1999: The Captain, Kasey Chambers

By Owen Elphick

It is late at night. The house is perfectly quiet. The silent bookcases watch as my dad carries me from my crib in the back room of our little house, where I cannot get to sleep, to the television room where a wooden cabinet sits against the wall.

My dad opens the blue double doors, and green light pierces through the darkness as he fiddles with the knobs and buttons on a rectangular box. My eyes adjust, and I make out symbols flashing across a thin display screen as my dad feeds a silver disk to the black tongue that emerges from the box. The disk disappears inside, and my dad stands, with me still cradled in his arms, as a voice cuts through the silence.

Well I never lived through the Great Depression—

And then the bass and guitars and drums slam in, elevating her voice even further, wrapping around my ears as my dad turns me in small circles around the room, rocking in time with the song, which is so instantly familiar.

—but sometimes I feel as though I did / And I don’t have answers for every single question / But that’s okay ‘cause I’m just a kid...

Kasey Chambers’ debut album The Captain was released in her native Australia in 1999, the year after I was born. It wouldn’t come out in the US until just over a year later, which means that I must’ve been two, three at the oldest, by the time my dad discovered it.

The thing you need to understand about my dad is that when my mom was pregnant with me, and the doctors told them that playing music for me in the womb would be good for my development, he put on Tom Waits and spoke to me through walls of skin. Where other parents might turn to soft, twinkly lullabies to put their kids to sleep, on nights when my cries echo through the house and keep him and my mom awake, he cranks the volume up on his stereo and plays Robert Earl Keene, Greg Brown, Dar Williams while he dances with me across the creaking wooden floors. He plays me his music, the music he wants to hear.

What will stay with me from this prehistoric time, when memory is just beginning to form, are the songs of a handful of female singer-songwriters coming into their own in the late nineties and early 2000s: Chris Webster; Lucy Kaplansky; and, most of all, Kasey Chambers.

It is in listening to The Captain at a young age that I first begin to notice and appreciate the order of songs on an album, to develop a sense of structure. I am already beginning to distinguish between harder, up-tempo songs and softer, slower ones, and to observe the way the tracklist alternates between them. I love the harder songs most, drum-heavy and laden with feeling—perhaps because Dad dances harder with me during them; perhaps because, like him, I am inclined towards percussion, towards rocking out.

Whatever the reason, it is this love that keeps me awake through the light strumming and fingerpicking of “This Flower,” waiting for the electric guitars of “You Got the Car,” why I tolerate the slow tread of “These Pines,” in anticipation of the infectious, explosive drum-clap that kicks off “Don’t Talk Back.” Only by “Southern Kind of Life” does sleep begin to take me properly, the rest of the album floating in and out of my awareness in blurred fragments.

I curl into my dad, into the music’s warm embrace.

***

It is 2005, and my dad’s birthday. The August sun beats down on the Newport Folk Festival, and my family and I weave through a sea of people, past small tents selling beads and scarves and other enchanted objects, through smoke of unknown provenances. This is not our first time coming here, and I recognize the landscape around me as I might my grandparents’ house—somewhere familiar, but only visited on occasion.

I am seven years old, and still know so little. In a year where Arlo Guthrie, Emmylou Harris, Bright Eyes, Patty Griffin, Old Crow Medicine Show, and the Pixies (playing their first- ever acoustic set) are performing, only two names really register for me: Elvis Costello—and only because I had been given to understand that Elvis was dead, and find myself very confused to hear he is performing—and, of course, Kasey Chambers.

My dad and I make our way down to the front of the crowd to catch Kasey’s set. Three years earlier, he carried me on his shoulders along the length of the stage while The Waifs performed. Now we are back for an artist I actually know, whose songs I recognize.

Kasey comes out in a long black skirt and a shirt bearing a skull and crossbones, a bandana holding back her dark hair. (And it is perhaps not a coincidence that in the years to come I will go through a very determined pirate phase.) She starts the set gripping the microphone, the band playing behind her. But soon, she slings an acoustic guitar across her chest, which will hang from her shoulder like an extra limb, an extension of her body, for the rest of the performance. (And it is perhaps not a coincidence that in less than a year I will ask for lessons, try to fit my fingers across a fretboard myself, ask my teacher to show me how to play “Cry Like a Baby” or “Don’t Talk Back,” songs I am years away from being able to attempt.)

