INTERVIEW: Fanny Lumsden releases new album 'Hey Dawn': "I realised that I have to tell the stories that I have now. All I can do is make this album now and stop worrying about before and after."

Interview: Jett Tattersall

Fanny Lumsden is one of Australia’s premier country artists. Since first releasing music in 2012, she has won seven prestigious Golden Guitar awards from fourteen nominations, and in 2020 she won the ARIA Award for Best Country Album for her top 10 smash Fallow.

Today she releases her fourth studio album Hey Dawn. Admitting to feeling stuck after the success of Fallow, Lumsden initially struggled to create its follow up until a chance encounter in a market in Tasmania. “The only pre-idea I had for the record was I knew I wanted the sound of a piano that felt like you were in a hall when you were a kid, and I walked into this hall and this old man was playing this vision of what I had in my head,” she says. That night she wrote the pared back, optimistic title track, and the album swung into place.

“That unlocked it: ‘Oh, you just need to wake up, it’s a new day, it’s a new moment, and you just need to be where you are right now. Forget about Fallow, forget about all the other things, just be now,’” she says.

The album is a triumph, a beautiful collection of country pop with stories that draws on Lumsden’s childhood, family, life, love and death. The jaunty ‘When I Die’ confronts death with a soundscape that is nothing short of joyful, as Lumsden sings of celebrating life instead of wallowing in grief “When I die / We’re gonna shoot my ashes into the sky…Please don’t cry / Because I lived a good life.” The moving ballad ‘Ugly Flowers’ was inspired by the death of Lumsden’s grandmother, and mixes a nostalgic look at childhood and how our life and beliefs change, with grief and recognising that life must go on. It’s a truly beautiful moment.

Elsewhere on the album Lumsden embraces a more indiepop sound on the brilliant ‘You’ll Be Fine’ which has an infectious beat and smart, wry lyrics which reflects on the fact that we have nothing to lose by turfing our hangups “What ever happened when you left that shit behind? / The world didn't blow up when you didn’t smile that time.”

‘Millionaire’ also leans more into the indie-rock-pop category with an insistent beat creating an irresistible desire to dance. Lumsden ties in her childhood experiences with the realisation money is not what defines us. “I’ve never wanted to be a millionaire…All this love around this table is free / This money won't make me.”

The album draws to a close with quiet, tender, reflective moments. ‘Enjoy The Ride’ brings in a gentle banjo and soaring vocals, with a soundscape that gradually and subtly builds throughout the track. Final track ‘Stories’ is a gorgeous, guitar ballad with an emotive vocal performance from Lumsden that honours her childhood growing up in the Riverina. It is a beautiful, warm hug to close the album.

Hey Dawn showcases what a remarkable talent Lumsden is. It absolutely ripples with life, charisma and joy, while also remaining incredibly connective, relatable and almost spiritual. It is an album you deeply feel, and will find it clings to your heart after just one listen. We recently caught up with Lumsden to chat more about its creation.

Fanny, thank you very much for your time today. I am loving your new album Hey Dawn, but I'm really sorry before I get into that, I read this bit of information and it made my heart go a-flutter. Talk to me about rollerblading please.
Ha! Yes, so probably my best achievement in life is that I have the world record for the longest distance rollerbladed by four people in 24 hours!

Everyone's always leading with your ARIAs and your Golden Guitars, and then I was like, ‘hold on a second, there's something else here’!
There's a real achievement here! It's very funny because I'm not like a skilled rollerblader, at the time I just had endurance because I was really fit, so I think they just thought I would last the distance. I was at uni in Armidale and we were raising money for the women's shelter, and to do that we decided to break a world record! It was with a team and it was really fun, actually. And because I was at uni, everybody else just drank in the quadrangle, whilst we skated for 24 hours! We didn't drink obviously, because I would have passed out.

Rollerblading and roller skating just go hand in hand with amazing music, you are a musician so tell me what is your go to rollerblading jam?
It’d probably be disco, for sure. That always amps me up. I don't know if I could pick just one song. Just a really good real disco, 70s and 80s disco, playlist and I'm just amped then, I'm just ready for life.

Let’s go to Hey Dawn, because this is such a great album. It's so joyous and beautiful, even in the sad moments there’s a touch of comedy in the sadness. Talk to me about how you went about creating this gem.
I'm so grateful you said that because it's not part of my soundbite, the joy part of it, but it's been really interesting because a few people that I've spoken to about the record in the last few days have all said the same thing - I just feel joy when I listen to it. As a performer and a songwriter and a sharer of stories, that is my ultimate goal, to share joy, and to encourage joy. So that makes me feel really great.

