Kasey Chambers

For The Record...

Born on June 4, 1976, in Mount Gambier, New South Wales, Australia; daughter of Bill and Diane Chambers, both musicians. Began performing with parents and older brother Nash as Dead Ringer Band, 1986-98; released Dead Ringer Band album Home Fires, 1996; recorded Dead Ringer Band album Living in the Circle, 1997; released first solo album, The Captain, 1999; title track “The Captain” featured on Home Box Office (HBO) series The Sopranos, 2001; released second solo album, Barricades and Brickwalls, 2001. Awards: Australian Recording Industry Association (RIAA), Best Country Album for The Captain, 1999; Country Music Association of Australia Award, Best Female Vocalist, 2000; Country Music Association of Australia Award, Best Album for The Captain, 2000. Addresses: Record company—Warner Bros. Records, 3300 Warner Blvd., Burbank, CA 91505-4694. Website—Kasey Chambers Official Website: http://www.kaseychambers.com.

Singer, songwriter

With the release of her first solo album The Captain in 1999, Kasey Chambers was hailed by critics as among the most talented singers and songwriters in the alternative-country genre, also known as alt-country. Avoiding the studio polish and multilayered overdubs common to much of the country music produced for major record labels in Nashville, Tennessee, alt-country musicians value emotional honesty and minimal studio production above mass-market, commercial appeal. They are influenced by Gram Parsons, Emmylou Harris, and Townes Van Zandt as much as classic country performers as Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, and Buck Owens. In addition, they also acknowledge rock ‘n’ roll influences from punk and 1970s album-oriented rock to heavy metal, 1960s psychedelia, and 1980s alternative rock.

Born on June 4, 1976, in Mount Gambier, New South Wales, Australia, Chambers was three months old when her parents, Bill and Diane Chambers, and her three-year-old brother Nash moved to central Australia’s Nullarbor Plain, a largely unpopulated and treeless desert area. Her parents earned a living by hunting and trapping the rabbit and fox that raided Nullarbor poultry farms, then selling the pelts. The Chambers home schooled their children, teaching them American folk and country music by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rogers, Hank Williams, Townes Van Zandt, and Gram Parsons, as well as Australian country artists Slim Dusty, Buddy Williams, and Tex Morton. In 1986 the family moved to Southend, located on the southern coast of Australia, and began playing as a band at local public houses. By the time she was 14, Chambers began to pursue a musical career with her family’s Dead Ringer Band. The quartet, billed under the father’s name, released two cassettes, Sea Eagle in 1987 and Kindred Spirit in 1991. By the time they began recording as the Dead Ringer Band, the teenaged Kasey was the group’s lead singer.

The Dead Ringer Band released a four-song extended-play single, A Matter of Time in 1992, and released their debut album, Red Desert Sky, one year later. The latter release featured the 17-year-old Kasey’s first recorded songwriting effort. At the time, the band consisted of Bill Chambers on lead guitars, Diane on bass guitar, Nash on rhythm guitar and harmony vocals, and Kasey on rhythm guitar and vocals. In their second full-length release, 1995’s Home Fires, Diane abdicated bass guitar responsibilities to professional musicians; the band enjoyed a successful single, "Australian Son," which spent seven weeks on the country charts.

Their follow-up album, Living in the Circle, released in 1997, contained eight original songs and covers of songs by the Carter Family, Townes Van Zandt, and Maria McKee. No Depression writer Geoffrey Himes noted that Living in the Circle "makes it clear that Kasey was the Dead Ringer Band’s most valuable asset. At 21, her voice had blossomed into the dramatic instrument it is today. And her songwriting—especially on Things Don’t Come Easy,’ The Last Generation,’ and ‘Already Gone’—had found the simple, emotionally naked approach that proved the perfect vehicle for her voice." Contractually obligated to provide another album to their label, Massive Records, the Dead Ringer Band released an album called Hopeville in 1998 comprised entirely of songs by other writers, including John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell, and Lucinda Williams. Following the album’s release, Bill and Diane Chambers separated and divorced, and the Dead Ringer Band went on hiatus.

