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Features Lost And Found Sunday, July 13, 2008 Their covers band The Lost Dogs, inspire husband and wife Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson to write together for the first time. By Martin Jones
Kasey: “Shane has probably influenced this record more musically than I have. And yet it’s come out countrier than both of us!”
Shane: “Everyone always tells me I’ve turned into a country hillbilly since I joined this clan, but it’s not really the music that’s changed for me, it’s just the mindset of how to make it.”
If you’ve been lucky enough to catch any of The Lost Dogs shows over the past year, you would have probably seen Kasey Chambers as happy as she’s ever been on stage.
Commercial success is a double-edged sword for any recording artist who values crafting fulfilling music more than money. Emerging from the Chambers’ family group, the Dead Ringer Band, which was never in any danger of being contaminated by commercial pressures, Kasey’s solo career transcended the Tamworth scene in spectacular fashion; her debut The Captain achieved Double Platinum sales. All four of her solo albums have sold better than Platinum, Kasey Chambers becoming one of Australia’s favourite daughters.
The Lost Dogs, a cover-band put together by Kasey, her father Bill Chambers and her husband Shane Nicholson, was a deliberate attempt to escape the pressures and restrictions of being a commercially successful artist. With all three sharing vocal duties, they performed regularly with Mick Albeck and Chris Haigh at the Avoca Beach Hotel near Shane and Kasey’s NSW home, bringing new favourite cover songs to the table each week.
The results were surprisingly successful in a number of ways. First, it achieved the desired objective of reigniting the musical spark in Kasey and Shane, both somewhat jaded by the perpetual pressure to succeed commercially. Shane has had his own brushes with commercial success, his band Pretty Violet Stain emerging from the late ‘90s triple j heyday only to break up under the ‘next big thing’ pressure. His 2003 solo debut It’s A Movie earned him a US deal. It also introduced him to Kasey – Nash Chambers, who produced It’s A Movie, brought his sister in to duet on ‘Destined To Fade’.
Second, the Lost Dogs concept broke its initial boundaries of the Avoca Beach Hotel, making its way to Tamworth and, most recently, Byron Bluesfest.
The Lost Dogs also forced Kasey and Shane’s musical worlds to share an unprecedented intimacy. The more they performed together, the more they appreciated the way their voices and musical personalities complemented each other, Shane’s extreme perfectionism countered by Kasey’s natural laissez-faire.
The experience encouraged the couple, who by this time had married and had a child together, to see if they could write together.
“I was nervous about it I really was,” Kasey laughs. “I just thought ‘what if my husband, who is also one of my favourite songwriters, what if we sit down and write a song together and it’s just a dud? You know we were planning on making this record together and also we had so many people say ‘oh when are you guys gonna make a record together?’ So there was a bit of pressure there on that first song.”
Fortunately, the first song was an unmitigated success and the title track from which to launch an entire new record of collaborations.
“Well yeah the first song we wrote was ‘Rattlin’ Bones’,” Shane reveals, “and it’s kind of symbolic I think that we put it first on the record and it’s the first single because it’s where it all started. And we didn’t know how it was going to go before we sat down and wrote and that is actually the first thing we ever wrote together. And I think in hindsight it was probably one of the easiest songs to write on the record, it just kind of came about. Which I guess boded well for the rest of the record.”
In fact the pair’s cooperation opened a floodgate of creativity. There are 14 songs on Rattlin’ Bones, all of them original and not a weak one among them. There’s a lot of music to enjoy.
“Yeah there is quite a bit,” Shane concurs. “We had too many songs in the end. And at one stage we thought ‘we better start writing because we’re going to come up short by the time we record’ but in the end we had to lose a few things. And it’s really hard – even harder when two people have written songs – to decide which ones you want to keep and which ones you don’t because it’s not just your own opinion, there’s two people attached to the songs for different reasons. So it was even harder, but I’ve never put 14 songs on a record before in my life (laughs).”
As Shane suggests, more doesn’t always (or even often) equate to better when it comes to LPs. In this case, the quantity is justified – Rattlin’ Bones is bursting with strong musical ideas.
“You hope so,” Kasey responds. “It feels like that to us, but when you’re the writers (laughs) I guess you think they’re always strong ideas. But it does feel like that and in some ways there’s a lot going on too because it’s all live. Well, most of it was recorded live so everything’s going on at the one time. Even though we didn’t layer things like you do on most records, but it does feel like there’s a lot going on. And there’s always two vocals as well.”
Shane adds: “I like the aspect that it’s kind of, without being contrived or thought about, somehow we’ve come up with every song on there is almost a homage to different things we love about different artists. A certain song might sound a lot like a Gillian Welch song that we love, and there’s a song that might sound a lot like a Steve Earle ballad and we love that aspect of him. And there’s songs that remind me of Buddy and Julie Miller. So there’s all these different songs that kind of dip a toe into each of those pools, things that we love. To me it covers a lot of the bases… it’s like a best of Lost Dogs really. It’s like all the songs we used to pick to play at Lost Dogs, it’s our favourite aspects of all of those. I think that’s what I like about it; every track connects to something that we love.”