At this point, Kasey has put out two albums since The Captain—2001’s Barricades & Brickwalls, her most commercially successful record, and 2004’s Wayward Angel—so not all of the songs she plays are ones I know intimately. It doesn’t matter—there is a thrill that comes from watching my dad point at the stage, hearing the voice that lulled me to sleep so many nights emanate from the flesh-and-blood figure in the pirate shirt.

And then there comes a point, partway into the set, when Kasey leans into the microphone, and keens to the open air, a cappella, the band silent behind her: We’re all gonna die someday, Lord, we’re all gonna die someday...

I recognize it instantly—and panic starts to grip at my chest.

On the recorded version of “We’re All Gonna Die Someday,” the closing song on The Captain, the track begins with Kasey speaking. Are we on? she asks. Then you hear a guitar strum, and then, We’re recording now? This gives the song a live feel—you picture Kasey and the band gathered in the same room together, about to burst into song.

But this is not a CD. Kasey and the band are right there, and Kasey is singing, Well, Mama’s on pills, Daddy’s over the hill, / but we’re all gonna die someday.

As the band kicks into gear, I suddenly need to be as far away from the stage as possible.

At age seven, I do not know what death anxiety is. I’m not fully aware of all the ways I have encountered the realities of loss and impermanence, or what they have done to me.

What I do know is that I have moved from the crib in the back room to a mattress in the next room over, where, each night, I stare into the darkness, and wonder what it will be like when I am dead. I try to picture a heaven that will take me, a palace of light, a place that I will go when I am no longer here. But all I come back to is the blank, shifting space behind my eyelids, and the fear that death will be like that, a void that I stare into forever. Worse, that I will not even know I am gone—I will not even know what I have lost, that I have been lost.

During the daytime, it is hard for me to be in a different room from my parents for too long. If I cannot see them, the fear that I will never see them again, that they have disappeared from me forever, starts to envelop me. More than once I have run through and around the entirety of our small house, unable to locate them, calling, frantic, before finding them and bursting into tears of relief. During the week, I go to school and try not to break down when they leave, try to tell myself they will be back. But everything feels so tenuous, so beyond my control.

Now, whenever we listen to The Captain, my parents skip the last track—they just know to. It doesn’t hurt that, in addition to having the potential to trigger my anxiety, “We’re All Gonna Die Someday” is also the most explicit song on the album. All of my friends are stoned, Lord, all of my friends are stoned / Janey got stoned ‘cause she couldn’t get boned / But we’re all gonna die someday, Kasey sings on the CD, and now on the stage in real life, and unlike with the CD, I cannot hit rewind or skip, and it will be years before I can understand these lines, or much more than that refrain, that refrain roaring through my head, the truth I spend most of my time trying to ignore, just so that I can function, and I need to get away from it, I need to leave—

The irony is that, far from being dismal, the tone of “We’re All Gonna Die Someday,” is one of the most optimistic of any song on The Captain. In the face of mortality, Kasey does not devolve into existential dread, but instead produces a jaunty and upbeat tune, drawing from her country roots, with accents of dobro guitar, and fiddle solos between verses. The song does not deny loss, or suffering (It hurts down here on earth, Lord, it hurts down here on earth), but it takes a kind of comfort in the knowledge of death, in the temporary nature of that suffering.

As a child, this stance on death is so thoroughly at odds with my own that I can’t begin to wrap my head around it. There is something debased about it, offensive to my sensibilities, to hear my worst fear sung aloud like this, as if it is a joke, or something worth celebrating.

Now my father and I are on the outskirts of the field, the music echoing in the distance. I stare down at the grass. I do not know how to put what I am feeling into words, how to make sense of the terror in my body. And my dad doesn’t ask me to explain.

He just stands there with me, waits until I am calm again.

***

It is 2013, and I am fifteen, in the throes of my first true breakup. Far from being new to heartbreak, I am by now well-acquainted with it, and I know it is a kind of death. Not only that there is grief to be wrestled with when a relationship is ending, or failing, but that heartbreak can make you long for the kind of absence of feeling that death promises. Just over a year ago, the same void that terrified me as a child started to beckon, and while I still fear death too much to have ever seriously wished for it, I now know why someone might not want to be alive.

