FANNY LUMSDEN DOESN’T WANT IT ALL, BUT SHE’LL HAVE A LOT part 1
AS THE LINE CONNECTS, the camera boots up and the sound eventually works, I am greeted by Fanny Lumsden singing. Not one of her own songs, not even the new single, Traditions, but a jaunty little melody nonetheless, in keeping with the perpetually buoyant Lumsden, a country music star who half of her fans here and in the UK probably don’t even think of as country.
I don’t join in, which she would be grateful for if only she knew, but I do ask if she’s seen the lyrics attached to the Traditions filmclip on Youtube - a mix of reasonable guesswork and someone whose first language is 0001100. I’m not sure a human was involved.
“I’m sure a human wasn’t,” she says. “I saw it said like ‘heat heat’ and I was like, what? Who said heat? I’m going to go screenshot that [she laughs]. And then fix it.”
Which does make me wonder, given a line on her new album, conveniently also named Traditions, whether she’d turn the other cheek and accept stuff like that these days?
“It depends how funny it is, I think. I think if it’s truly amusing I’d leave it, just for the LOLs,” she says with another laugh. “If it made it just bad, embarrassing …”
What she should do is sack her manager I reckon.
“Yeah, same. I’ve been trying to for a while. She’s so useless and she’s really persistent.”
Lumsden, of course, is her own manager. And bandleader, singer, songwriter, showgirl, parent and anything else that comes to hand. You might get tired just reading that, you would definitely get tired doing it, but her?
“Yeah,” she chuckles. “Yes. Yes and no. Workload-wise, absolutely. It’s very hard just because I want it done really well and when you don’t have enough and you’ve used all the hours of the days that’s frustrating. But then I also enjoy each role in certain ways, and here we are still doing it.”
Presumably it started because it had to be done, and there’s a part of every artist – or, maybe all of us – that wants to control as much as possible, balanced by the bit that just wants to focus on the art and forget about the business. But as much as Lumsden figures all the hours of the day aren’t enough, would she really want to give up the control she has now?
“No, I’d never want to give up all of it in typical artist/manager fashion. I think that’s why I get called a difficult woman,” says Fanny the artist deftly slipping in the title of another of the new songs – about someone being told she doesn’t have to do and be herself, and sung solo at the end of the album – in a way that Fanny the manager and Fanny the publicist would appreciate.
“I started doing it out of necessity and then because I guess the way my career has gone, and we don’t usually use traditional music industry ‘the way it’s always done’ vibes, I like to look at it in a very different way. Then you’re like ‘I could do that already and not pay someone 20 per cent’. Maybe I’m just not a good people manager.”
Well if you’d met the people she has to manage you’d understand that.
“Yeah, that’s true. They’re a nightmare.”
Lumsden is quick to point out that she couldn’t do it if she didn’t have husband/musical offsider/photographer and videographer/co-parent Dan – or Daniel Stanley Freeman if we’re being formal – sharing all that load and the plans and the methods and the thinking.
“I’m not out here on my own,” she avers. “I heard someone say recently that having it all is just doing it all. And that’s why we’re burnt out! I think I’m learning to define what your ‘all’ is and what’s enough.”
It does connect to something else she says on the new album, in a different context – specifically about ageing and acceptance – but still potent in the broader question of how much is possible or sensible in any given life, that “I know it’s enough and I know there’s nothing to hide”. Ah, yes, the supposed big conundrum of modern women, the basis for the wacky and possibly not even real beyond social media, trad wives movement. I got myself some thoughts, I warn her.
Among talk about can we have it all, and have women been sold a pup by feminism being told they can have it all I think it’s nuts that any of us think we can have it all when all of us have to decide what we are willing to sacrifice or compromise on to have as much as we do have. Men, willingly or not, sacrificed home and connections and relationships to have the job and money and control; women, willingly or not, sacrificed jobs and money and control to be the foundations of all families. We all have to bend, to decide what’s enough to have or give up, to get anything, but thank god thanks to feminism we all now are allowed to choose what we bend and what we break. That doesn’t make her a difficult woman, it just makes her an adult with choices.
“I definitely agree with this,” Lumsden says as my rant ebbs away. “That brings in Traditions, the song itself, the whole point is that. We can complain all about it but the only thing we have now is a choice. We have a choice. In most cases. And you have a choice of what to accept is ‘it all’. Is this it all? Is this enough? Is this enough for me? I’m trying to find that point. Is this all the bits I wanted to achieve without that high achiever thing that was banged into me as a child?”
High achiever, driven by something more than mere ambition, is something we’ll pick up in the second part of this interview, but for now it’s worth noting that it doesn’t mean automatically highly confidence. Look at for example how she has said that she was shocked that overseas tour companion and local godhead of songwriting, Paul Kelly, agreed to sing with her on the album, on the song By The River. But if you look at it another way, he probably owed her a duet.
After all, has he played Glastonbury and found an eager, very eager, audience of Brits happy to dance, make shapes and sing loudly to his songs the way she has in the past few years? The man’s been given a leg-up there by Lumsden joining him on stage on his recent European tour, as well as opening for him. Helping the old man out you might say.
“I think that I did make his audience dance for him,” she will concede, after laughing uproariously at the audacity of my suggestion. “I still feel so grateful to him. There are so many artists who would kill to tour around with Paul Kelly and sing duets with him and just have his time and his attention.”
By The River was recorded with her band early this year before Lumsden and band returned to the UK touring season, then sent to him for his contribution. “And when I got the version of him singing on it I just cried my eyes out, just hearing him sing my lyrics.”
It strikes me that being amazed and grateful that Kelly agreed to sing with her is understandable – he is Paul Kelly!, - but at the same time hopefully she also saw that the reason he agreed to do it is because he thought the song was good enough. Which meant her song was good enough. And therefore she was good enough.
“I think that that reason in itself makes it even more special,” she says. “We spoke so much as we were driving around Europe in that van: we spoke about books and poetry and different things. We both ended up buying the other a Pádraig Ó Tuama book of poetry at [restaurant and bookstore] The Winding Stair in Dublin, accidently, as our parting gift.
“I learnt a lot, and I am still really grateful, but it does make me feel like I am doing the right thing. In those moments of crashing out and darkness and whatever else that comes with all the ups and highs and positivity and optimism, you can draw on something like that.”
TOMORROW: In part two of this interview, Fanny Lumsden digs into the parts of her that built but might once have threatened all that she’s done and all that she has. “I protect my space and my nervous system a lot.”
READ MORE
The Energy That Never Ends For Fanny Lumsden, part two of this interview, on Friday
SEE MORE
Fanny Lumsden plays:
Tooma Rec Grounds, Tooma, October 31
Barwon Club, Geelong November 6
Meeniyan Town Hall, November 7
Castlemaine Royal Theatre, November 8
Castlemaine VIC
Norton Music Factory, Caloundra West, November 13
M Arts Precinct, Murwillumbah November 14
Finnian's Irish Tavern, Port Macquarie, November 15
Keystone 1889, Bathurst November 27
Milton Theatre, November 28
The Stag & Hunter, Newcastle, November 29
HEAR MORE
Fanny Lumsden’s Traditions is out October 30
Comments