IT’S NOT A MEMOIR, OK? That’s message one from Kasey Chambers about her book, Just Don’t Be Dickhead (and its accompanying album, Backbone). And she’d like us all to take note.
As she explained in part one of this interview, rather than a follow-up to her 2011 autobiography, Chambers wanted to collect the fruits of her experiences – the life lessons the 49-year-old has accumulated through (a few) trials and (quite a few) errors – that gave her alternative ways to live than being just another, yes, dickhead.
But … but …
But yes, like the many photos of young Kasey out in the wilds of the South Australian desert or older Kasey hanging out in recording studios, tales of her upbringing, her career and her family appear throughout. However, more than her loves and disappointments on and off-stage, more than any of the key personal relationships, it is when talking about her eating disorder (which hit at the peak of her fame as the biggest selling Australian country artist) that a raw, personal, most autobiographical Chambers appears.
It is the most exposed and the most detailed she gets about her vulnerabilities, from a time when plenty of those around her, and plenty of us on the outside who engaged with her, could see and speculate about what was happening. Was the fact that in a sense some of this was already out there make it easier or harder to talk about?
“I do feel like that’s a really vulnerable place, but sharing that with people wasn’t that hard; it was harder to write it,” says Chambers. “When I sat there and wrote it, on my phone – and this happened a few times in the book – I had to say to myself, ‘take the reader out of it and just write as if this is your therapy for it, and you can decide later if you are going to put it in the book’.
“I think allowing myself to know that that was still my choice, and how much vulnerability I shared with other people, was still up to me, made me open up a little bit more and share it.”
So acting as if no one would see it made it possible to think it?
“No one was around, no one was reading it, I wasn’t reading it out loud to anyone, I wasn’t saying it,” she says. “It allowed for me to go to a really deep place and then be really open about it. But then by the time I got to the other side, I was like, no, I’m happy to share that stuff.”
In fact, she confesses that the hardest part of the book to share is what most of us would see as the most unlikely “problematic” thing: an afternoon when she tells her youngest child, Poet, to change out of her dirty clothes so they can go to the supermarket as she can’t go out like that.
This seemingly innocuous moment turns into a crucial moment of self-awareness and then adjustment as Poet asks the simple and, to her, obvious question: why?
“When I seriously went to answer that question, I didn’t have an answer for her because the reason that I wanted her to get changed was because I felt judged. Me going out with the dirty child into the shopping centre and then other mothers might look at me and go …,” says Chambers, her voice catching. “I still get a bit teary thinking about it now because it came from such a little thing that she asked me to ask myself the question, and the true answer was something way different than what I thought it was. I found that really hard to share with people.”
Why? Because, it turns out, Chambers had a vision of herself that had accidentally crashed into reality.
“That feels way more uncomfortable to me because I like to think of myself as this person [who says] I don’t care what people think, I don’t care if people judge me, I’m a free spirit, I live my life how I want,” she says. “And this was only a couple of years ago, so this is not a lesson I learned when I first started parenting; this is me thinking that I’m pretty evolved at this point of my parenting, certainly of my life.
“It hit me like a ton of bricks: why do I care what somebody says looking at my dirty child? She wanted to stay in her dirty clothes because she was going back outside to play in the mud again. Who cares?”
That hardly makes her a dickhead though, surely.
“I look at myself and I see things I don’t want to see, but I feel I have learned something from that. I still say to her sometimes ‘Po, go and get changed’, and she’ll look at me, and I’m like, ‘no it’s okay you can wear whatever you like’. It still happens, it’s still sinking in, but the message I’m trying to give my daughter on the overall scale is that do your own thing, be your own person, who cares?
“People are gonna judge you anyway, it’s just part of life. But my actions were not matching up with my intentions [that day], and that makes me look at other things I do.”
As for the adult relationships happening almost in the background of the book – with two partners with whom she’s had her three children and a long term one now – she captures them more in photos than words. Chambers argues she isn’t necessarily looking to evade the subject, more that the lessons coming out of those relationships aren’t as substantive as other parts of the book.
Well, ok, though interestingly she doesn’t even mention the surnames of the three key men.
“I don’t do I? I hadn’t realised that,” she says. “Also I think the lessons that I’ve learned out of relationships – and I think this book would have been very different if I had I written it five years ago – are things that I need to take accountability for. Because at the end of the day that is all we can do. It’s pointless blaming someone else for something.
“Firstly, most of the time when I think about those times when I thought I was being oh so mature or whatever, I realise now I was just being a dickhead [she laughs] and I wasn’t exactly how I’d convinced myself that I was.”
And accountability only means something if you do things differently next time, if you learnt something from the previous time(s), if you do it better, with more care. If you’re less a dickhead each time.
“It’s irrelevant that I ended up with an eating disorder because of these things that happened; what’s relevant is if those things ever happen again, I will take a different path because I’ve learned from that. It’s how I’m showing up in it,” says Chambers. “And that is the bottom line really about what I’m trying to do every day for myself: make better decisions and show up in a way that I want to show up. And I want to try and not be a dickhead so much. Even if other people are!”
As she points out, she actually has really strong and “beautiful relationships” with her exes, while the partner of one of them, fellow musician Shane Nicholson, is one of her best friends now. What’s more, Chambers and Nicholson have written a song on the new album, a duet, called The Divorce Song (“of course,” she snorts happily), which is the first thing they have done since they were married.
“After a while we just went, why are we bothering? We are just putting so much energy into keeping the negative things going. We just let all of that go and concentrated on making a beautiful family unit. And that’s what we have now.”
If Chambers has moved past being a dickhead, it can’t be said for all of us.
Having seen her go into a lot of the D&M stuff through the book, having watched her be quite raw about one key period and intimating interesting aspects of her adult relationships, it tells you something – a lot? About me as much as her? – that the most indelible memory I came away with was the collection of scattered stories about Troy Cassar Daley lighting his own fart. Jeff McCormack farting in David Letterman’s chair on set, extra toilet paper at home “so I can really let go”, and Chambers farting in front of her two boys when yelling at them to clean their room.
I could be wrong but there does seem to be a bit of a theme.
“There is a lot of farts in there isn’t there,” she says slightly incredulous, the tiniest bit embarrassed, but mostly just amused. “Look, at the end of the day, we all fart, and if you don’t think farts are funny then you probably can’t be in my friend group anyway.
“If you don’t find farts funny, don’t buy the book [she breaks down laughing] it’s as simple as that.”
There you go, some Kasey Chambers life wisdom for free.
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Just Don’t Be A Dickhead and Backbone are out now. Kasey Chambers’ Backbone tour begins January 23. Dates and tickets via www.kaseychambers.com
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