Just Don’t Be a D**khead, And Other Profound Things I’ve Learnt isn’t the first memoir Kasey Chambers has published, but this time it’s personal.
Australia’s country queen says 2011 autobiography A Little Bird Told Me was more of an extended interview with music journalist and co-writer Jeff Apter.
This one, which began as a series of thoughts and notes pecked into her phone, delves far deeper into the chaotic inner workings of the 14-time ARIA Award-winning 48-year-old singer-songwriter and mother of three.
“I didn’t write it like a memoir, I didn’t intend it to be a memoir,” Chambers explains from the home on the NSW Central Coast she shares with 17-year-old son Arlo and 12-year-daughter Poet, her partner Brando and dog, Buddy.
Arlo and Poet also live with their dad, musician and producer Shane Nicholson, Chambers’ husband from 2005 to 2013.
Talon Hopper, 22 — her eldest son with former partner, actor Cori Hopper — lives in Perth, where he’s pursuing an acting career.
Just Don’t Be a D**khead features “conversations” between Chambers’ self-doubt and her straight-talking “Inner Foghorn”.
“It’s more just a bunch of stories,” she continues, “I don’t even know if it was meant to be a book. It just started out as a bunch of little notes in my phone to remind myself not to be a d**khead.
“For each little lesson, I would come up with an experience that would remind me why I learnt that (lesson) and believe in it now.
“It was a bit like writing a song.”
As she gathered more lessons and wrote down more experiences, Chambers decided she wanted to share them, “a bit like how I want to share a song” such as 1999 breakthrough single, The Captain.
“Part of my being is to share things,” she adds. “It reminds me of when I was a kid and I would put on performances for my mum and dad like I was on stage, and I’d never ever been on a stage.
“Something in me wanted to perform and wanted to share. I didn’t care that it was only my mum and dad . . . this book is an extension of that.”
Chambers would call it a “mongrel memoir” if Paul Kelly hadn’t already used the term for 2010’s How to Make Gravy.
That said, she adds with a cackle, it wouldn’t be the first time she’s copied from the nation’s greatest songwriter. “I’m going to steal from Paul, as I’ve done many times before.”
Perhaps, I offer, Just Don’t Be a D**khead could be dubbed a “feral memoir” in reference to her unusual upbringing on the Nullarbor, where her father Bill worked as a professional fox and rabbit hunter to put food on a camp table for Kasey, older brother Nash and their mum Diane.
The prologue of the book tells the tale of Bill doing a little “freelance” hunting on private property late one night with three-year-old Nash and Diane, who was then heavily pregnant with Kasey.
The clan strayed a little too close to a homestead resulting in a wild car chase through the desert with the aggrieved farmer firing shots at their old army jeep.
After retelling the story she heard often as a child to open Just Don’t Be a D**khead, Chambers wondered whether she was exaggerating only for Bill to inform his daughter that she’d actually toned it down. And it wasn’t his jeep, but a Rambler.
Chambers would make her first forays into a different kind of firing line on stage with her family’s Dead Ringer Band, where she found her voice and learnt a songbook spanning Hank Williams to the Bangles.
Given the book was written alongside her latest and 13th studio album Backbone, perhaps it could be considered the most expansive liner notes in the history of popular music.
“It’s one project with two parts for me,” says Chambers, who insisted on the last-minute minute inclusion of QR Codes, so fans can listen to songs inspired by the stories as they read the relevant chapter.
Or maybe it’s a self-help book, although most of the advice is directed back at the author, who shares homespun and hard-earned lessons on how not to be a dickhead in such a likeably conversational tone that you can’t but imagine the audiobook version being read by Dolly Parton.
“You’re stuck with me reading the audio,” Chambers laughs.
“My boobs aren’t as big but that’s OK for audio.”
What Just Don’t Be a D**khead isn’t is a tell-all autobiography packed with sordid tales and revealing personal stories. Readers hoping to find juicy details of why she split from former partners are going to be disappointed.
That said, Backbone does feature a riotous duet with Nicholson called The Divorce Song.
“Shane and I wrote that (song) together,” Chambers laughs. “It’s a real honest reflection on how we realised we do divorce better than we ever did marriage. We seriously had to get through the hard marriage to get to the good divorce.
We do divorce better than we ever did marriage.
