SO, DOES THIS MEAN there is a career change to life coach coming up?
“Life coach?,” she guffaws, not for the last time today. “Fuck no.”
Kasey Chambers is holding court, casually. For she doesn’t play any other way. Fuck no. Even today when she is no longer just one of Australia’s premier singer/songwriters with a multi-award-winning career that began when she was in primary school, not just the most successful woman in Australian country music with her 13th album, Backbone, coming out in a couple of days.
Oh no, that’s not enough. Today she is also an author, whose book of life-acquired wisdom is called Just Don’t Be A Dickhead (subtitled: and other profound things I’ve learnt), as she tells us about finding her “inner foghorn” that centres and guides her – if she tunes in – and the experiences that showed her why listening to our own horn matters.
Still, we begin with a quibble as I argue that “You Love Chinese Food” should have been the title, that being the “wisdom” inside a fortune cookie she had one night at a career-altering dinner with one of her heroes and collaborators, Buddy Miller. A night when she was expecting, maybe even hoping, for something deep and philosophical to guide her next steps. She greets my perfectly sane suggestion with laughter.
“How good is that? How good is that for a fortune?,” she grins. “I remember that moment so vividly. You know how much Buddy Miller meant to me, and means to me, and I was in such a surreal moment just going wow, this is a big moment in my life, this is everything. And then, getting that fortune …”
It’s perfect Kasey Chambers that in the middle of a book filled with plainly expressed profundities, explained in often amusing, sometimes gut-kicking anecdotes – from riotous times on the Nullarbor and hanging with her best friend, Worm, to losing a baby and later confronting her idea of motherhood – that she would plonk this almost self-mocking episode. But as she says, “it’s a weird place to be” as she didn’t set out to write a book, even if publishers have been wanting another autobiography for some years, given her first came out alarmingly early, in 2011.
“There were moments where I was like, I don’t want this to be a serious – and I get into some serious soul-searching in the book – tell-all thing. I don’t want it to be this thing where it’s like, This Is How You Have To Live Life. I don’t know how to tell someone any of that, and no one should fucking listen to me anyway,” says Chambers. “I guess I just wanted to share things that have helped me. Even in hindsight, things I can go back and look over.
“But I also live my life like that: I don’t take anything too serious, but there are certain things that I know I have to dig deep and take serious or I’ll never get any better as a human. It is a fine line and I hope I’ve walked it okay.”
It sounds like she may have had a longer list of what the book wasn’t going to be than what it would be.
“Oh, totally. I didn’t have a list of what it was going to be because it wasn’t a book to start with: it was just notes to myself going ‘you need to remember this’.”
When she says notes, she means it: the book came together in messages she would write herself on her phone’s Notes app: memories and lessons and stray thoughts.
“I was only writing the ones I need to remind myself of, which meant that’s where all the downsides of the experience came from,” she explains. “If they were ones I did easily, I wouldn’t need to remind myself to do them.”
It turns out the whole book was written on her phone, and in fact is still there. She doesn’t know how to use a laptop she says, let alone own one. As for backups? Well …
“I actually, about halfway through, got a bit worried about that so I started backing it up. But on another phone.”
Um, that’s now how it’s supposed to work. She has the good grace to laugh at herself she says this.
“I have this other phone that I’d taken on tour to do some filming that had a really good camera on it and I thought, I’ll just back it up on my other phone, in Notes. That’s all that I have. And I barely know how to use that, let’s be honest.”
Kids, potential authors, anyone, don’t try this at home. Print it out, back it up to the cloud, get a hard drive, something. Don’t do what Kasey does.
“Yeah, that’ll be the name of the next book: Don’t Do What Kasey Does.”
There is another disappointment in, or more accurately on the book. As you may already have discerned, Chambers swears freely, joyfully. In real life and all throughout the book. But the cover shows the title as Just Don’t Be A D**khead. Come on Hardie Grant Books, Kasey makes no claim to being a scholar but she would spell out Dickhead.
“I absolutely would,” she says. “It was the publisher’s idea to do that. But when I say the publisher’s idea, the publisher’s idea was to change the name of the book, and not to have Dickhead on the cover of the book at all.”
Presumably they wanted something nice and safe in that throat-gagging motivational poster way. Maybe Not Pretty Enough? Kasey Says Believe In Yourself. Or Nothing Is Impossible, You Can Do It: Kasey Chambers’ Guide To Life’s Hits. Urgh, shoot me now.
“I said to them that this means something to me, that if I go for something like [the glib lifestyle posters], that’s not me anymore. It’s not authentic. These are real things that I’ve learned and the reason that they are powerful to me is because they are not the perfectly worded inspirational quote that we all see on Instagram now,” says Chambers, adding with a giggle. “So that was my version of compromise.
“And it also sums up what you were saying before, where we can find profound messages in things that aren’t so profound on paper. I find my own experience in them. And that is what makes a powerful to me. Once I explained that they obviously understood.”
There is a nice symmetry in this that in the book she recounts one of her early meetings with her then-label, EMI, discussing what would be her debut album, where her title, The Captain, looked likely to be dismissed by the marketing experts without too much thought.
