — and he used to sing the songs to his family around the campfire. Since there was virtually no other entertainment, these family sing-alongs were important to Kasey. “You can't be exposed to 15 years of Hank Williams and not be affected,” says Bill. “You just can't.”

When Kasey was nine, the family moved to Southend, a tiny town (population 200) on the Australian coast. There the kids attended secondary school and were exposed to more modern cultural influences. “Having TV all of a sudden and having radio and that sort of thing, and having friends my own age” really made a difference, Kasey says. “They were all into the music in the Top 40, and I was getting all into that.”

“She was into Metallica and Mötley Crüe,” Bill says, “but those country roots that she grew up on, they were left. She was just exposed to so much of it.”

ON THE PUB CIRCUIT

Meanwhile, the Chambers parents started playing out again. Before too long, both Kasey and Nash were gigging right along with them in the Dead Ringer Band (so named because of Kasey and Nash's close resemblance to their parents). “She wasn't a particularly great singer at that stage,” says Bill. “She'd just get up and have fun. She was a cute little girl, and everyone would clap. And she enjoyed it and was quite good at it. I didn't realize until she was about 15 or 16 that she'd actually started to develop a sound of her own.”

The Dead Ringer Band toured steadily during Kasey's teens, and the constant gigging helped her sharpen her skills as a performer. She also began writing songs, some of which eventually ended up on The Captain.

All that performing was certainly beneficial from a chops standpoint, but the Dead Ringer Band wasn't exactly becoming famous from it. “We were under the mistaken notion,” says Bill, “that if you tour enough and play enough gigs, you're going to get famous. We actually thought that's how you do it. We didn't realize there was a music industry and you need a CD out and all. We were so naïve. But we had a lot of fun, and those were some of the best years of our lives — playing places where no one had ever heard of us but somehow we got a crowd.”

The band finally recorded and coproduced an album, but nobody seemed satisfied with the result. “We realized a year later that it was the biggest load of crap,” says Bill, “so what we did was learn from that experience. We thought, ‘This is not good enough.’”

“We had a couple of other bad experiences of going into studios and not getting what we wanted,” says Kasey, “and having other people produce it and say, ‘This is how it goes.’ And we got something that we paid for that we weren't happy with.”

The band's unhappiness with the state of these recordings caused Nash to take matters into his own hands. “He just said, ‘I'm going to get my own studio,’” Kasey says. With financial help from relatives, he began building one from scratch. “He started out with a little bit of gear and got a little bit more. And now he produces a lot of other albums for a lot of other artists.”

The Dead Ringer Band continued touring and recording (with Nash producing). Their persistence — along with Kasey's growing talent as a singer and songwriter — finally brought them a degree of success in the Australian country music scene, such as it is. The most any of their records sold was about 7,000 copies, but the band did manage to win ARIAs for Best Country Group three times between 1995 and 1998.

Then Bill and Diane split up. Kasey (who by then had become the band's focal point) decided to give it a go as a solo artist. “Kasey and her mum went on a trip to Africa,” says Bill. “Kasey wrote a lot of songs. I guess they were going through a traumatic time, like I was. We all were. A lot of the songs from The Captain come out of that time.”

ISLAND RECORDING

With Nash as the producer and Bill playing most of the guitar parts, Kasey recorded The Captain. The songs ranged from the country-rock-flavored “Cry Like a Baby” and the simple, almost Carter Family-like “The Flower” to the satirical “We're All Gonna Die Someday,” written about people in the music industry who take themselves too seriously. Kasey's distinctive voice and Nash's sparse production combined to give the CD an intimacy reminiscent of early Emmylou Harris.

Chambers had her whole life to write The Captain (“It's like 22 years rolled into 42 minutes,” she says of the CD), but like most artists recording their second release, she had to come up with the material for Barricades and Brickwalls in a much shorter time. “I think it's pretty different from The Captain,” says Chambers, “but I think the vibe is the same. We went in knowing that we wanted to have the same principles on this album as we did on The Captain. I don't want to make another Captain. I'm in a different place than I was three years ago when I recorded that album.”

The collection of work on Barricades and Brickwalls showcases Chambers's continuing maturity as a songwriter. From the plaintive “Not Pretty Enough” to the classic “A Little Bit Lonesome” to the rocked-out “Crossfire” (on which she's backed up by Aussie rockers the Living End), Chambers reveals an eclectic mix of influences, both modern and traditional.

