Kasey Chambers brings new vocal strength to album Dragonfly

After three tumultuous years, Kasey Chambers has a fresh outlook on life — and music.

Kasey Chambers has recovered from throat surgery and has a new album. Picture: James Croucher

In spiritual circles the dragonfly is seen as a symbol of change, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Kasey Chambers chose it as the title of her new double album. Certainly it’s shorter and less confronting than calling it Divorce, Career Crisis, Single Parenting, Throat Surgery and Betrayal, the subtext to the singer’s changing life over the past few years.

The title is symbolic also of a shift in musical direction for the 40-year-old songwriter, who, since the release of her debut album, The Captain, 18 years ago has evolved as an artist whose oeuvre stretches beyond traditional country music. Most of all, Dragonfly launches Chambers in a new guise as a singer with a voice that is strengthened, revitalised and tonally altered by surgery to remove nodules and a cyst in 2015.

Just before that, when she found it impossible to get through a whole show without straining her vocal cords, Chambers thought her career might be over.

“I was feeling a lot of pressure,” she says, while preparing to sing a few songs from Dragonfly in The Australian’s Sydney office. “I started thinking this was it for me. I wasn’t going to do music any more. It was just too much for me to handle.”

Contributing to her stress were a number of factors, including what she describes as “being blindsided by someone in my life” and the ­financial setback of having to cancel an Australian tour because of her voice just after her previous album, 2014’s Bittersweet, was released.

Chambers has had nodules since she was a teenager but was able to “sing through them” until the strain became too severe two years ago. She admits that her approach to singing and her lifestyle as a young performer and later in her career didn’t help matters.

“As a teenager I was doing covers gigs for four or five hours with no foldback in noisy, smoky pubs,” she says. “I didn’t know how to sing. I just opened my mouth and that’s what came out. That’s what I thought you had to do.”

Chambers, brother Nash, mother Di and dad Bill in the Dead Ringer Band Picture: Mark Cranitch

When fame kicked in after her crossover hit Not Pretty Enough in 2001, demands on her voice and her time got even greater.

“I never warmed up,” she says. “I smoked most of my life. I’d drink a bit of straight scotch now and again. I used to just talk too much — and clearly that hasn’t changed — but I didn’t look after my voice. I had to stop doing signings after gigs. Talking after a show is the worst thing you can do, my doctor told me. I still don’t do that.”

Fortunately for her, Chambers took advice on her nodules problem from someone who has gone through career-saving throat surgery in recent years, her friend and collaborator Troy Cassar-Daley. He recommended a surgeon in Brisbane and in May 2015 Chambers had an ­operation that rendered her speechless for a while, but which has left her confident about her long-term future as a performer.

“I’ve had to change a bunch of things,” says Chambers, who is based on the NSW central coast. “I warm up before shows. I stopped smoking. There’s no point having surgery if you’re going to do that. I’m glad of it now and that I had the extra incentive to do it.’’

The upshot of this healthier and happier Chambers, professionally speaking, is Dragonfly, released this weekend. It’s a project divided by two men who have had a powerful influence on her career. The first part, The Sing Sing Sessions, was produced in Melbourne by Paul Kelly. While those two have worked together on tour and on record before, this is Kelly’s first gig as her producer. The second collection of songs, The Foggy Mountain Sessions, was produced by her brother Nash Chambers at his studio near Wollombi in the NSW Hunter Valley.

Adding weight to some of the songs are high-calibre guests including Keith Urban (If We Had a Child), Ed Sheeran (Satellite) and Foy Vance (Romeo and Juliet), as well as local musicians Dan Kelly (Paul’s nephew) and singer-songwriter Harry Hookey — who co-wrote some of the songs with Chambers and also sings and plays on both sets.