She was a no one, a pet project of the label boss, sure, but a kid whose family band had been half frozen out by the country establishment (save for Slim Dusty and his pioneering wife Joy McKean) and this was her first step into the “real world” where no one, except maybe Tennille, would take that title seriously. Except Chambers said to them that that title and that song was at the core of the whole record and she would not go on without it.
She won that battle too.
“I get it, it’s a hard sell and it’s their job to come to me and say this will make it harder to get into stores and certain advertising won’t put this cover up, and all of that. And I understand that,” Chambers says. “But then I’ve also learnt over the years that everything that we do is going to be a choice and there’s going to be a sacrifice, and it’s my job to figure out which sacrifices are worth it and which ones aren’t.”
Maybe she knows her audience, and herself, better than the experts. Put it this way, I would much rather hear the thoughts of someone whose basic principle is just don’t be dickhead than someone advising me to seize the day, chant positive affirmations or sell sell sell because the path to success is to take massive determined action (thanks Tony Robbins, you dickhead).
“Sometimes I would look at it and think, is it just me that finds something profound in this?,” says Chambers. “I know it won’t resonate with a lot of people. I know the book is a very acquired taste, particularly because of my writing style being so conversational, and that sort of thing isn’t going to connect with everybody, that’s for sure. But I’m also not doing it to connect with everybody; I’m doing it to share something that means something to me and there will be some people that connects with.
“Like you I scroll over the really inspirational, perfectly worded things: that doesn’t really connect with me much and it doesn’t resonate with me, and the book is about figuring out what resonates with you rather than being told what you should believe in, should do and should think.”
Chambers will tell you upfront what is obvious to anyone who reads it: that this is not really a memoir. There are stories and interactions with famous people in recording studios and not so famous people on back roads, there are key moments in her career and tales of Kasey the uber-fan fan meeting heroes. But you won’t get much at all about her relationships or the mechanics of recording, and we learn more about how she meditates than how she writes a song.
“Honestly, I don’t even know if I really know how to tell someone how to write a song actually. I go into it more with the Not Pretty Enough one [her chart-topping signature song] because that was a real process, but again it was more about how to connect to my creativity rather than how to write a song. Even now when I’m writing songs, I don’t know that I have a formula; it’s more a way of connecting to my creativity that I know works better for my songwriting. The more connected I am to myself, the better my creativity is; the better my creativity is, the better my songs are.”
She explains that meditation is part of freeing her mind of the accumulated baggage of living and returning in some ways to the simpler creativity route of her first decade or so as a songwriter and performer, back when “I had no reason to not connect with myself: I just did so naturally” and the process was “so easy”.
Now? “I have to work a little bit harder and I have to dig a bit deeper. I went to more vulnerable places back then so much easier than I do now.”
Though as she details in the book, Chambers has tried to replicate some elements of her own life for three children, having abandoned flying as much as possible and travelling to gigs and elsewhere in a four-wheel-drive and van, setting up camp, lighting fires, though probably not, in case any authorities happen to be reading, shooting animals for pelt or meat and siphoning diesel from a jerry can into the fuel tank during a high speed chase (you’ll have to read the book to know more about that).
“What’s really important to me now with what I am trying to do with my parenting [is] I have to remind myself a bit where I want to tell my kids all this stuff but my kids are at the age where listening to their mother, and me saying it, probably makes them want to do the opposite,” she says wryly. “I think I just have to live the way I believe around them and that can really hold a lot more weight than me telling them anyway. Particularly with my daughter and looking at how I sit with my own body image and things like that, and the struggles that I’ve been through with that.
“It’s no point me giving [her youngest] Poet that chapter to read, it’s really now about me living what I truly believe in what I truly want to live every day and how I want to be in my own skin. If I live like that around her, that’s going to hold a lot more weight and be way more powerful anyway.”
Let’s be honest, nobody under 25 is going to take advice from a 49-year-old or a 59 year old. Not just because when you 20 you think you know everything and you feel invulnerable anyway, but because thinking 10 or 20 years ahead is nebulous and far-fetched and probably done by the kind of people who read motivational books, the dickheads.
“I wouldn’t have [listened to advice], I didn’t care about any of that,” Chambers admits. “And that’s one of the beautiful things about being under 25 isn’t it? It’s just, whatever! I love that. I wish I could be more like that now. People often say to me what is the letter that you would write to yourself and give to your younger self, what is the advice? And I’m like, no, I want to take advice from my younger self.
“My little free spirit that grew up on the Nullarbor, she had it all sorted. It’s when I went through all of the life shit, society tells you what you should and shouldn’t be, that’s when I got off-track. I’m just basically now trying to live my life like that little free spirit again, and go with my own vibe.”
THURSDAY: In part two of this interview, Kasey Chambers digs into just how her eating disorder was nowhere near as hard to write about as a moment of parenting with her daughter that questioned all she thought she knew of herself. Oh, and there’s some passing wind.
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Just Don’t Be A Dickhead is published today. Backbone is released on Thursday, September 3. Kasey Chambers’ Backbone tour begins January 23. Dates and tickets via www.kaseychambers.com
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