After the Chambers’s divorce, the Dead Ringer Band signed a contract with EMI Australia that included a solo contract for Kasey. Bill and Nash became musicians in her band, while Diane focused on her daughter’s merchandising. Her first album, The Captain, released in 1999, was lauded by critics for its elegant simplicity and earned favorable comparisons to the music of alt-country singer and songwriter Lucinda Williams. The album was recorded in Australia, but additional recording was done later in Nashville, Tennessee, including vocal and instrumental support from American musicians Julie and Buddy Miller. The multiple awards won by the release, including the Australian Country Music Association’s Album of the Year and the Australian Recording Industry Association’s (ARIA) Best Female Vocalist, helped propel it onto both Australia’s country and popular music charts.

When The Captain was released in the United States, Chambers and her family toured the country to promote

it. She won several influential proponents within the music industry, including Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams, and broadened her audience with a well-received performance on The Late Show with David Letterman. Chambers performed with Lucinda Williams, Robert Earl Keen, and British folk-rocker Richard Thompson, and made appearances at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, Texas, and country music’s annual Fan Fair in Nashville, Tennessee. These netted her additional critical accolades and pushed her American sales over 100,000 copies. Writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jack Bernhardt noted: "Introspective in a quiet, thoughtful way, The Captain taps into the emotions that make country music vital. It surveys hardships and the lure of the road in tones that are lonesome and blue. And Chambers sings them with an Iris Dement-meets-Tammy Wynette combination of vulnerability and truth."

The album’s title song, however, raised concerns among feminists due to lyrics that suggest the narrator’s desire to subjugate herself to her male partner. Of the song, Chambers told Billboard: "Lots of women come up to me saying, That’s so sexist.’ I wrote it… for someone who’s really special to me. It’s kind of through the eyes of myself in about 10 years’ time, when I want to settle down and take it easy and just be no one for a day."

In 2001, Chambers finished recording her second solo effort, Barricades and Brickwalls, which features supporting vocals by Lucinda Williams and Buddy Miller. Considered to be more musically diverse than her previous album, Barricades and Brickwalls features songs that range from traditional country to straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll. She told Himes: "These new songs have been written over the past three years, and I did go through a heartbreak during that time. I was feeling very lost. I found that selling double platinum and winning an ARIA doesn’t fill your heart and soul. I didn’t find out what would satisfy me, but I did find out that material things wouldn’t. I said, ‘OK, this isn’t what I’m going for. I love my career, and I do appreciate it, but it’s not enough."

Selected discography

Solo
The Captain, Virgin, 1999; issued in U.S. on Warner/Asylum, 2000.
Barricades and Brickwalls, EMI Australia, 2001; issued in U.S. on Warner Bros., 2002.

With the Dead Ringer Band
Red Desert Sky, Massive, 1993.
Home Fires, Massive, 1995.
Living in the Circle, Massive, 1997; reissued, 2000.
Hopeville, Massive Records, 1998; reissued, 2000.
Till Now: The Very Best of the Dead Ringer Band, Massive, 2000.

Sources
Books
Wolfe, Kurt, Country Music: The Rough Guide, Rough Guides, Ltd., 2000.

Periodicals
Billboard, September 30, 2000, pp. 18, 22.
Country Music, December-January 2001, p. 28-38.
Guardian (England), July 4, 2000, p. 2.14.
Guitar Player, March 2001, p. 27.
Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 27, 2001, p. 3E.
New York Times, March 11, 2001, p. 2.30.
No Depression, January-February 2002.
Rolling Stone, October 16, 2001, p. 73.
Seattle Times, March 23, 2001, p. G12.
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), August 30, 2001.
Village Voice, April 10, 2001, pp. 73-74.

Wisconsin State Journal, June 21, 2001, p. E2; June 14, 2001, p. 20.