Originally named Harvest after Shane’s original musical hero, Neil Young, The Lost Dogs teamed Shane, Kasey and Bill with fiddle player Mick Albeck and bass player Chris Haigh to perform the singers’ favourite songs – everything from Young and Dylan to John Prine to Tom Waits to Fred Eaglesmith. The concept took on an unexpected life and was both salvation and inspiration for Shane and Kasey. Rattlin’ Bones would not exist as it does without it.
“Without a doubt,” Kasey confirms. “And I don’t think we knew that at the time when we were playing every week and learning new songs and singing with each other for a year, and it did influence this record a lot. But I feel like it’s really inspired me to get into music again. I think after the last record, for me personally, and I went out and toured and everything… I honestly just got really sick of it (laughs). I got kind of sick of being out on the road. And we fell pregnant as well and I didn’t want to be out touring while I was sick which I was this time. So I kind of felt a little bit like I’d just had enough of music. When I say music, I just mean my career side of music. I’d just had enough of it and I just wanted a bit of a break. I hadn’t really had a proper break from music throughout my whole career. And even though we had a break from our careers, we missed actually playing music and that’s why we put The Lost Dogs together, so we could get that real fix of real music every week and that really helped to inspire me to want to get really passionate about music again. And we definitely have on this record, I love it.”
As a result – and not to disparage Kasey’s previous writing – Rattlin’ Bones contains her strongest songwriting yet in my opinion.
“Oh definitely,” Kasey agrees. “I feel like I’ve learned more about songwriting in this last year than I have in my whole life! I think I’ve learned just generally about the craft of songwriting a lot more, just from Shane and sitting down and just from writing with someone else… I’d never really done that before. So to learn how someone else does it and sit down and go ‘oh yeah there are different was to do this and I could try this and I could go into this place’. It’s been really interesting to learn that about songwriting and to learn that about myself as well and it definitely changed how I write songs on my own as well. It made me feel more passionate about writing on my own too. It’s a pretty great experience for me, this whole thing.”
It’s when we get to talking about the arrangement and production of Rattlin’ Bones that the project’s most significant effects on Shane begin to be revealed. While Shane’s career has been based primarily in indie rock, he and Kasey confirm that their dearest musical heroes are shared. The results of their writing collaboration are surprisingly old-school.
As Kasey remarks, “The funny thing is I think that Shane has probably influenced this record more musically than I have. And yet it’s come out countrier than both of us!” That’ll come as a surprise to those who have assumed that the Chambers clan has gradually turned Shane into a country musician.
“Both of our last solo records were the most kind of polished, most pop records I guess, that we’ve made,” Shane begins his view on the timing of Rattlin’ Bones, “so we were quite interested to do this record now. It just felt like a good antidote to that. And also what goes along with making a very polished pop record is that it becomes very promotionally driven, you know you’re doing lots of interviews and you’re trying to get on the radio and all of that, and it felt like a really good time musically to do this record, but also professionally because we’d both been travelling down that road and working quite hard it. It felt like the right time to do something just for the sake of it, musically, that we really wanted to do. Personally it felt like exactly what I wanted to do after the last record; to go a complete 180. That’s what was so enjoyable about it for me I think. And the writing was obviously different for both of us because it was all co-written and neither of us had made a record like that before. And the actual production of the record is so different to what we’ve ever done before. So everything about it was kind of fun and fresh.”
Shane and Kasey realised they needed an authentically organic production to complement the songs they had written; to make it sound, “spontaneous and fresh,” in Shane’s own words. Producer Nash Chambers drove the pair to complete the recording in under ten days – the entire album was recorded live in only eight. Whilst the Chambers’ are used to such methods, it was a daunting task for Shane, a self-confessed control freak and studio perfectionist.
“It would have terrified me two years ago!” he laughs. “I just didn’t have my head in that space. I mean even Kasey’s most polished records are still primarily live, it’s just the way they operate. But there’s still a lot of work done afterwards to pull them into shape. And even some of my records, the band might record live but then I’ll spend months manipulating that and changing it to what I want (laughs). So it was fun to know that with this record what we got in those eight days was what we would print and what people would hear. Even though that’s a risk, that was what was exciting for me.”
Shane credits the Chambers’ experience in such a situation as invaluable and as something he had to learn to trust.
“And we didn’t really give too many guidelines with this record either. We didn’t do a lot of demos for the album, we just played them an acoustic version and said ‘let’s just see what happens’. Most of the time we didn’t even tell the guys in the band what we wanted or were trying to achieve for each song, we just let it evolve. And that just comes down to picking the right people for the record who we know are good players and are going to understand where you’re coming from musically.”
Read the full article in July Rhythms.
Rattlin’ Bones is available through Liberation. Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson tour dates in the Gig Guide.
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