Meet Fanny Lumsden – singer-songwriter

She’s won ARIAs and Golden Guitars, played Glastonbury, appeared on Rockwiz, Play School and runs her own record label – but at the heart of it all, Fanny Lumsden is a girl from the bush with a degree in Rural Science, an achingly beautiful voice, a drive to support the land she came from and a nickname that won’t quit.

 

There’s a man called Brett who wants Fanny Lumsden to play at his funeral. He put some extreme thought into the big day, pitched the concept at the pub one night and provided a down payment – one load of wood. (A second load of wood, a cow and 50 grand, as suggested by Fanny, will surely follow.)

Brett means business. But what started as a night at the bar, sharing his dying wishes, became a source of inspiration for a song on Fanny’s latest album, Hey Dawn.

“Brett is my muse for the single, When I Die. That night at the pub, he told me he wants his ashes put into a shotgun, shot into the sky at sunset – ‘across the valley and through that golden light’ – while we all gather around a bonfire and I play guitar. Weeks later, I wrote the song for him, beneath the stars of the Nullarbor Plain.”

It’s a unique kind of beautiful, like Fanny’s own voice – which is entirely self-taught.

“While I do a lot before shows to keep my voice clear and controlled, I still don’t technically know how it works – it just comes out of my mouth.”

Fanny has never questioned her sound, and rightly so. Alongside her band, The Prawn Stars, her voice delivers divine layers of alternate country, the sweet and the sour, with a whole lot of heart. No traditional twang, keister-sittin’, straw-chewin’ here.

“I’m telling stories the way I want to tell them – it just happens when I open my mouth to sing.”

Show pony

Fanny’s own story begins on a mixed cropping and sheep farm in the Northern Riverina. The eldest of four, her childhood was threaded together with horse riding and sheep shearing, bush poetry and piano lessons.

“Dad loves a good yarn and has written bush poetry for as long as I can remember, so that storytelling element has always been in my life,” says Fanny.

“The country influence comes from him too – car trips with dad meant James Blundell on the tape player. As for mum, she was very into classical music and taught us all piano and a bit of guitar.”

When asked what she was like as a kid, Fanny describes herself in two words: show pony.

“No doubt about it – I was always performing. Whether that was a circus on horseback, singing or dancing, literally anything that would make our parents watch us. It was pretty precocious really,” Fanny laughs.

A move to boarding school in Albury saw her add the fiddle to the mix, as well as her first attempt at lyric writing – “although they were terrible lyrics”. And that was okay, because to be entirely honest, at this point in the game, Fanny had no dreams or aspirations to be a professional musician. Sure, she was playing music and writing songs in her spare time, but she didn’t know anything about the music industry, had never been to the Tamworth Country Music Festival and, after high school, arrived at Armidale UNE to study Rural Science with honours in wool, sustainability and high fashion.

“I loved my time in Armidale, but of course, a science degree is very factual, and there was a side of me that needed to be creative, so I started performing on the side.”

One of her first gigs was at The Armidale Club – Fanny remembers her college mates coming to watch her. She also remembers the fact she didn’t really know how to gig, including how to plug in her guitar. Still, she had a good time and carried on performing in the big smoke after scoring a job as a wool broker at Sydney’s AuctionsPlus.

This right here is the moment the tables start to turn and the balance begins to tip in favour of music. Deep down, Fanny knew she wasn’t in wool for keeps – she wanted to do other things, experience life and see her music grow.

“So I traded in that one good job for four part-time jobs to pay my rent and keep my life flexible while I was doing gigs – that was my first leap.

“I was very much at the start of my career, faffing around, but I somehow convinced all these incredible musicians to join my band. I still don’t know how I did that, not a single one of them was from the country scene. But they jumped on board at the start of 2011 and the first generation of Fanny Lumsden and The Glorious Whores was born. As it turned out, they wouldn’t say that on ABC, so we changed it to Fanny Lumsden and The Thrillseekers. That didn’t stick either, so we evolved one final time to become Fanny Lumsden and The Prawn Stars.”

Not one to do things by the book, Fanny and her band hit the road to tour Australia and play anywhere they could – choosing to put live performances at the forefront of what they do.

“More often than not, you’ll see careers built up in the industry side first, then they grow the live performances from there. We were definitely the other way round and led with our Country Halls Tour from 2012 to bring live, original music with a full band and production to the bush. I knew there were people out there who wanted to experience live music, but were never going to make it to the city – so I decided to come to them, to make it accessible to everybody and raise community funds along the way.