None of this prepares me for being left. The thing that I couldn’t have possibly anticipated is not the pain, which is intense and all-consuming, but my inability to do anything about it. For the first time in my life, I am forced to reckon, fully, with the fact that I have no control over my emotions, nor the emotions of others. I must simply accept them, survive them.

This is easier said than done. I now recognize more intimately the way Kasey sings Can’t get you out of my head in the final verse of “You Got the Car,” the ache in her voice, the haunted quality of it, the sense of powerlessness. And I understand what it means when, in the song’s climax, Kasey and her brother Nash (who produced the album) belt, I’LL BREAK MY OWN HEART INSTEAD. There is an appeal in having some control over your own suffering.

Up in my bedroom, I blast the song through the tiny speakers of my iLove. In many ways, I am well behind my peers when it comes to music consumption and discovery, still carrying around my green fifth-generation iPod Nano, with the little camera in the back and 7.3 gigabytes of storage space on it. The Captain was one of the first albums I loaded onto it from our family computer, and the twelve-song tracklist fits perfectly within the confines of the two-inch screen.

There is music you love, the music that changes your life. And then there is music that is fused to your consciousness, inextricable from you. It would be wrong to say that The Captain changed my life, in that I do not remember a time in my life when The Captain was not part of it. Listening to it, I find I know the album like some people know scripture—and, like most children in Sunday school, I don’t think I fully understood the text I was being indoctrinated in.

The first thing I feel when I put The Captain on can best be described as a rush of familiarity, of safety. I feel it tickle around the edges of my brain, around memories I don’t even have proper access to, and it is hard to listen without getting emotional.

Because what I did not and could not recognize as a young child is that, beneath all my positive associations with it, The Captain is a crushingly sad album. Kasey taps into a vein of deep, visceral heartbreak that I now seem to hear all over the album. Part of it is her voice, which seems built for singing about sadness—the edge to it, its slightly nasal quality, the way it leaps and wavers around the pulse of pain at the heart of a song. On the cover of the album, in a photo taken at a slight angle, Kasey sits on a sidewalk, dressed in all black, eyeshadow-rimmed eyes looking out from between her hands, which are tangled in her dark hair. It is a look that screams emo, that says, This is someone who knows how to get sad. And for someone so often pegged as merely a country artist, Kasey navigates a range of styles, from rock to folk to the blues.

In particular, I find myself rediscovering songs on the back half of the record, ones I fell asleep before or during as a baby. Even the songs that are up-tempo and light in tone, like “The Hard Way,” reveal themselves, on a lyrical level, to be about some lost love (But one thing that I know / This time I wouldn’t make you go / I’d have you back I wouldn’t lose you again). The second verse of “Last Hard Bible”—at surface level, a song about poverty, and making ends meet in hard times—begins, I spent my cash / On a brand new heartache. And in the refrain, Kasey sings, Money can buy me a hell of a lot / But it sure won’t buy me love...

This proclivity towards exploring the many contours of sadness eventually led Kasey to her hit single “Not Pretty Enough,” which remains her most popular song—a song written, ironically, in response to commercial radio’s reluctance to play her music. Am I not pretty enough? the song begins. Is my heart too broken? / Do I cry too much? / Am I too outspoken?

Like all heartbroken people, Kasey seems obsessed with what she cannot have, and continues returning to broken relationships over and over, longing for a different outcome, to make right the mistakes made. On “Don’t Go,” the barest and most devastating song on the album, acoustic guitar is the only instrumentation under Kasey’s voice, which is timid, almost tremulous, until the chorus, when it breaks open with desperation, pleading, So before you disappear again / Just think of what you’re feeling and / Don’t go...

When the girl I have loved for the past five years tells me that she does not love me back—that, indeed, she never did—I cannot accept it. I don’t know how to make sense of the last two years of kisses and whispers and sunlit days with her, can’t look back on those times thinking that she didn’t feel the same way I did. And I don’t know what has gone wrong, what has changed, what I can do to make her take back what she has said and love me again. There’s more to what you’re telling me / I’m not buying what you’re selling me / Don’t go...

