THE ENERGY THAT NEVER ENDS FOR FANNY LUMSDEN part two
IF TRADITIONS, Fanny Lumsden’s fifth album, has a subtext beneath its close examination of what and why we choose to cherish and what think we should jettison of our family’s past and our culture’s history, it might be the way one woman came to grips with the life she very clearly chose.
That woman is Lumsden herself, self-described as a high achiever, a term loaded with connotations both positive and negative, and attached to her since school days. Attached and lingering, like something she is not just happy but keen to discuss: the role of then-undiagnosed, or at least unnamed, ADHD, in her creative, personal and academic life growing up and what role it plays in her life now.
Lumsden tells stories such as how her mother, a school teacher and principal who saw who Fanny was and worked with it not against it, liked giving her a lot to do, early in the day for example when her energy was high, her brain firing and focus all over the yard. And how she was set on doing the best at everything, and brutal about herself when she didn’t meet the almost impossible standards, whether it be running, writing or university. Or running a family business with her husband where making music, playing music, and selling music is both all-consuming and yet only part of a life of kids and parents and country life and travel and bills and and …
“I’m definitely the same way [as I was as a kid], I don’t get up early though,” Lumsden smiles. “I definitely have a better grasp on it. I definitely have a better understanding of it. I can just recognise now the parts where it’s doing me harm or doing me good. I think I’m also much kinder to myself than I was in my 20s or even my early 30s. I was much harsher on myself for the failures that that kind of brain presents.”
How is it better now? Or how is she better at it now?
“I think that I try and incorporate more tasks and timelines, and because I’m doing it all, which means I can control how I work and Dan and I can control how we structure everything, we do structure it to suit the way our personalities kind of express themselves.”
When she was so harsh on herself in her 20s, was it balanced by recognising how the way Lumsden was built did good for her as well?
“Yeah,” she says not wholly convincingly. “I suppose I didn’t really have this same conscious understanding, even though I was told from an early age that that’s what it was. The vocabulary has really only come in the last however many years. Mum never actually said the words, any of those words, to me, but she could see it a mile away. She helped me learn to focus, hyperfocus. I still did benefit from all the positive sides of it as I’ve grown. It taught me a lot of things: it taught me how to work.”
In some ways you could argue this was another version of “having it all”, a concept that is debated through Traditions, this drive to be the best possible at everything she was doing, even if the price to pay for that was not always pleasant and might mean not seeing that sometimes being second wasn’t bad at all.
“I think I’m definitely becoming much better at that as I get older, zooming out and going ‘sure you’re #2 but you’re also doing this and this and this and these are the things you wanted in life and you’ve also got all of them’,” says Lumsden. “I think the positives [of the ADHD] outweigh the negatives, wholeheartedly. I am wildly optimistic, to a fault though I have no shame about optimism; I am constantly coming up with ideas; constantly listing and doing new things; I have this energy that never ends. I mean, it might as I get older, but at the moment it isn’t so let’s do this stuff while we can.
“I think the whole thing, how I’m built, is perfect for what I’m doing at the moment.”
Inevitably there must be a “crash” of some sort when highs are so high and sometimes seem endless but maybe learning how to balance is a lesson now learned.
“I’ve tried to learn to incorporate practices that calm my nervous system down as I do all these things,” Lumsden says. “For example, when we are on tour – which I absolutely love, obviously, because it feeds every single part of what I love doing – we are very strict. When I am home I am very relaxed and have very grey lines about everything, but on tour we have lots of rules: my band is very healthy, no drugs, I don’t drink on tour – a bunch of us don’t drink on tour – I do yoga every day before gigs. We don’t hype ourselves before we go on stage either; we do breath and calm down because we’re all very similar, and I’ve noticed that when I don’t do that my banter is unhinged.
“If I haven’t calmed myself right down before a gig, almost feel like I’m bored before I go on stage, I will jump sentences halfway through, I’ll be speaking so fast no one will be able to understand me [she cackles]. I protect my space and my nervous system a lot. And kids help a lot. Kids are humbling, kids don’t care, and I have to be ‘LOL, I’m just putting on parties, calm down. I’m not saving lives!’.“
Kids and parents and ancestors underpin the album, the connections that bind, going back decades or centuries, the traditions that hold through generations. This has been a steep understanding in recent years for Lumsden.
“My Dad has Parkinson’s and so watching that change in him and realising how much all of those traditions, those farming traditions, actually do mean to me. When you’re presented with the loss of that it’s like, whoa,” she says. “What’s been interesting to me is how previously I’d thrown the baby out with the bathwater with those traditions, thinking I don’t fit into some of them, therefore I can’t have any of them. That’s dumb.
“Then I was like, no, I can celebrate these parts of me that are not quite fitting into my ambition or not fitting into the woman I want to be. Even one of the things was over the last how many years learning more about colonialism and learning more about all those things and knowing how tied they are. My family are all settlers from Scotland and so they are all part of that story in a way that you have to grapple with the shame of that and then deal with the reality of that. I think I was like, oh chuck I all away; now I’m like it’s actually ok you can do it all at the same time: you can understand that something is flawed and also celebrate the parts that make you you and that are actually beautiful. That’s been the main driver.”
“But once I’d come to this place where I wanted to express this for the record, I was like, now I have to be as honest as possible. Like, I’m not going to hide any of it; this is exactly what it is, I know what I’m saying comes from a good place and I’m happy to have a discussion about it.”
She was ready. As she sings: “We’re throwing streamers, while they’re throwing knives.”
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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
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Fanny Lumsden’s Traditions is out October 30
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