From Country Halls to Nashville - The Fanny Lumsden story
Fanny Lumsden has always been a performer, and she's always done it on her terms. ARIA Award Winner, 8x Golden Guitar Winner, AIR Award Winner - Fanny and the Prawnstars are killing it.
She grew up on a mixed cropping and wool property between Tallimba and Weethalle, and now lives on her property in Tooma. We caught up for a chat about all things storytelling, life experience and how important the country is to her.
Fanny always has stunning promotional material that is usually shot by her husband, Dan. IMAGE CREDIT: Fanny Lumsden
OLI: Do you think that upbringing [being rural and on the farm] had you wanting something different from the farm life that you knew?
FANNY: Yes, and no, but it did really instil this amazing kind of base of appreciation and grounding in that world and knowing that that was where I came from and that was kind of what I wanted, I wanted to further that. I went away to school in year seven and so every time my dad would end the phone call … by saying, “don't forget the bush”. And I love that now, I think it's so beautiful and at the time I'd be like, “of course I won’t dad”. I wasn't running away from it by any means, because when I finished school, I went and studied rural science in Armadale, and so I was obviously still very much wanting to kind of pursue that world and yeah, just I hadn't worked out how I think I went and studied that degree, and did those four years, not loving it, to be honest, not loving the content of what I was doing that yeah, it was kind of till further down the track I've realised what I was wanting to do and how I wanted to connect to that world.
OLI: The decision to pursue the music side and career full time, what was the thought process at that time?
FANNY: It's kind of really crept up on me, I'd always just kind of stepped one bit at a time, until, you know, that was overriding what else I was doing. There was a patch there after AuctionsPlus, where I was still living in Sydney, and I was working four jobs and I was touring on the weekends, and I was just trying to be more flexible with my work so I could move it around a bit.
But there was a lot of just hard yards, and grit and stuff that went into it. But I think basically, the pressures of living in Sydney, doing that became too much, and just started to move out of the city, and kind of go on the road full time. But in a very, like, vague sense, it makes it sound like I was very organised - I really want to push the fact I had no plan, I really just jumped… there was a lot of risk, there was only risk… I just kind of knew that what we did, and what I wanted to do, could work and that it was connecting at some level, and that what I needed was more time and to give it everything, and more resources.
And so I kind of did, we had to take away the bits that were kind of taking up time, then it's kind of I did other stuff on as well, while I was going for the first few years, I was doing like kind of I was doing the Man from Snowy River Festival, the marketing for them and I was doing other bits and pieces, until there was a year that things all really just kind of took off, we won a bunch of awards and then I got a bunch of grant money awards, and those kinds of things that kind of set me up a little bit more and I was able to get rid of those day jobs and then I just had to hustle hard to kind of keep going.
Fanny Lumsden’s CMAA Golden Guitar Album of the Year, Fallow IMAGE CREDIT: Fanny Lumsden
OLI: Do you have aspirations to play to tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people?
FANNY: We get to play 10s of 1000s at festivals and stuff and of course, I want to keep going, but I will never not do the Country Halls Tour, because it's kind of who I am as an artist. I think once I've stopped doing that, I've disconnected from the real essence of what I set out to do, and what we love doing. It really is… the foundations and that's kind of the grounding for that. But I think you can do both, I think you can grow and still still do shows out in [rural Australia].