Kasey Chambers
ANGEL'S WINGS Alt-Country Star Kasey Chambers on Her Most Wide-Ranging Set Yet
Kasey Chambers seems determined to take the road less traveled. At the height of acclaim for her first two albums (The Captain and Barricades & Brickwalls) and bona fide stardom in her native Australia, she decided to take three years off to have a baby and get settled into motherhood. Can you say Lauryn Hill? But luckily for fans, Chambers' new material proves worth the wait. Wayward Angel sets her powerful, intimate songs in a variety of styles, from rock to hard country to bluegrass; it even has a beautiful moment in a pop vein in "Paper Aeroplane," a meditation for vocal and piano. Speaking from Australia, Chambers talked with Barnes & Noble.com's David McGee about the enormous changes in her life and their impact on her music.
Barnes & Noble.com: In the three years since Barricades & Brickwalls was released, you've become a mother. But at the same time, were you rethinking who you are now, both professionally and personally?
Kasey Chambers: Having a baby shifts your priorities around a bit. All of a sudden a lot of things don't quite matter as much. I probably like spending a little bit more time at home now. We're on the road in Australia now and I take my son, who's two, on the road with me, which is a whole lot of fun. I haven't changed things too much as far as my career goes; it's just that I spend a little bit more time at home and it's not quite so rock 'n' roll on the touring bus now. [Laughs] It's more about dirty diapers now. The songwriting sort of changes a little bit now after having a baby. My songs aren't particularly about having a baby, but just the priority changes in your life, and the biggest priority change in my life does come out in the songwriting.
B&N.com: How does the song "For Sale" fit in with reorganizing your priorities? Is that a fleeting moment of cynicism about the marketing side of your career, or are you really rethinking the whole idea of playing the game?
KC: That one definitely is one of those moments. I actually wrote that after I had been in the hospital. It was about a year and a half ago, and I went in to have a minor procedure done, and I was actually lying in a hospital bed and I was about to go under, and a nurse came up and asked me for an autograph. And it was just one of those moments when I thought, Oh, my God, this is too weird. I'm lying in the hospital bed and I wasn't thinking for a minute that I'm Kasey Chambers; I was just that girl in a hospital bed. It was a bit of a reality check. But that song represents a certain time in my life now that I don't want to be for sale. It's more about taking off certain amounts of time to be home with my family and just be Mom instead of being Kasey Chambers. That's a really important thing I've realized in the past couple of years, definitely, from having my son.
B&N.com: There are several different styles of music on the album and within those styles lots of different textures. On "Pony," for example, there's a lone, twanging guitar playing, maybe that's your brother Nash, maybe it's your dad --
KC: That's actually Steuart Smith. He's with the Eagles now. He's been one of our favorite guitar players. He plays all over the album. In making this album I wanted to get a different set of textures as far as the guitar parts, but I really wanted it to be a band-sounding album. I didn't want to make the album and get a guitar player to put their parts on later. So we got Steuart to come out to Australia, and he stayed there the whole two weeks, from the start of the album to the end. And we all just sat in and played it all live... I'm really happy with the way it came out.
B&N.com: "Paper Aeroplane" is a beautiful song, like a pop torch song with a slight folk flavor. It's nice to hear you alone singing with a piano.
KC: I've never sung with a piano before in my whole life. I've never had too much of keyboards on my records; little bit of Hammond and stuff like that that we throw in every now and then. It was quite weird for me to write a song based around a piano because I don't know the first thing about piano. That's Bill Risby from Australia playing the piano.
B&N.com: This album also features your first venture into bluegrass with "Follow Him Home," which sounds like it could have been a cut on a Rhonda Vincent album.
KC: I've always listened to a lot of bluegrass. In my band over the years, I've had a lot of different bluegrass musicians. And I love bluegrass instruments as much as anything, even in my style of music. We have a lot of banjo and mandolin and dobro throughout the show; we always have had it, it's always been something I've liked playing with live. It wasn't too much of a conscious decision to have a major bluegrass song on the album. That was one of the songs we had and it sounded good when we played it in the studio. We were fortunate we had Tim Warner, who's the Australian mandolin champion and now lives in America. He used to play in my band years and years ago, and my dad and his dad used to play music together back before we were born. But he lives in Austin now and has a band there called the Green Cards. He just happened to be staying at my house the week that we were making the album, so that was just a bit of luck, because I would never have been able to get him all the way over from the States!
B&N.com: We've all heard that life is not like the movies, but you wrote the song "Hollywood," which takes that sentiment very personally. What inspired it?
KC: To be honest, it's a love song, and it has something to do with the way my life's gone the past few years here in Australia. Barricades went seven times platinum here in Australia, and I can't walk down the street without somebody asking for an autograph normally. And I guess there are moments when you get that sort of success that you start thinking you're invincible and everything should go right. And then of course you get brought back down to earth and you realize, Oh, hang on a minute, I am just a real person. I guess that song sort of comes out of realizing that it all seems so perfect in theory, and everything seems perfect in the movies but it's not in the real world. Dammit!
September 2004
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