Fanny Lumsden floats On
With her third album, Fallow, country singer-songwriter Fanny Lumsden aimed to create something beautiful and optimistic.
It’s not unusual to see a horse float parked on the closed-off main street of Tamworth one afternoon in late January, but this is no ordinary equine transport: it’s a one-of-a-kind Fanny Float. As the annual Tamworth Country Music Festival winds down, Fanny Lumsden and her travelling family have set up shop on Peel Street in front of a cafe with the plan to meet loyal fans and hopefully entice a few new ones ahead of the release of her third album.
Their preparations haven’t quite gone to plan, however, as the country singer-songwriter has been caught up in the bushfires that have devastated large tracts of NSW. Home for Lumsden, musician husband Dan Stanley Freeman and 17-month-old son Walter is a farm near the village of Tooma. “It’s on the western side of the Snowy Mountains – the part that was in The New York Times for being where the megafire joined,” she tells Review. “You don’t really want to be famous for that.”
Accordingly, much of January has been spent in a state of high alertness that has left little time for ordinary life. Music plans have taken a back seat to survival. The couple only managed to acquire the Fanny Float the week before, and Freeman hurriedly set about fitting it out as a mini-cinema, complete with a projector screen, wiring in a couple of pairs of headphones and installing a black curtain to block light.
Her idea was to screen a five-minute clip filmed on location in and around Tooma that also previews a set of songs Lumsden has named Fallow. “I was trying to get a billboard in Tamworth – pretty expensive,” she says. “Now, I’ve got a moving one.”
The one downside of this cinematic experience is that, being Tamworth in January, it’s hot as buggery day and night. Their solution? Offering viewers a hand-fan that reads “I’m a Fanny fan”, as well as a Zooper Dooper ice block to suck on while standing inside the darkened float, headphones on.
As a promotional exercise, the Fanny Float certainly stands out as unique, particularly during a crowded 10-day period where just about every country musician in the nation is swimming in the same pool of potential fan attention. It’s also effective: despite the waterfalls of cascading sweat, Review is soon captivated by the gorgeous scenery – filmed by Freeman, who shoots all his wife’s videos – and snippets of accompanying songs from Fallow.
As a five-minute statement of artistic intent, the pop-up mini-cinema experience makes clear that Lumsden is a songwriter who knows exactly what she wants to say and how she wants to present herself and her art. “I had a cry when I first saw it,” she says of the video once Review steps back outside. “I wanted it to be really immersive. Obviously you can’t do mass numbers, but that’s fine – that’s not really on my mind.”
Instead, the idea is to win fans one at a time – an approach that’s nothing new for the singer-songwriter, who has now been honing her craft for a decade. In 2010, Lumsden created a Triple J Unearthed artist profile with the goal of getting played once on the radio. Three years later, her goal had changed to paying her rent by playing music, while the release of her debut album, Small Town Big Shot, in 2015 was met with the simple hope that people would get something out of her straightforward, direct and witty songs – as well as the hope that paying customers would continue turning up to the country hall tours that she and Freeman had begun in 2012.
Born Edwina Lumsden in Warren, NSW and raised on a farm near Tallimba, she has established herself as an exuberant performer in a genre that cynical outsiders can sometimes perceive as conservative or anachronistic. By leaning into her sense of humour – no pun on her nickname goes unused, with a line of merch loudly proclaiming “I heart Fanny” in large fonts – and by cultivating a highly engaged social media following, Lumsden is hard to miss and even harder to forget.
Her concerts include plenty of audience participation that have become an attraction in their own right: at the Longyard Hotel in Tamworth, there’s a spirited dance-off set to 2019 single Pretty Little Fools wherein blokes wearing swimming caps show off impromptu moves in front of a few hundred people. Her tight band, The Prawn Stars, meanwhile, ensures a polished performance no matter how far the frontwoman wades into the crowd in search of memorable spontaneity.
On a short walk to a nearby pub, Review asks whether the country music festival is a welcome change from her stressful weeks at home. “Yeah, definitely,” she replies. “Just not having to think about safety – you take it for granted. Also, we have no power at home, still; it’s been that way since New Year’s Eve. Not having to put fuel in a generator to keep the fridge going is cool. Having a hot shower? That was nice.”
In recent years, Lumsden and Freeman have lived a peripatetic lifestyle in a caravan, clocking up tens of thousands of kilometres each year while unintentionally following a trail blazed by the nation’s original country music power couple, Slim Dusty and Joy McKean, who began touring the backroads and small towns of regional Australia in 1954.
Even the arrival of Walter in July 2018 didn’t slow them down much: they returned to touring when he was just three weeks old. “That was stupid,” she says with a smile. “It was pretty much me trying not to wet my pants and weeping. I won’t do that again.”
Every pub on Peel Street is filled to the gills with live music and thirsty country listeners and, over a cider and the raucous sound of a nearby band, Lumsden reflects on how the devastating recent events have informed how she chooses to spend her days and nights.
“It’s made me think about the power and the relevance of what I do,” she says. “I think any other record, I would have pushed [the release date] back – but this one, even if it’s just for me, it feels like a hopeful thing that will provide that kind of optimism for the future. And therefore, I feel like my role as an artist is valid in this kind of situation.”
She tells a story of how, earlier that morning, a woman and her daughter stepped inside the Fanny Float. When they returned to the sunlight, their eyes were full of tears, and they spoke of how they had just lost everything to the bushfires: stocks, crops, house. They were planning to give the festival a miss, but reconsidered once they realised they’d already paid for the tickets and had nowhere else to go. For Lumsden, witnessing their moving reaction to her art was an empowering moment, and a sign that she’s doing something right.
“With this album, I wanted to connect more with what I felt, rather than what I was seeing,” she says. “I previously wrote more observational, funny stuff, but I’ve been through a lot in the last few years and I wanted to connect with that a little bit more, and reflect back to create something beautiful. It’s taken on a whole new layer now.”
Glasses emptied, we walk back toward the horse float. Her husband and brother are packing up the merch desk while her son is lying on the road, playing with some sticky tape and lost in his own world. “Walter is amazing, to be honest, even though he doesn’t have an ounce of routine in his life,” she says.
But doing Tamworth with a toddler in tow isn’t all smooth sailing. While at a gig the night before, Lumsden had to take him home earlier than expected after he suddenly pooed through his clothes. Hardly a matter of life and death, especially considering what she’d seen in Tooma – but still, she says with a laugh, “That was a bit of a downer”.
Fallow is out now via Red Dirt Road Records/Cooking Vinyl Australia. Fanny Lumsden performs in Tooma on Saturday (March 14) and in Thornbury on Wednesday (March 18), followed by a tour that begins in Sydney (May 1) and ends in Leeton, NSW (May 16).