Kasey Chambers
Songs from the Outback
by Kerry Dexter

As a child, Kasey Chambers listened to many of the same recordings that influenced other country and folk singers and songwriters. "My dad kind of brought me up listening to Hank Williams," the 25-year-old Chambers recalled, "and to Gram [Parsons] and Emmylou [Harris] and that kind of thing." The ambience was not exactly playing tunes on the car stereo on the way to the corner store, though. Chambers grew up in the Nullarboor Plain, a part of the Australian outback that's been called one of the most inhospitable places on earth. When Chambers was just three weeks old and her brother Nash three years old, her parents, Bill and Diane Chambers, decided to become desert nomads, motivated by idealism and a desire to explore the country.

"Everybody thought that was a little strange. All my dad's family thought he was crazy," Chambers said. "But because I grew up like that, I thought it was normal." There was a supply train that ran through the Nullarboor, and that was the source of the music tapes that inspired the young girl. Miles from civilization, the young family entertained itself by singing around the campfire. Before long the kids were joining in on songs and making up shows of their own. Eventually the family was playing clubs and pubs to make money. By the time they returned to urban Australia so the children could attend secondary school, making music as a way of life was ingrained, and young Kasey had begun to write songs. "I was listening to a lot of Lucinda Williams when I first started songwriting," said Chambers, "and Nanci Griffith and Steve Earle, those would be my main songwriting influences."

She entered her first songwriting contest when she was 13. "It was just a little songwriting competition down in south Australia," she said. "I went into it with the first song I'd ever written. It was a really, really bad song — I don't know how it won," she said. "But my dad also went into the competition, and he came in third place! I haven't let him live that down for a long time," she recalled, laughing.

Her songwriting has improved since. Chambers wrote the 12 cuts on her U.S. debut album, The Captain, raging from the questioning lyrics of the title track to a haunting country soul duet with Buddy Miller, "In the Pines," to the raucous "We're All Gonna Die Someday."

"There aren't too many up-tempo songs about death," she said of the latter. She wrote the songs when she was between the ages of 15 and 22, but they are light years away from the teen country and pop fare of young mainstream superstars. So is Chambers' distinctive, earthy singing voice, somewhat in the Iris DeMent /Lucinda Williams style. "I never lived through the Great Depression/ but sometimes I think I did/ I don't have all the answers/ but that's okay because I'm just a kid," Chambers sings without a trace of irony on the opening track of the disc, "Cry Like a Baby."