Home may be where the heart is, but sometimes the voice comes from somewhere else. Whether it's Mick Jagger's Mississippi drawl or Billy Joe Armstrong's cockney pretensions, pop singers adopt accents because that's the way they imagine one sings a particular style of music. It doesn't matter that Jagger still sounds like an English fop or that only a nerdy Californian would sing about the things Green Day's Armstrong sings about.
But Kasey Chambers is different. The American Southern accent that comes out of her mouth when she sings her country songs belies her Australian upbringing, but it's not the same as assuming a style. Chambers is as country as they come. It's just that the country isn't the U.S. She lived in the outback for the first 10 years of her life, singing Hank Williams songs with her family around the campfire. As a teenager, she was the lead vocalist in Dad's country and western band.
Reportedly devastated when her parents divorced, Chambers channeled her disappointments into her first solo album, "The Captain," which was a hit Down Under in 1999 and one of the most talked about records on the Nashville fringe when it was released in the States the following year. Steve Earle raved about her voice and Lucinda Williams, who said she couldn't stop crying the first time she heard the album, invited Chambers to open her last American tour.