FANNY LUMSDEN
Announces New Album
‘Fallow’
Out March 13
+New Track ‘These Days‘ Out Now
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On March 13, Cooking Vinyl Australia will release Fanny Lumsden‘s new album, Fallow, an indelible collection of storytelling that features some of her most intimate songwriting to date.
Pre-orders for Fallow are available HERE
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“I wrote this album in amongst a season of change,” says Fanny Lumsden of Fallow, her third full-length record. “It was a time of re-evaluation.”
For an artist who’s made her name writing songs packed with clever observations and witty asides, often about the quirks of small-town Australian life, Fallow represents something of a lyrical shift for Lumsden. Her eye for detail is as sharp as ever, but this time the subject matter is more personal.
Over the past few years the singer-songwriter has experienced some of life’s greatest joys, nowhere more so than in the birth of her son. As she was pregnant, however, her husband and bandmate, Dan Stanley Freeman, lost his mother to cancer. As Lumsden sings in This Too Shall Pass, “Some of this is magic/and some of this is pain.”
“With this album I was really trying to just write what I felt, rather than trying to be clever about observations,” she says. “I felt like I learned to see not just the funny, witty stuff anymore. I want to say these things and sing these things because that’s what I’m feeling right now. I’m in this space, so why not celebrate it?”
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Another player in Lumsden’s approach was the environment in which Fallow was created, namely the property where she lives on the western side of the Snowy Mountains. It was there that Lumsden spent last summer and early autumn writing the majority of the songs, the setting a constant reminder that even in dark times there is beauty all around. Save for some drum tracking at Endomusia Studios in in the Blue Mountains and a few overdubs in Sydney at Love HZ Studios, the majority of the album was recorded with producer Matt Fell in a stone hut a few hundred metres from her home. The location called for some resourcefulness.
“We used this bathroom that’s built out of a cast iron tank as an echo chamber,” laughs Lumsden. “There were all these cool elements that we would never use if we were in a studio. I really wanted to take Matt out of Sydney so he could experience where I’d written the songs, or what the songs were about, in this mountain environment in this beautiful valley. I wanted that to come out in the music, and I feel like it does.”
Lumsden takes the listener on a journey that reflects the joy, grief, hope, sadness, loss and love of the human experience. There is warmth in the shape of These Days, a song that lives in that post-Christmas, pre-New Year’s haze where “the normal rules of time and space don’t apply/Where you can drink at 10am”. There is longing and pain in Wishing, a beautiful song Lumsden wrote in the voice of her husband that addresses the passing of his mother. There is deep reflection in Grown Ups, a song which acknowledges that moment when you realise your parents are growing older and you’re now “the adult”. And there is storytelling that’s rich in detail throughout, from the Colorbond fences and defensive lawn edges of Tidy Town to the glow in the dark stars on the wall in Black And White.
One of the reasons Lumsden chose to name the album after the song Fallow is because “I love the word, I love how it sounds”. On a deeper level, it reflects the sense of hope that filters through the LP. “Fallow means tilled earth ready for planting, ready for sowing, and I like that it represents possibility and new beginnings, but with a chance of failure. I wanted this album to be hopeful. We play so much in regional areas, and I’m from the bush, and with all the drought and hardship that’s going on I didn’t want to dwell on that anymore. I wanted to create something with a bit of hope.”
Musically the album reflects the myriad moods and emotions of its lyrics. From the joyous, horn-laden stomp of “Dig” to the double-time march of “Tidy Town”; from the soothing, harmony-laden “This Too Shall Pass” to the gorgeous ballad “Black And White” with its hymnal backing vocals, Fallow is the work of an artist following her muse without limitations.
“We went where each song took us,” she says. “There was a little bit more freedom to push it in whatever direction it needed to go.”
Over the course of Lumsden’s acclaimed career she’s maintained a fiercely independent approach, releasing her music through her own label, Red Dirt Road Records. Her second album, 2017’s Real Class Act, debuted at Number 1 on the ARIA Country Charts. It also won ‘Independent Country Album of the Year’ at the AIR Awards and was nominated for an ARIA, as was her debut album, 2015’s Small Town Big Shot. A winner of ‘New Talent of the Year’ at the Golden Guitar Awards and ‘New Artist of the Year’ at the Country Music Channel Awards, Lumsden has forged a deep connection with music fans throughout Australia, thanks in part to her self-produced Country Halls tours, in which she’s clocked up more than 250,000 kilometres taking her show throughout rural Australia. For the release of Fallow she’s proudly teamed up with Cooking Vinyl Australia, while still remaining as hands-on as ever.
“I want to be right in touch with everything that’s going on,” she says. It’s just another evolution for Lumsden, an artist who has come of age both in her personal and artistic life. You can hear that journey in Fallow. “It’s a very personal album this one,” she nods. “This is me. Here I am.”
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FALLOW
TRACKLIST
1. Mountain Song
2. This Too Shall Pass
3. Peed in the Pool
4. Grown Ups
5. Fierce
6. Tidy Town
7. Fallow ft. Thomas Lumsden
8. Wishing
9. These Days
10. Dig
11. Black and White
12. Mountain Song Reprise
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AMNPLIFY – SB