What was your kernel of a motive going into this one?
I just wanted it to feel good, and I know that sounds very vague. When I songwrite I don't really consciously make a decision about what the songs are going to be about or what the album's gonna be about ahead of time. I see what comes out. I write the songs and they just kind of come out and then I figure out what they're about after. Once they're all together, this sounds really weird, but I try and wait until the world of the album arrives. And I know that it will. This particular album did take me a longer time, it was a labour of love compared to my past records, which have just flowed out pretty fast. Fallow flowed out like water and I knew what I wanted to do going in, and I knew what I was trying to make in a more vague sense and the world appeared quite quickly. Whereas this record, I had to search a bit more, which I think was good because obviously I needed to do that. And the song ‘Hey Dawn’ was the crux of that, I didn't write that one until we were halfway through the recording process, and it has its own story entirely about how I even got to that. But that was when the world kind of appeared to me and I realised where these collection of songs fit and how they connected to each other.

Latest single ‘Ugly Flowers’ before I even pressed play, I laughed, and I was like ‘What a beautiful, hilarious and wonderful title for anything’. Just your opening lines, and quickly understanding what the song was about, instead of feeling sad, I just laughed some more. Because everyone's gonna relate to the song, everyone's got a Nan and everyone's Nan has a lot of ugly shit lying around!
Totally! And you hated it, and then all of a sudden, it represents something that you don't have anymore, some part of your childhood or some kind of nostalgia. All of that stuff changes colour and I really wanted to represent that in the in the song, about how you get told stories when you're young that define you. As you grow, you hear those stories again, and you see them in a different colour, they're totally different, but it doesn't really change who you are. The fact that I used to think that people who had in ground pools were elite, that's part of me, that's how I've grown and that has helped me shape how I look at the world. That representation of all the cakes on the table, that's what we used to do, we used to go to my grandparents house on Sundays, every now and again, when all the cousins could come together, and we would just be like, well, it was a bunch of birthdays, so let's celebrate, and everyone's whose birthday it was gets a cake. And it doesn't happen anymore, because grandma has passed away and we've all moved on and we've got our own families, and we have our own traditions now.

It’s lovely, and you also say how your mom stepped up to the plate and that broke my heart in a beautiful way. What I love about your songwriting is it's so very Australian without feeling in any way forced country or forced Australia, there's a real suburban quality to it as well. And I think that's where the comedy comes into it. But you also write such personal stories that everyone relates to, and I always go back to this notion that we all are individuals, but we're all very human, and we're all the same.
Yeah, we are. The more you boil it down, the more we realise we're all the same, even though we like to think we're different. I really like the idea of being very specific, the more specific you can become, the more universal it becomes. That is something that I've learned as a songwriter over time. My main thing that I have to maintain when I'm writing songs is just honesty. I just try and be as honest as I can. I can't sing lines I don't believe in like to the point where in post-production I go back and change everything that's doesn't sound like me. That's the only thing I really try and maintain, the honesty and distilling the story in a way that I see it and I would tell it. Anything contrived just doesn't work for me.

With regards to the sound on this album, I'm hearing so many different sounds on this album, particularly, ‘You'll Be Fine’ because you've got the wide open country lyricism, but then the melody and beat is reminiscent of indie-surf-pop-punk, but it's still very much your song.
I am proudly a country music artist, but what I see as my difference is that I write songs from the perspective of someone who lives and grew up in the country. I tell stories about people who live in the country, and from that perspective, and I'm passionate about it, but I don't feel like I have to just have lap steel and or pedal steel and fiddle to emote that. I feel like that's limiting. Country music in general these days is so broad, the country part is almost irrelevant. It's just songwriting and songs, some of it sounds like pop music and some of it sounds like rock music, it's all. I don't ever feel bound to a genre, ever. With every single song we make we come at it like how do we elevate this the right way? How does this story get communicated? And what sounds do we do that with? Sometimes it feels like it should be a bit more surf pop punk, or sometimes it feels like it should have horns. I just like exploring that as well, I think that's really fun. And as a musician, I would never want to just make the same record twice, because I feel like it's quite boring. There's no progression in that and no progression for my audience either.

There's storytelling lyrically on this album, but there's also storytelling musically, and I really am loving on this album, how sometimes that comes in as a contrast, and also keep keeps the mood playful, particularly with a song like ‘When I Die’, or even ‘Ugly Flowers’.
I like talking about serious issues, but I don't want it to feel heavy. I want it to feel hopeful still. So I that humour does that well. The last few years been heavy, it's time for us to have some fun.