ON THE STAGE

After the release of The Captain in the United States, Chambers began touring and making appearances here. She experienced some pretty serious culture shock. Traveling to New York City to do the Late Show with David Letterman was a real eye-opener. “‘From the Nullarbor to New York’ — we keep saying that because the Nullarbor is the most remote place on the planet, and New York is the most crowded place. We love going there, but my God …”

Although she'd never before played a show like Letterman, with millions watching, she was able to keep her nerves under control. “It wasn't as bad, once I actually got onstage,” she says. “It was more the buildup.” Ironically, her most nervous moment came when she played at the Bluebird Café (a songwriter's showcase in Nashville) on the same bill as Lucinda Williams. “That's probably the most nervous I've ever been in my life,” she says, “because I was sitting next to her and I had to sing after her. Every time she sang a song, I had to sing one straight after her. It was like, ‘Man, this is hard.’”

Overall, Chambers has really enjoyed touring in the United States. She seems almost awed by the experience. For instance, while many musicians gripe about their tour buses, Chambers and gang — who never had a tour bus in Australia — seem to genuinely enjoy theirs. “It's amazing — we love it,” she says, “It's very cool.”

But you get the feeling that Chambers and her band would prefer to come back next time as the headliner instead of an opening act. “One of the problems we had,” says Bill, “is we were touring for two weeks with Robert Earl Keene, and every night we'd walk onstage, and the crowd would be going ‘Robert Earl Keene! Robert Earl Keene!’”

“I found that really challenging,” says Kasey, “getting to kind of try my hardest to win them over with what I had to do. It's a great thing, it's a really rewarding thing to finally win them over in the end.”

Chambers reports that her summer tour with Lucinda Williams was much easier from an audience-response perspective. “Playing to Lucinda's audience for five weeks was a total breeze. I almost felt like I was playing to my audience. I felt that they related to my music really well and I didn't have to sell it to them.”

SECRET WEAPON

One of the secrets to Chambers's success is her remarkable vocal ability. In live performance, she nails her vocal parts with ease. She's so consistent that if you close your eyes, you may think you're listening to the record.

Many singers go through major routines to warm up their voices before shows, but Chambers takes the opposite approach. “I have a couple of Alpine cigarettes. That is all I do. [Laughs.] I've never really been too much into that side of it. I don't warm up at all before a show. I probably should, but I don't.” The only time she's ever had trouble was back in her Dead Ringer Band days. “I went to a voice therapist for a while because I was losing my voice at the time. But that was just from doing four-hour cover gigs four or five nights a week for ten years. I think it kind of just caught up with me after a while.”

FAMILY AFFAIR

Many artists might find it constraining to have their father in the band with them on tour. Not Chambers. Having grown up playing in a family band has given her a different perspective. “It's really normal for me. I've never, ever done a gig without Dad there. It would be weird for me to go on a stage without him. It's pretty normal, and it always has been, and I guess it always will be.”

Chambers's casual attitude about him stems in part from the fact that Bill Chambers is anything but an uptight, Ward Cleaver-type father figure. Like Kasey, Bill is easygoing and relaxed. “Everybody thinks Kasey's a little angel,” he says with a twinkle in his eye. “Put it this way: she's got a mind of her own.”

And despite the fact that she's younger than her band members, Chambers is in charge of creative matters. “I do most of the arranging,” she says. “We don't play a lot of the songs live before we record them. They kind of come to life in the studio. So I guess Nash has a lot to do with that. But also, I use pretty much the same band onstage as I do in the studio. I have a lot of faith in them. People just come up with things. Everybody does. I get the final say, though.”

Besides Bill and Kasey, the band consists of drummer BJ Barker, who's been with her since the Dead Ringer Band days; bassist Jeff McCormack (who also engineers her albums); and guitarist Glenn Hannah.

TO THE POINT

Chambers's philosophy on performing is to keep things simple and direct. “I feel like when we get out there onstage, because these people have bought our album or paid money to come to our shows, we kind of owe it to them to be the people that we are and to sound like we do,” she says. “And that's why when we get out there, there's no fireworks, no big lighting show, there's not all this stuff to distract from all the songs we're doing. If people like the songs then they come along and hear, and that's what we do and that's what we'll do forever.”

Despite all the fuss about her, Chambers seems almost surprised by her success. “Sometimes we have to pinch ourselves and go, ‘Man, we're doing a gig in New York,’ or, ‘We're doing Austin City Limits.’ It's so weird.”

Unlike some artists who can never be satisfied with the state of their career, Chambers seems quite relaxed about hers. “As far as I'm concerned, if it all goes away tomorrow, then I've had a hell of a ride.” It seems likely, however, that her ride is just beginning.