The work was intended originally to be a single album but the Kelly sessions went so well that the project was expanded. There’s a variety of styles across the 19 songs, including gospel (Golden Rails), English folk (Romeo and Juliet), epic pop (Summer Pillow) and country blues (Hey), the last a duet with Kelly. She says she clicked with Kelly in the studio, although it did enter her mind that working with him in pressured circumstances could mark the end of a beautiful friendship.

Paul Kelly worked with Chambers on Dragonfly as a producer for the first time. Picture: Stuart McEvoy .

“Paul, to work with, was everything I had dreamt,” she says. “He’s very particular and very strong-willed. I am generally a pretty easygoing person — well, sometimes — but when it comes to making albums and doing gigs and writing songs, I’m very, particular too. He has a similar attitude to Nash to production, which is not to put boundaries on it — and then shape it afterwards, and also recording live in one room. I don’t like making albums any other way. I don’t want to slave over songs and sing them 30 times.”

The centrepiece of Dragonfly is a song that holds the key to Chambers’s journey through difficult times to where she is today. Ain’t No Little Girl, a soul belter par excellence, not only chronicles the singer’s trip from crisis to confidence, it’s also the most powerful — to the point of scary — vocal she has delivered in her 25 years as a performer. She wrote the song long before the surgery but never performed it ­because she felt her voice couldn’t do it justice. It’s a triumphant song, and defiant, sung now with passion and swagger and emotional depth.

“It’s not all strong, though,” she says. “In the verses there are really vulnerable moments where I feel like I could cry, but it’s always overpowered by strength in the chorus. And that’s what it’s about. That’s me.”

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Late in 2015, Brandon Dodd and Josh Dufficy played a gig in the beer garden of the local leagues club at The Entrance on the central coast. They had no idea what a game-changer it would be. Their duo, Grizzlee Train, with Dufficy on drums and Dodd on vocals and guitar, was hardly known outside NSW. There seemed little prospect of that changing as they powered through their set of bluesy rock tunes in front of half a dozen locals.

One of those listening, however, was Chambers — and this chance encounter not only ­improved the fortunes of the two young musicians, it also shook their more experienced audience member out of the torpor that had been affecting her life and career. Her night out with a few friends was intended as an ­escape from the pressure she had been talking to them about, but it turned into something momentous.

“I saw these boys play,” she says, “and they just reminded me how exciting music can be and that when you focus on the right things, how great it can be. They played to us and to some drunk lady dancing in the corner, but they had so much heart and soul. They did something to me. I see great musicians all the time, but they had a great innocence to them. I chatted to them afterwards. It felt like I’d known them my whole life. Within a couple of days we were just jamming all the time. It wasn’t long after that I asked them to join the band.”

Leap forward a year, to last September, and Chambers is in Nashville, Tennessee — the home of country music, a place with which she has a career-long association. Chambers has a showcase performance in town as part of the annual Americana Music Festival, the premier event on the global Americana music calendar. The two musicians she has chosen to back her in this important enterprise are Dodd and Dufficy, now regular members of her touring band and also contributors to Dragonfly.

Blues and roots duo Brandon Dodd and Josh Dufficy are working with Chambers. Picture: Swamp House

The show, a sellout, is an opportunity to reacquaint her American audience with some of the songs from her back catalogue, such as Pony and Not Pretty Enough, but it’s a chance also to trial new material, not least Ain’t No Little Girl. As she wrenches every syllable from somewhere deep in her gut, the audience is transfixed, punched in the head by the power in her voice and the intensity of her ­delivery. There are tears. Jaws drop. Then she does The Captain and everyone goes home happy.

Afterwards Chambers is keen to stress how important the presence of Dodd and Dufficy, both barely out of their teens, has been to her.

“Getting to know them over the past few years has been so great,” she says. “They have helped to change my life and bring that bug back for me. I had lost that. My whole band is such an important part of me at the moment. They came into my life at a time when I was ­really struggling. They don’t know a lot of what they have done for me.”

