Fanny Lumsden Gives Us Her Blood, Sweat and Tears
The ARIA Award-winning country singer dishes on touring with Paul Kelly, growing up in isolation and life on the road.
Words Emily Wilson // Image Dan Freeman
Fanny Lumsden, framed by a halo of soft curls, is bright and bubbly, earnest in person in the same way that she is earnest in her music. Zooming in from her farm on the western side of the Snowy Mountains, she discusses touring with national icon Paul Kelly, opening for his European and UK shows, and then also opening for him and Lucinda Williams across a range of Australian stadiums.
She describes the experience as “amazing… It was just the four of us in the tour van, and we got to eat food in Paris and swim at Forty Foot in Dublin. It’s just crazy. They treated us so beautifully.” Her face bright, she describes watching Kelly perform every night as a profound “lesson” to her. The ARIA Award-winning singer-songwriter, revered for his sense of narrative and humanity, has always served as a major inspiration to Lumsden. “I love how carefully he examines the human condition,” she says. “He manages to distil this feeling that we all get, that we all might not have thought of. His music just feels so universal and specific at the same time, which is just my favourite way to write - honing in on a specific thing that’s very universal. Such a deep thinker. His shows - he puts so much weight and effort into how real it is, if that makes sense.”
Lumsden - who has won two ARIA Awards herself, for Best Country Album in 2020 and in 2023 - reflects on her glittering triumphs and hard-won successes on her latest single ‘Look At Me Now.’ The music video compiles flashes of archive footage and music excerpts from throughout her career, a feat which involved her and husband Dan Freeman having to "troll through footage from the last fifteen years, across twenty-two hard drives.” She wanted the music video to be “a little bit messy, and not too shiny. And just a little bit gritty.” As in all things she creatively pursues, in this particular project, Lumsden has succeeded in exhibiting a radical, bright-eyed honesty.
“I usually write in a stream-of-consciousness,” she says. “I write my songs and I work out what they’re about after. ‘Look At Me Now’ just came out, and then I was like, oh, I’m either trying to prove a point to myself or someone else or both.” She laughs. In a nutshell, the indubitably catchy song can be described as “looking back to my younger self and thinking, you never thought you’d get here, well, here you are.” Or, as she declares on the single, “Yeah, there were blood, sweat, and tears / Oh, baby, look at me now.”
Lumsden is a country music singer-songwriter, unabashedly operating amidst a genre that people haven’t always been so kind to. There is, it must be admitted, a certain degree of eye-rolling cringe attributed to country music.
She unpacks why that might be. “Oftentimes, country music is quite earnest. It’s just telling stories how it is. Sometimes the truth’s a bit hard to hear. And it’s not trying to be cool. It’s not trying to be anything that it’s not.” Lumsden adds that this “cringe” that people feel toward the genre could be “psychologically linked to a very old idea that being in the country is being behind. Which is absolutely not the truth.”
But she believes that things are looking up for the genre. “I think country music has had a full flip on its head - it’s the fastest-growing genre in the world. Australia is the third biggest country market in the world after America and Canada. And I think country music has really come into its own.” But at the end of the day, the negativity the average person might harbour toward country music is not really Lumsden’s problem. “I don’t care if you think it’s cringe, if you think it’s cringe, don’t come!” she cries, laughing. “I’m not trying to be cool. That’s never been part of my band. We are very much about joy and having fun. I think cool kills creativity.”
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Lumsden grew up in Tallimba, a rural town in the Central West area of New South Wales, which is 600 kilometres from the nearest city. As of the 2021 census, Tallimba had a population of 185 people.
“The isolation means that you have this pure experience, it wasn’t influenced by pop culture very much,” she explains. “And I’m so grateful for that now because it meant that I had a different experience to other people that are often in the music industry. And I think when you have a different life experience, you just look at things slightly differently, and it means you come to ideas differently. And I think being unique is one of the best things that you can be in the music industry.”
Growing up in the country also instilled her with a staunch sense of community - a value that she thinks is definitional to the country music genre. “And that’s influenced how I run my business, and how I put together shows. In the country, when you have an event, there’s no other event on, so you have to be really inclusive with literally everyone and create something that’s accessible and meaningful.”
Lumsden, off the back of her recent single release, has just confirmed plans for a national tour. Kicking off in Perth on February 6, Fanny and her band The Prawn Stars will traverse the country with shows in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, wrapping up the tour in Canberra on February 21.
“I absolutely love it,” she says of touring, eyes gleaming. “Between the Paul Kelly tours, we did a twenty-three date UK and Ireland tour with kids in the van, running the whole thing ourselves, festivals and everything. We didn’t have a day or a night off.” That ordeal might sound like an exhausting nightmare for some, but to her it is the ideal scenario. “I think for some reason I was just built for it. I love being in new places. I love being on the road. I love waiting in airports. I love being backstage. I just love all of it.”
For Lumsden, performing is joyful and fulfilling - but so is songwriting. “One is so internal, and one is so external. I don’t do much cowriting because I really like that process of just being in a room or being outside by myself to write. Onstage, I am giving all my energy outwards.”
Both processes to her are equally important - they reflect different parts of what she appreciates about being an artist. “I really like being introspective and thinking about words, thinking about stories, thinking about how to construct all of that in a meaningful way and create those worlds. But then I also like just being silly onstage. And I like being able to have both and not having to choose a lane.”
As she continues to look back in joy, all the paths are Lumsden’s to walk.
Catch Fanny Lumsden performing at Lion Arts Factory on Saturday 7 February. Tickets on sale now via destroyalllines.com.
