Kasey Chambers album Campfire sees her return to her roots

Kasey Chambers’ grandmother receives a special send-off on her new album, Campfire.

Kasey Chambers traces her love of music to the Outback.

As Judy Chambers lay dying in a Mount Gambier hospital at the start of this year, several gen­erations of her family gathered to say goodbye. At 84, she had spent much of the past two ­decades watching her granddaughter Kasey become one of the nation’s most celebrated ­musicians. It was natural, then, that her final ­moments of life would be coloured by the music for which the family surname has become ­famous.

The matriarch had suffered a stroke and was unconscious as her son Bill began to play a new composition that his daughter had recently finished mixing. Named Campfire Song, it adopts a gentle, swaying rhythm as both generations of the family share vocals in the chorus. “Everyone sing ’round the campfire, where the song of the curlew awaits,” they sing. “And dance with me under the moonlight, until the morning breaks.”

Judy Chambers was surrounded by about 20 loved ones in the same South Australian hospital where Kasey was born in 1976. “I played it to my family as we sat there,” Bill Chambers recalls. “It’s quite an emotional time, as you can imagine, and they all started singing along: my dad, all my brothers and sisters. We were all crying, of course, but it was just a beautiful ­moment. I just happen­ed to video it on my iPhone and sent it to Kasey at that very moment as soon as we were done.”

Although Kasey had finished work on an album named Campfire by the time her grandmother died on January 11, the songwriter realised this moment ­des­erved a wider audience. That phone recording, sent from father to daughter, appears at the album’s end, as a secret track of sorts.

“It sounds kind of like a sad story but I actually don’t feel sad when I hear it,” Kasey Chambers says of this late inclusion.

“It feels really special, and I feel really grateful that my nanna had all of her family singing around her at the time, singing songs that she loved. They sang to her all night; that was just one of the songs.

“The last song that she heard was Go On Your Way, which is on the record as well. It feels like a beautiful thing and it would have been what I can imagine to be the most perfect send-off for my nanna to ever have.”

This sort of intimacy powers Campfire, Chambers’s 12th studio album and by far the least adorned. It is her father’s voice that we hear first, counting in Campfire Song. The arrangements remain sparse throughout its 13 tracks thanks to the decision to record only the musical instruments you’d ­expect to hear played at a campsite — hence no amplified guitars or drums but plenty of acoustic guitars, banjoes and simple percussion.

As a result, the human voice is the star: not just those belonging to the band leader and her father but also a group of musicians dubbed the Fireside Disciples, which ­includes Brandon Dodd and Alan Pigram. Now That You’ve Gone is a spine-tingling showstopper on which Chambers opens up her throat — from which she had surgery to remove nodules and a cyst in 2015 — to hit some truly fearsome notes.

Chambers also performs a duet with Emmylou Harris, The Harvest & The Seed, which closes a circle of sorts as she supported the American country singer on her Australian tour in the early 2000s. This was about the time Chambers rose to prominence with her two biggest ­albums, the multi-platinum sellers The Captain and Barricades & Brickwalls.

The songs captured on Campfire are all remarkably intimate and easily evoke the locale of the title. All that’s missing is the sound of crackling flames.

This idea for the album has been on Chambers’s mind for much of her life as it harks back to her peripatetic childhood. Her parents and brother Nash alternated ­between living near Mount Gambier and the wide open ­spaces of the Nullarbor Plain.

“I was three weeks old when my mum (Diane) was out in the Outback with me,” she says. “It’s pretty incredible what they did and how they did it. It really was very basic; we didn’t have a lot of materialistic things. As a kid I was like, ‘Cool, I’ve got the biggest back yard in the world and I wake up in a different place every day, and I get to make a new cubby house every day!”

She and Nash completed their primary schooling by correspondence, often while sitting around the campfire, and at night the family would play music together.

“For a start it was hard work but you make do,” recalls Bill Chambers. “We were going back in time, I guess; just a family living in the bush, living off the land. My wife would cook on an open campfire, which she got very comfortable and used to. In fact, it was more of a culture shock when we moved back home and sent the kids to high school.”

He recalls his children as being very comfortable with the notion of walking up to strangers and having conversations about all sorts of things.

“That overflowed into Kasey’s career; in fact, she never shuts up,” he says with a laugh. “I’m sure that one of the reasons that Kasey and I get along so well and are still working ­together is because those early years set us up to have a bond that’ll be there forever.”

Campfire arrives a year after the release of Dragonfly, a 20-track collection that made its debut at No 1 and won best country album at last year’s ARIA Awards.

In January, Kasey Chambers was paid the highest compliment by her ­industry peers at the Golden Guitar Awards in Tamworth when she joined the Roll of Renown in recognition of her significant and lasting contribution to Australian country music.

After wiping away tears at the sight of a standing ovation, the songwriter thanked her parents from the stage. “They taught me from such a young age not to follow trends and just to do whatever feels right to me in my heart, my soul and my gut,” she said. “I thank them very much for that. My dad basically taught me everything I know about music and my mum taught me everything else, really.

“I think the key to having a longstanding career is to be authentically you and then to surround yourself with people who encourage that in you.”

Kasey Chambers with the backing band on her new album, The Fireside Disciples.

Starting this week, Chambers will take Campfire on a national tour that includes more than 30 dates spread across four months. Playing guitar and singing back-up vocals as one of the Fireside Disciples is her proud ­father.

What does Bill Chambers see when he looks across to the woman standing at the centre of the stage each night? “I think I’m the luckiest dad in the world,” he says with a laugh.

He’s the one who had the presence of mind to record the Chambers clan singing along to the chorus of Campfire Song, thus capturing an impromptu deathbed performance at a South Australian hospital that now is etched into Australian musical history.

That reprise appears a few bars after the end of an album-closer named Happy, a joyful song that features backing vocals provided by children.

That juxtaposition feels right as it depicts the end of life brushing up against the beginning, and the sadness of death being lightened by the effortless happiness of young lives.

Campfire is out now via Warner Music. Kasey Chambers and the Fireside Disciples’ national tour will continue tonight in Laurieton, NSW, then Forster tomorrow, through to Wonthaggi, Victoria, on August 18.