After an Incredible Brush With Dolly Parton, Fanny Lumsden Celebrates Her ‘Traditions’
Billboard ·
Lumsden talks Dolly Parton, Paul Kelly and her new album, the followup to her ARIA Award winner "Hey Dawn."
Just three years ago, Fanny Lumsden had an on-stage moment that’s near-impossible to beat. When her last LP, Hey Dawn , collected the prize for best country album at the 2023 ARIA Awards , it was the late Queen of Country, Dolly Parton , who announced the winner . “Dolly Parton said my name,” Lumsden reminisced in a post on Substack , published in July of this year. “Not only was this the high point of my career so far but maybe one of my life.”
A high point, yes, but Lumsden has many more highlights to come.
Today (Oct. 30), the Australian singer, songwriter and bandleader invites us in for Traditions, her fifth studio album. On it, Lumsden explores the value and meaning that can come from our traditions, and how they shape us. Some ought to be reconciled or resolved. Others, perhaps, consigned to landfill.
Across its 11 songs, Fanny acknowledges the traditions of her upbringing, whilst also “staying true to my autonomy, and my ambition, and being a woman, and being progressive in all of that space,” she tells Billboard over a Zoom from her property in Tooma, on the western side of the Snowy Mountains, NSW. “I’m trying to figure out which ones I celebrate and which ones I have to change to keep. And then which ones we just chuck out altogether.”
Lumsden, like so many of us, had a spring cleaning with her family traditions. And like a growing number of descendants of white settlers, a reckoning with Australia’s modern history and an awareness of its flaws. “I decided they didn’t quite fit me properly, so I threw them all out,” she recounts. “And then I was like, oh no, that’s not how that works. You can change things, you can celebrate a little bit of it.”
Produced by Steven Schram (Crowded House, The Cat Empire, Paul Kelly), Traditions was recorded live over nine days with her band, The Daddies (also known as the Prawn Stars).
“I didn’t go in with a clear understanding of exactly what this theme was, although I did have the world and the vision. The colors and the visual. I knew I wanted to celebrate that world in some way,” she explains. It wasn’t until after the album was completed that Lumsden realized she could “see it through all the songs.”
Those songs tell a personal story, unflinching. Traditions is home to the anthemic title track, the singles “Difficult Woman,” “Mother’s Eyes,” and “By The River” a collaboration with Paul Kelly , the legendary songsmith who Lumsden has shared the stage with, many times.
Family is at its heart. An independent artist, Lumsden is self-managed with her husband Dan Freeman, who wears multiple hats as bandmate (bass player) and label manager for their imprint, Red Dirt Road Records.
“My family culture I want to take forward, and I can just sit uncomfortably with some of the others. It’s never going to be easy to explain,” she says. You just have to “embrace the mess.”
At this point, Kelly, too, is like family. While on a tour stop in Dublin in 2025, their last in a 10-week trek across Europe and the British Isles, Lumsden lifted her book ban (she’s an obsessive reader, but they’re too heavy to lug around on a trek) and visited the Winding Stair, one of the city’s oldest independent bookshops. Her stash included a gift for Kelly, a book by Pádraig Ó Tuama. What she didn’t know was that Kelly had bought her a gift, a book by the same poet. “It wasn’t even at the front of the shop,” she says with a laugh.
Soon after, Fanny was opening for Kelly on his arena tour of Australia, alongside Lucinda Williams.
Kelly, she remarks, is “a quiet observer of life. I’ve just never seen anybody quite like him in a way that he’s so interested. Even when he’s busy and overwhelmed, he’ll still sit there and actively listen, which was incredible. And then he quietly contemplates while I would yap in the van.”
Fanny will launch the new album Saturday, Oct. 31 with an outdoor concert at Tooma Rec Grounds, a field that is now part of a tradition. With her 2020 album Fallow , Fanny, a volunteer firefighter, hosted a launch party in the same spot. All proceeds were donated to locals affected by the bushfires that had razed the area, on multiple occasions. Two days after that show, the pandemic made its unwelcome appearance. Good times from the bad.
Fallow won the first of Fanny’s two ARIA Awards, also in the best country category. Her collection includes ten Country Music Association of Australia (CMAA) and three AIR Awards, and she has secured spots on some of the most prestigious stages on earth, including a debut set at Glastonbury Festival in 2023.
Fanny’s east-coast tour in support of Traditions continues Friday, Nov. 6 with a date at Barwon Club in Geelong, VIC, and runs through Sunday, Nov. 29 at The Stag & Hunter in Newcastle, NSW.
Conversation turns to Parton, who sadly left us Aug. 25, at the age of 80. “I feel equally in awe of the fact that I lived at the same time as Dolly Parton, but now she’s gone and now we have to live without Dolly Parton. So I think that that is like equally as incredible,” Fanny remarks. “She really was quite a force of nature in every sense of the word. And the way that she just really affected so many people in a way that they feel like they were the only one. But yeah, to have her have say my name in this lifetime, look, that’s almost enough, isn’t it?”