Chambers’s life has taken several dramatic twists since the day she was born. Growing up on the Nullarbor Plain and in South Aus­tralia with her family, she cut her teeth musically from the age of 10 in the travelling family outfit the Dead Ringer Band that also featured her ­father Bill, mother Di and Nash. Since her solo career took off, all have remained part of the ­entourage: Bill as musician, Nash as ­producer and sound man and Di in charge of merchandising.

The singer felt a burden of responsibility when her illness and a personal crisis, which followed an earlier eating disorder that also threatened her career, took the Chambers ­enterprise off the road for a while.

“I feel lucky that I’m in a position where I can have a lot of my friends and my family working with me,” she says, “but I just was beyond devastated about a few things that had gone on in my life. The beautiful inspiring things I feel about music, things that I love about making music, were being taken away by the pressure that was attached to it. For the most part I usually just concentrate on the positive things, but I was a single mum trying to hold a family together, along with the guilt of a marriage breakdown. It was such a full-on time.”

Chambers and her husband of eight years, singer Shane Nicholson, separated in 2013. They have a son Arlo, 9, and daughter Poet, 4, and share parenting. “There’s no option not to have a workable relationship,” she says. “If you are putting the kids first, there is no choice.” Chambers has an older son, Talon, from a previous relationship.

Chambers and her then husband Shane Nicholson with multiple Golden Guitar awards in Tamworth, 2009.

Nicholson and Chambers tasted success ­together, winning multiple awards for their ­albums Rattlin’ Bones (2008) and Wreck & Ruin (2012). Chambers says she learned a lot about songwriting from him and about songwriting collaboration.

“I loved writing with Shane because we were in the same house and we could just do it when we wanted,” she says. “I learned a lot about co-writing from Shane. He’s really good at it and I’m really bad at it. It opened my eyes to a whole new world. It also made me realise I don’t want to co-write with someone I don’t really feel comfortable with because I know how good it can be when it does work.”

Luckily for her, another songwriter came along to whom she could relate.

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Hookey, a Victorian singer-songwriter who ­released his debut album, Misdiagnosed, in 2014, has been a regular member of the Chambers ­entourage since 2013. Nash played drums in his band and Hookey played at Nash’s mini-festival, The Foggy Mountain Jam, in the Hunter. He also supported Kasey on tour.

Then he and Kasey became a couple. That romantic relationship has since gone south but the two musicians remain good friends and for that reason Hookey is, to use Chambers’s ­description, “all over Dragonfly”. They wrote a handful of songs together that ­appear on the album, including the opening song, Pompeii, as well as Golden Rails, the stark Jonestown and the title track.

“None of those songs were written for my ­record,” says Chambers. “We just enjoyed writing together. Some of them were written when we were together and others were written after we broke up. Harry is so f..king nice. We had our moments but I don’t think it was a normal person’s break-up. A lot of our relationship was built on friendship. Obviously we were together for a while but we will be best friends forever. It was about reshuffling the relationship to where it should be. He was a big part of the record. He’s amazing to work with in the studio and a super-talented guy.”

Looking ahead, Chambers starts the next phase of her career next week at the Tamworth Country Music Festival, the beginning of a ­national tour with singer Bernard Fanning, ­another artist with whom Chambers has worked. He co-wrote the title song and played guitar and sang on the album Bittersweet, while Chambers returned the favour, singing on the song Sooner or Later on his album from last year, Civil Dusk.

No doubt there will be more collaboration ahead but mostly Chambers is just happy to have her career — and her life — back on track.

“It is really hard to juggle a career and a personal life and stay on top of everything,” she says. “For the most part it’s about balance and sometimes I get it right and the rest of the time I’m falling apart like any normal mum. Some days I wake up and feel not pretty enough, then some days I wake up and I ain’t no little girl.

“As a person, as a woman, as a mother and as a friend I have changed a lot. Hopefully for the better.”

Dragonfly was released yesterday through Essence/Warner. The Kasey Chambers/Bernard Fanning tour begins in Tamworth, NSW, on Thursday and ends in Grafton, NSW, on February 25.