Rating: 7/10
While America’s mainstream is constantly stuck puzzling over the tomato issue and can’t seem to figure out how to launch women into the format at all, much less how to actually sustain their careers for longer than one hit single, Kasey Chambers is calmly churning out platinum records in Australia. While we give our country awards and airplay to pop stars, she’s become an icon by releasing music often more primitive and rootsy than much of our independent scene. She’s done it all on a major label as well. All are things from which America, the birthplace of the country genre where you’d think we’d have it all figured out, could take a lesson.
For Kasey Chambers, the obvious question is how would she follow 2017’s Dragonfly, an impressive double album that isn’t even twelve months old to American ears. It was an album that explored all of her many influences and styles, from the more traditional and rootsy to rock to country pop to gospel. The answer for Chambers was to strip everything down and record Campfire, an album she says she has wanted to make all her life.
I grew up in the remote outback of Australia living a unique lifestyle isolated from civilisation. The campfire was the heart of our existence: for survival, creativity, inspiration. We hunted all our own food and then cooked it on the campfire. My brother and I did all our schooling via correspondence around the campfire. We used the campfire for warmth and light. We gathered around the campfire at night to play songs together as a family. Our connection to music and the land has developed through and around the campfire since I was born, so it has always stayed with me as a special part of my life.
She enlisted some fellow musicians and longtime collaborators because well, you don’t sing around the campfire alone traditionally; they are dubbed the Fireside Disciples, and they consist of her father, Bill Chambers, guitarist and tour mate Brandon Dodd, and Yawuru elder Alan Pigram. The result is a really unique-sounding and special album.
As you would expect, this is an acoustic affair; it’s not like you’re going to have a full band just waiting to pop out of the shadows and join you at your campfire. Acoustic guitar, banjo, and dobro are mostly what this record offers in terms of instrumentation, making it definitely very rootsy and giving it that warm feeling of sitting around the fire while someone absently picks a guitar. The Fireside Disciples are a great addition as well, as the harmonies really add to the mood of this whole thing. It’s fitting that the record opens with “Campfire Song” where you can hear the fire crackling in the background and they’re literally singing about dancing in the moonlight. “Go on Your Way” doesn’t even have instruments, it just forsakes that notion altogether and relies on their excellent harmony to tell the story. That adds to what they’re going for here, as you can imagine the atmosphere, sitting around a fire and someone spontaneously starting to sing, with the others joining in. “Orphan Heart” is the opposite, opting for instrumentation to back them throughout the song, but then fading out until it’s just Kasey and the Disciples echoing the refrain, “let me walk beside you” out into the night. Someone breaks out a harmonic on “Goliath is Dead,” as they sing in call-and-response style about that well-known biblical moment.
You can imagine as you listen to this that they’re all just sitting around having a really great time with each other. They talk and laugh openly between tracks, and in the nature of many Kasey Chambers albums, record some pretty ridiculous songs. “This Little Chicken” features Bill Chambers going on about having fried chicken for breakfast before breaking into a bluegrass tune about how this woman, or “chicken” won’t be back home again. “Big Fish” is literally a song about just that, catching fish. And “Junkyard Man” is like some old folk song you can imagine your grandmother singing that you’ve known all your life and think of with fondness but don’t really have any idea what it means. It’s like your family and friends were all just having a good time singing dumb songs together, but you could all actually carry a tune and play instruments, so it got made into a record.
Just when you think it’s all fun and not to be taken too seriously, though, they hit you with a song like “Abraham.” This one grieves for all the hurt and hopelessness in our world, and the fact that it’s stripped back so we can hear their harmonies and their emotion makes it all the more poignant. The same goes for “Now That You’ve Gone,” one of several tracks here where Kasey sings solo without the Disciples.