Online
"Kasey Chambers," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll (December 14, 2001).
"Kasey Chambers Biography," EMI Music, http:http://www.emimusic.com/au/artists/kaseychambers/03_bio.asp (December 20, 2001).
Kasey Chambers Official Website, http://www.kaseychambers.com (December 20, 2001).

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Biography

In 2000, Kasey Chambers emerged as Australia's first successful country-to-rock crossover female singer. It was just the latest chapter in a unique 25-year life journey. In 1976, hoping to earn a living hunting foxes, Bill and Diane Chambers took their two-year-old son Nash and newborn daughter Kasey into the 100,000 square mile (260,000 square km) sparsely vegetated and generally flat plateau called the Nullarbor Plain. The family would spend seven or eight months of the year on the Nullarbor, resupplying themselves from the world's longest stretch of straight railroad track, 330 miles (530 km), running through the Nullarbor. The family spent the rest of the year at a small south Australian fishing village. Each night out on the Nullarbor, after a day's hunting, the family would camp in a different spot on that vast Australian landmark and, grabbing his guitar, Bill Chambers and his wife passed on their love of country music by the glow of the campfire, under the stars. This is how Kasey spent the first nine years of her life.

In 1986, the family returned to "civilization" so that Bill and Diane could pick up interrupted music careers. First, Kasey joined them as lead singer, then brother Nash, and they became known as the Dead Ringer Band. By 1992, the family had become full-time musicians, playing to city audiences as well as heading back out into the countryside, pulling a small trailer behind their Toyota Land Cruiser. During the '90s, the Dead Ringer Band members, known as performers of quality country music, released seven CDs and collectively earned two ARIAs (Australian Grammys) and seven Gold Guitars at the annual Australian Country Music Awards in Tamworth. Kasey was the face of the new generation in Australian country. She appeared at Tamworth dressed as a spice girl, wearing a nose ring, and posed nude for a country music magazine (walking down the streets of a deserted country town with brother Nash).

In 1998, Chambers' world was turned upside down with the separation of her parents, with mother Diane choosing to go and live on distant Norfolk Island, two and a half hours by plane off the Australian coast. Chambers started putting her feelings into songs, and over a few weeks during July and August 1998, Kasey recorded her solo album The Captain on Norfolk Island. With brother Nash acting as producer, Kasey and her musicians set up in an old homestead on the island and practically recorded the album live. Father Bill was on hand to play guitar. Country legends Buddy and Julie Miller added their voices and guitar to four tracks afterward in Nashville.

Released in May 1999, the album The Captain initially won Kasey the 1999 ARIA award for Best Country Album and, at the 2000 awards, earned her Best Female Artist. With double-platinum sales at home in Australia, Kasey spent the latter part of 2000 following up enthusiastic reviews for her album internationally. She also spent time touring the U.S. with Lucinda Williams and playing gigs in her native land with Emmylou Harris. She was in the studio as well; with her brother Nash at the production board once again, Chambers delivered another sonic beauty with 2002's Barricades & Brickwalls. The album was a multi-platinum success in Australia and significantly raised her profile in the United States, earning her enthusiastic reviews and much better sales than The Captain.

After a two-year layoff, during which Chambers and her husband, Aussie singer/songwriter and former Pretty Violet Stain vocalist Shane Nicholson, had a baby, she released her third solo disc, Wayward Angel, in the fall of 2004. The 14-song set gave Chambers her first number one album in Australia. Two years later, Chambers' song "The Hard Way" was featured in an episode of the ABC adventure drama Lost. Carnival, released in September 2006, included collaborations with Tim Rogers of You Am I and Powderfinger's Bernard Fanning. In 2008 Chambers released the sparse and heavily acoustic Rattlin' Bones, a collaboration with Nicholson. Little Kasey Chambers & the Lost Music appeared in 2009, followed by her sixth full-length album, Little Bird, in 2010. ~ Ed Nimmervoll, Rovi

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