Your last album Fallow was such a big success and it really launched you into the mouths of people outside the country realm. I imagine, no matter how many years you've been doing this, there's always going to be a little bit of a ‘Oh, shit, now everyone's really going to be watching what comes next’. Did you have that moment before Hey Dawn?
I wish I could say that I'm so absorbed with my art that I didn't, but I 100% did. I think the reason that it took so long for me to find the world of Hey Dawn was that I just didn't know where to go after Fallow, the narrative of Fallow became so full on. It was hard for me to write after that, just the combination of all of the shit that happened over the last few years made it hard for me, I didn't want to write about it, it felt to obvious. And so I just had to wait until the songs came, and they did when we were in WA actually, we got stuck in WA and had all our gigs cancelled, and I was pregnant and there was all this stuff that happened. So we ended up going down the WA coast for a couple of months and it was that that really unlocked it. I just stopped thinking about the industry and the album and what people thought and I started writing again. Going to the studio I still found quite difficult, and then we had this massive storm and all these trees came down and we didn't have power for a week - which is hard when you're trying to record an album! So we had to move studios over to the east coast of Tasmania and I woke up in the Airbnb one day, just as the sun popped over the ocean, and I literally said to it, ‘hey, dawn’. I just had this as I drove to the studio that morning, I just felt like something had changed. I realised that I have to tell the stories that I have now, that's all I can do. All I can do is make this album now and stop worrying about before and after. Fallow was its own thing, and that is never to be repeated, because it was just its own time. Maybe I've peaked and I'm on the way down, so don't worry about it. Just keep going!

The only kind of sonic idea I had going into the whole record, the only vision I had was someone playing the piano, an old church hall piano that was a bit out of tune, a bit honky tonk in this hall in the middle of nowhere. On the way home from the studio, we stopped off at this little market. I went into the hall where there were stalls, and there was this little old man sitting at the piano with a little red hat on, just playing the piano. He was playing the songs, these standards, and he didn't stop. He just played and played and played. I just sat there and watched him and I was like, ‘oh my god, this is what I had in my head’. It was this really amazing moment where I was like, ’here it is like, here's the moment.’ Then I went back to the where we were staying and I wrote ‘Hey Dawn’ on on the piano. And then I felt that the album had come together and I was in the moment. Here I am, this is what I'm doing. It doesn't matter what happened. And it doesn't matter what happens in the future. I just have to just make this.

That's a gorgeous story. You put on an incredible live show, and one of the most recent of which was the fricking Avalon stage at Glastonbury! Tell me, what is it about playing live? Is that the thing that makes it all worth it?
Yeah, I love songwriting. I love every stage of it to be honest. I love what I do. I love writing, I love creating, I love the art, I love the videos. I don't love all of the admin that I have to do, but whatever I have to do it! I LOVE performing. Being on that stage, it does make it all worth it. It makes all the kilometres and all of the late nights and no sleep worth it. Standing there and connecting with people in that moment, I literally have got goosebumps right now. I get to do it with these people that I trust so much. Playing Avalon stage at Glastonbury was this unreal moment. In real time we were having a lot of tech problems actually, no one could hear anything, there was a lot of shit going on behind the scenes. But at some point in the set we all, without looking at each other, decided that we were going to have a good time because we're here. And we did and there's just something about creating excitement and atmosphere and joy and everybody getting lost in a moment together at once that really does makes it feel all worthwhile.

You're obviously gonna have some more of that going on with the release of Hey Dawn, what's coming up for you?
We’re touring! We've got about six, seven weeks of touring this album, which is exciting. I'm taking Hey Dawn show out in the road, which we're still finalising. We have rehearsals the night before, so we'll just whack it all together! We’re going to play all over Australia, we've got some festivals as well, up in Queensland, in Ipswich and in Savannah In the Round. And then we are going to go on the rest of the Country Halls tour, the 10 year anniversary tour, we've done the first part of and we're gonna do the second part from the end of October through to the end of the year. So more hall, more shows and then we're gonna go back overseas again next year, we had such a beautiful time in the UK, and Ireland, the audiences were just unreal. Everyone had told me or inferred to me over my career so far that I was too Australian to connect over there, but it was absolutely not the case. We’re all humans in the end! So we're going to be doing lots more touring. I love it.

Hey Dawn is out now via Cooking Vinyl. You can buy and stream now.
To keep up with all things Fanny Lumsden, you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.

Hey Dawn Tour Dates
August 4 - Street Theatre, Canberra, ACT
August 5 - Civic Theatre, Wagga Wagga, NSW
August 6 - Benalla Town Hall, Benalla, Victoria
August 9 - Brunswick Picture House, Brunswick Heads, NSW
August 10 - Majestic Theatre, Pomona, Queensland
August 11 - Maryborough Sports Club, Maryborough, Queensland
August 12 - The Powerhouse, Toowoomba, Queensland
August 13 - The Triffid, Brisbane, Queensland
August 25 - Memo Music Hall, Melbourne, Victoria
August 26 - Meeniyan Town Hall, Meeniyan, Victoria
August 27 - Live At The Bundy, Bundalaguah, Victoria
September 1 - Milton Theatre, Milton, NSW
September 2 - Factory Theatre, Sydney, NSW
September 3 - Lizottes, Newcastle, NSW