That said, therein lies my biggest critique with this album; aside from “Now That You’ve Gone,” the tracks without the Fireside Disciples participating vocally don’t feel like they belong. They are still acoustic and stripped back, but without the harmonies, the campfire atmosphere that this album was built on is lost. There’s a solo Kasey song here called “Fox & the Bird” which is about nothing–I mean, it’s about a bird who meets a fox, and he carries her home. It’s boring, and it doesn’t fit when the Disciples aren’t singing with her. Also, there’s a track featuring Emmylou Harris, and this is really cool since this is Chambers’ idol, but it doesn’t fit with the theme either. Also, and unfortunately, Emmylou Harris just sounds terrible vocally, and that’s upsetting on many levels. It’s like she’s out of breath or something. But even if she sounded excellent like she normally does, it’s still weird to have her here on a track with Chambers with no vocals by the Fireside Disciples. When the campfire theme is played out, it works very well, but it needed to be more consistent throughout the record.
It’s a solid album and certainly a unique one, and it was definitely a cool direction for Kasey Chambers after Dragonfly. The idea itself is a good one, and when Kasey and the Fireside Disciples stick to it, it works well. The warm, intimate vibe you get when listening to this is really special. The solo Kasey Chambers material sort of distracts from the thesis here and keeps a good album from being a great one, but Chambers is on a roll here. She’s released three good records just since I started Country Exclusive, and that hasn’t even been three years ago. I said recently on Twitter that if you’re not a Kasey Chambers fan, you’re doing it all wrong, and this album is just another exhibit for that argument.
I agreed with most of your opinions, it really was amazing to see Kasey be a bit dangerous and just break away from all expectations of what a “good” song should be like. This album was really a work of art.
I do, however, disagree with your evaluation of ‘Fox and the Bird’. On the surface, the song seems to simply be about… well, a fox and a bird, but the words could also be interpreted as being symbolic. As in, the bird represents a woman and the fox represents Death – she has lived a long life, had her “wings” broken by her suitors and has become a strong and enriching character from her lifetime of experiences, these being represented by her gorgeous feathers “covered with colours of silver and gold”. And though Death spares her, she “cannot go on anymore”, so she willingly accepts death and allows Death to carry her “home” to the Afterlife. Also, I think the simplicity of the song, with minimal voices and instruments, makes it more powerful and emotional, because it essentially represents the life of an ordinary woman – nothing grand or fancy or orchestrated. So the simplicity of the song actually makes the story more poignant because it’s relatable. I hardly found the song boring, it spoke to me on a much deeper level than ‘Abraham’ or ‘Now That You’ve Gone’, because the song is basically a synopsis of life itself.
Hey Ariel,
This is a really interesting analogy, thanks for your interpretation. It does add a whole new layer to that song. We are glad to have you here at CE!
Thank you very much Megan! I have a passion for poetry and symbolism, so I can’t help finding deeper meanings in seemingly superficial or boring literary works.
To elaborate on what I previously wrote, how the lyrics portray the fox happen to relate very well to our perception of Death – upon first confrontation with it, it seems cruel, like a predator stalking its powerless victim. But when we get older and/or experience sheer pain and anguish in our lives, many people begin to see Death as a merciful, peaceful thing… it’s not so scary then, and almost seems more like a relief and reward for all our suffering in life. Like the bird climbing on the fox’s back at the end of the song, the dying trust Death to deliver them safely and peacefully to the afterlife.
The bird is especially personified, which was how I came to conclude that the fox and bird are analogies rather than literal depictions of the characters… “once there was a bird, SO THE STORY GOES I HAVE HEARD” implies that the story has been morphed into a more figurative narrative style, probably to make it more creative and interesting to listen to. Also note the lyrics’ emphasis on things we normally associate with humans – her ability to think/feel with her head and heart (sometimes represented by her ‘wings’), her being offered people’s hand (as in, like proposals and marriages) and her ability to decline their offers (as animals are primitive and instinctive, they would not reject potential mates just because they were treated roughly by them in the past – they simply don’t have that self-awareness and are mainly concerned with survival). Not to mention, in most bird species it is the males who are more vividly coloured since they are the ones who actively pursue partners, whereas the females are duller, so it didn’t seem to make sense that other birds are pursuing her for her feathers.
It can be a lot of fun to look deeper into song lyrics in order to find a deeper message, and I really enjoyed doing that with ‘Fox and the Bird’.