“It started by accident, like most things in my career. No one knew me back then, but people from all over the bush came to see us. They listened and they danced and they helped build me as an artist.”

Then things got big, fast.

Class act 

Entitled Small Town Big Shot, Fanny’s first album was released in 2015. It was financed entirely by crowdfunding, saw her described as ‘a breath of fresh country air’ by Rolling Stone Magazine and established her as an artist who wrote lyrics with soul, honesty and witty confessions – including peeing in the pool and stealing Juicy Fruit gum. Later that year, the album was nominated for the ARIA Award for Best Country Album and two years later, Fanny released her second album Real Class Act under her own record label created with husband Dan, Red Dirt Road Records. It debuted at number one on the ARIA charts and saw her awarded the Professional Development Award (PDA) from APRA that same year… which was lucky… because she was running out of cash.

“We’d been touring in western Queensland in our tiny caravan, playing at all these random places like pubs and backyards and I got the call to say we’d won. That same day, Telstra called to tell me they were going to cut off my phone because I hadn’t paid my bill. But the PDA came with a cash prize of $15k, which was amazing.”

It was enough for Fanny to keep her phone connected, and enough to give her the nudge to quit her multiple side hustles. But not enough for her to rely on as income.

“That was a good thing – because it meant Dan and I still had to work out how we were going to make an actual income from the music. But it was still enough to get us across the line and take the jump to do it full-time.”

It was a good call. Because that same year, Fanny won her first Golden Guitar for New Talent of the Year. In 2020, her third album Fallow debuted at number 10 on the all genre ARIA charts, won five Golden Guitar awards (including Album of the Year) and picked up the ARIA Award for Best Country Album. In August 2023, Fanny released her fourth album, Hey Dawn, debuting in the ARIA charts at number one (all genre) Australian album, number 10 on the album chart and number one Australian country album.

While none of the above was ever on some kind of bucket list, Fanny says she’d be lying if she said it didn’t mean the world.

“It’s a very cool thing and I’m so proud of what we’ve done – it’s a real validation to do these things that you didn’t even aspire to because you didn’t think you could achieve them.”

She’s humble alright, even going as far to describe herself as an “accidental country artist”. But don’t get her wrong, that doesn’t mean she isn’t proud as punch to be the country musician she is today – after all, telling stories about life in the bush is in her blood. Her dad wears the big cowboy hat and everything. But at the start of Fanny’s career, she thought she fell into the ‘Indie Folk’ side of life.

“Then came the day I visited Tamworth to watch a friend perform at the Country Music Festival. We got up, played a few songs and the audience reaction was out of this world. That was the moment I realised we had arrived where we belonged – I could see people in the crowd connecting with our story, dancing along to our own unique version of country, complete with banjos and mandolins. The community we found that day has played an enormous part in my career and I immediately knew I had to embrace it.”

From industry organisations and platforms to support networks far and wide, the country music community is a rare beast according to Fanny, who says that kind of vibe is hard to come by in other Australian music industries and has been instrumental in building her as an artist.

You be you

There’s another community Fanny simply couldn’t live without – her family, her band and her children, who at just 18 months and five years old are living it large, touring on the road with their incredibly talented parents.

While the juggle is real, it’s doable.

“Dan is very hands-on, which makes it all possible,” says Fanny. “We’ve also had the same band since 2016 now, including my brother, so the kids have been raised by them too. They all chip in, lend a hand, pick them up – they’ve been amazing. And while I do try to have systems in place, it doesn’t always happen and ultimately we’re very tolerant of chaos and change.

“There will always be things that I keep consistent for the kids, so life feels safe. But I have no hard and fast rules because I think you would actually collapse if you tried to do that – you’ve got to be flexible living this life and I’m not into making long-term plans. This works for us right now and we’ll cross each new bridge as we get to it.”

It’s an admirable outlook, one that’s fuelled by creativity and love and sends a brave message to the small humans Fanny and Dan are raising – music is powerful, anything is possible if you work hard and should you fall, your people are here to catch you. As for Fanny’s advice to people who are hoping to break into the beloved country music community?

“I’d say don’t change yourself for anybody else, ever. One thing that has made us successful is the fact that we don’t sound like anybody else, and everything we do, everything I sing, everything we perform and everything I say I truly believe in. I wouldn’t be here if I was singing someone else’s words – so you need to figure out who you are and what you want to say.

“Also, don’t stop. Always strive to be better and get better – that still goes for me too. I never think we’ve made it. Every record has got to be better than the last. And remember there’s no one way to do it all – no one’s done it your way yet, so it all comes down to you.”

Website | Instagram | Photography Dan Stanley Freeman

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