“We live that. It’s not just a good line for the song. Don’t get me wrong, we have our moments — we’re a real couple of exes, that’s for sure.
“But overall, we put our own sh*t aside and we make our divorce work.”
While you can learn a whole lot about Chambers’ wonderfully messy life among the dirt roads and QR codes, perhaps it’s the singer-songwriter herself that gets the lion’s shares of the valuable takeaways.
One of the profound things the chart-topping star — five of her albums are ARIA numbers ones, including 2001’s Barricades and Brickwalls, which sold more than seven-times platinum — learnt while writing her non-memoir was that success doesn’t always equate to happiness. In fact, in her case, it rarely has.
“When I started having some real numbers on paper and some real accolades that backed up what people call success, I was at my absolute unhappiest in my life,” Chambers confesses.
“My most disconnected from myself was around that time.
“Whereas, when I first started and I was this little free spirit with idea what was going on, I was f****ng living the dream,” she laughs.
“Now, I feel like I’m living the dream again because I don’t give a s**t, I’m just going to do all the things that fill my cup.
“Lots of them are musical but lots of them aren’t. Some of them look shiny on Instagram but most of them are not.”
Another realisation was that while her unconventional childhood on the Nullarbor made her the roundest of pegs at high school and then in the music industry, it also gave her a unique outlook and valuable point-of-difference.
Chambers says she first realised that her upbringing was anything but normal when she went to high school in Millicent, South Australia after attending a tiny primary school in the desert.
“I went from a very free-spirited lifestyle into something that felt quite caged,” she laughs. “It’s confusing enough for anyone, let alone when you come off the Nullarbor.”
On reflection, Chambers says it was probably when she started to be questioned about her childhood in interviews to promote her music that she released that those “feral” years were out of the ordinary.
“When I first started out in music, a lot of why I felt out of place,” she says. “I felt like I thought quite differently to most people in the industry.
“I didn’t really have the same goals . . . it wasn’t like I had any real ambition or goal to be a successful musician. I think I just didn’t want to get a day job.
“In hindsight,” Chambers adds, “I think it was a big part of what made my songs stand out.”
Just Don’t Be a D**khead features plenty of musings on parenting, ranging from allowing her daughter Poet to go to the shops in a dirty t-shirt to encouraging eldest son Talon to be completely open with his mother.
The latter backfired when Talon burst into a dinner party to show-off his first pubic hair.
Chambers doesn’t expect anyone to take her advice. She hates those fake online mummy vloggers that you know never follow their own rules.
“We live in a world where you can read how to live a great life on Instagram, if you want,” she says. “You see all the people being perfect but none of it’s real.”
As a parent, the Not Pretty Enough singer says that if you’re going to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk.
Chambers says that the final chapter about ageing and “how women are scared about getting old” was written for Poet. Not for her to read, but more to make sure Chambers doesn’t denigrate her own appearance or self-worth in front of her daughter.
“It’s to remind me that I need to live that every day in front of her, because she won’t read the book,” she explains. “She will pick up on that, it doesn’t matter how much I say all this s**t.
“This book is (so I can try) to be the f***ing parent that I claim to be.”
During our chat, Arlo wanders past and says goodbye to his mum — he’s off to Avoca Beach for a surf.
“See ya, mate, love you,” Chambers calls to him, before adding: “That’s my 17-year-old, he just got his P-plates, so he’s going on his own to places — it’s so weird.”
Undeniably, Chambers did it her way. Regrets, she has a few, but mainly silly things such as getting an eyebrow ring from a dodgy piercing joint resulting in a trip to Dubbo hospital.
At one point, that Inner Foghorn had to talk her into publishing Just Don’t Be a D**khead.
“You’ve never written a book on your own before, so yep, no doubt, you’re gonna have some self-doubt,” her internal life coach spat back.
“Putting yourself out there is f***ing scary,” Chambers reflects, “especially in a world right now where everyone’s got a f***ing opinion about everything.”
Including the country queen herself, but at least her opinions are authentic and very entertaining.
“Who cares,” Chambers adds. “If five people connect with (the book) and get something out of it, that is enough.”
Kasey Chambers’ book Just Don’t Be a D**khead, And Other Profound Things I’ve Learnt and new album Backbone are both out now. Catch Chambers in conversation at the AH Bracks Library, Melville on November 16 and on tour around WA in May 2025.
