KASEY Chambers is bubbling with enthusiasm. She's "keen as", as she likes to say.
After what's been a fairly torrid and frustrating two years due to COVID-19, there's blue skies ahead for Australia's queen of alt-country. A massive 2022 is on the horizon.
Firstly there's a headline show at the Tamworth Country Music Festival in January, followed by a hectic April with appearances at Wildflower (April 2) and Sunset Sounds (April 23) music festivals at Roche Estate in Pokolbin and sandwiched in between is Bluesfest (April 15-18).
Then Chambers hits the road with "two of her favourite people in the industry", Queensland folk-pop duo Busby Marou, for a tour that visits Newcastle's Civic Theatre on June 15.
"It's a really nice position to be in, certainly after the last two years of it generally being pretty tough for all of us, particularly in the gig world," Chambers says.
"We had a few gigs go through earlier this year and then others got cancelled. So even if we had a few gigs come through at different times it was a pretty nerve-racking time to know if anything was actually gonna end up happening."
Chambers has hardly lay idle in lockdown. She's spent much of this year building her Rabbit Hole Studio and Music Retreat on her 2.5-acre bushland property on the Central Coast.
A competition was recently held to give young unsigned artists an opportunity to have an EP recorded at Rabbit Hole and produced by Chambers and collaborator Brandon Dodd.
On Sunday the music retreat component of Rabbit Hole opened for the first songwriting day camp hosted by Chambers. Several camps are sold out before Christmas and more are planned for 2022.
I tried not to buy too much into the bullshit, to be honest. That's been my main thing.
Kasey Chambers
The day camps allow budding musicians to receive intimate knowledge from Chambers about navigating the music industry. They also get an insight into how the ARIA Hall of Fame inductee wrote songs like The Captain, Not Pretty Enough, Pony and Barricades and Brickwalls.
"This way I get to create a whole special day that's based around general music and creative advice, but then we'll specifically spend time on songwriting," Chambers says.
"We'll sit around the campfire and jam and everyone joins in. We'll do a walk through of the studio to show people how to record a song, so there's a little bit of everything.
"My other favourite hobby outside of music is cooking, so I get to do all the cooking and catering for the day, which I love."
Chambers says opportunities like the day camps are needed now more than ever due to the pandemic. The 45-year-old mother-of-three has seen first hand how difficult the past two years have been for teenagers and young adults through her son Talon, 19.
"My eldest son finished year 12 last year and was all ready to go out and start discovering who he is outside of school and outside of his parents and a lot of it has been stuck at home for this last year," she says.
"It's tough, in general, for that age group, but particularly in music.
"Why I started that competition is it's a really tough time to be launching a career and to get music out there when you can't tour and you can't showcase new songs and have life experience so you can write songs."
Another important lesson Chambers wants to teach through her camps is the importance of authenticity.
It's something Chambers has possessed in spades since she announced herself in 1999 with the release of iconic debut The Captain, which won an ARIA for country album of the year.
At the time the alternative-looking Chambers stood out in the conservative Australian country scene, traditionally dominated by male artists like Slim Dusty, John Williamson and Lee Kernaghan.
Two years later Chambers' second album Barricades and Brickwalls, led by the No.1 single Not Pretty Enough, crossed over into the mainstream and won three ARIAs and became the highest-selling Australian album of 2002.
More No.1 albums followed with Wayward Angel (2004), Carnival (2006), Rattlin' Bones with ex-husband Shane Nicholson (2008) and Dragonfly (2017).
Throughout the success, Chambers refused to be molded by the male-dominated music industry into a typical country-pop artist.
"I didn't set out to do that," she says. "I'd love to say I had this really clear plan of what I wanted to do and I smashed it, but it wasn't anything like that. I was just doing my thing.
"It wasn't only that I was a woman, it was also I was a female playing country music, which was a kind of like a double whammy.
"It was a little unexpected at the time, but I also didn't know a lot of that at the time, I just played music and did my thing and tried to be as true to myself as I could be.
"I tried not to bend what I was doing or change what I was doing to please anyone. I just did my thing and I stayed strong to what meant something to me.
"I tried not to buy too much into the bullshit, to be honest. That's been my main thing."
Roche Estate hosts Wildflower on April 2 and Sunset Sounds on April 23.
