By JJT (written for ThinkChristian.net)

On the Campfire album and tour, Kasey Chambers provides a gathering place for the weary and burdened.

With her latest release, Campfire, Kasey Chambers draws a tight circle around the music, landscape, people, and stories that have shaped her and her work most profoundly. In doing so she invites all those who may feel lost in a cold, cultural wasteland of acidic art and warring tribes to gather and warm themselves.

When Chambers first appeared on the music scene back in the late 1990s, it was after years of seasoning in the backwoods of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain. She and her brother spent their childhood living out of a car as their father hunted foxes and lived off the land. For them, the campfire was no special occasion. It was a nightly affair, the heat on which they cooked their meals and the light around which they gathered. On her recent Campfire Tour, which I was fortunate to see on its final night at Nashville’s 3rd and Lindsley club, Chambers shared stories and photos from this amazing time in her life. In the middle of the stage a small pile of boards was stacked around an electric light. “Sorry about the lame campfire,” she teased at one point. “It’s the only fire Qantas would allow us to bring. I promise you the real thing was much bigger!”

Before she had a television or a computer or any real sense of what was going on in the rest of the world, Chambers had music. Her family listened to cassettes of the artists their father liked, which included Gram Parsons, Johnny Cash, Emmylou Harris, and Merle Haggard. They sat around the fire every night and sang songs. This album and tour was a longtime dream of hers. With her bandmates, The Fireside Disciples, sitting alongside her armed only with acoustic instruments, they replicated what it would have sounded like to sit around one of those fires and share songs. The old family photos projected onto a large screen behind them were the extent of the special effects. The evening was about intimacy, candor, and transparency.

Her set included several songs from the new album, but generously dipped into her significant catalog as well. She gushed about her excitement to be playing at 3rd and Lindsley, the place where she originally met her hero and musical influence, Lucinda Williams, some 20 years earlier. Her wide smile rarely left her face the whole night, even during the times she was wiping away tears. The unplugged treatment lacked for nothing. Chambers’ voice has grown only more powerful over the years, as has her songcraft.

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