No song on The Captain is more haunting—or has proved more enduring for Kasey— than the title track. Well I don’t have as many friends because / I’m not as pretty as I was, she sings, foreshadowing “Not Pretty Enough,” over a mournful electric guitar. I’ve kicked myself at times because I’ve lied, and I shiver with recognition. I never had many friends, and the ones I did have broke my heart, as surely as my now-ex did. For years, when sadness clawed at my insides, I tried to push it down, to hide my tears and feelings from the other boys who would tease me for them. I was taught by the world that if I showed it my pain, it would hurt me more; and so, late at night, in the dark of my bedroom, I hurt myself for feeling too much. And when my parents, who always made space for my sensitivity, who never admonished me for it, asked if I was okay, I lied, too ashamed of my sorrow, and kicked myself even more for it.

For a long time, I also lied about my relationship with my ex-girlfriend, and asked her to keep it a secret. Even as we went to movies together and held hands and traded I love you in private, our relationship was something else I hid, not only because I feared mockery, but because ultimately, I was scared it would make me—and reveal me as—vulnerable. That once my love became known to the world, the world would find a way to ruin it; that once it became public, official, it would become, like all things, finite. And now, nine months after officially starting to “date”, in full view of everyone, I have lost one of the only real friends I have known, one of the only parts of my life that kept me from throwing myself into a deeper darkness.

“The Captain” is still mysterious to me, in many ways, but I think it is mainly about being so consumed by your love for another that, for better or worse, you disappear in the process. You be the Captain / And I’ll be no-one / And you can carry me away if you want to, the chorus goes, and I find myself able to harmonize along with a backing vocalist whose name I have never known. (A note beside the lyrics in the liner notes reads “if the angels could sing they would sound like julie miller,” and it is true.) There is something dangerous about giving so much power to another person, to imagining them into a role that is both more and less than they really are, and becoming subsumed by the feelings you hold for that version of them.

But there is also something special, and necessary, and unavoidable, about giving in to love, and all the hurt that comes with it. The gift of this breakup—and of Kasey’s music—is that I start to accept my feelings for what they are, and in turn, to approach the feelings of others with more generosity. I start to realize that my sadness is not indicative of some deeper failure within myself, nor a romantic indication of my depth, and that shame will only destroy me faster. And when Kasey sings, I don’t hide my pain to save my reputation... I still cry just like a baby on the opening track, there is a kind of permission being given that I could never have grasped when I was just a baby myself. I start trying to love myself, to let my tears fall.

***

It is 2016, and my parents, brother, and I have packed up the car so that they can drive me to Boston for my first semester of college. Change has never been easy for me, and the idea of moving from my middle-of-nowhere hometown in Connecticut to a big city is intimidating. As we speed down I-84, my parents tell me to choose the music, and I ask them to play The Captain.

At this point, I have decided that it is not simply heartbreak that Kasey is wrestling with on the album, but, in a larger sense, heartache—a larger wistfulness or longing for what one no longer has, or cannot keep. Sometimes it is a place—in “Southern Kind of Life,” Kasey, who grew up traveling around the Nullarbor Plain with her family, details her upbringing in southern Australia. The south was like the whole world to me, she croons at one point; and, at another, I used to think the north was the end / Cos people go there and they don’t come back again.

Evident throughout the song is a sense of displacement, the distance that Kasey now feels from the place she grew up. I didn’t grow up living the kind of life Kasey describes, and yet I already identify with the bittersweet affection for a place and the past it is linked to, as I speed farther and farther away from what has been, up until now, the only home I have ever known. It wasn’t easy to stay / But it was harder to leave, Kasey sings.

Despite this nostalgia for home, the version of herself that Kasey presents isn’t someone who stays put in one place—a byproduct, perhaps, of touring so much as a young person. More than any other kind of imagery, The Captain brims with mentions of cars and driving. In “You Got the Car,” the car takes on a kind of metaphoric resonance as the site of a recent heartbreak.

And if there is one love affair Kasey has that doesn’t end in heartbreak, it is with the open road. Well the hurt won’t leave with the sight of white line / But it eases up my pain for a while, she sings on “Don’t Talk Back,” referring to the kind of white lines that whip by my window now on the highway. Wanderlust pervades the album, sometimes as a means to escape sadness, but also as a source of joy, a way of creating purpose for oneself. Miles takes time but the time is mine / And always moving suits me fine. On the precipice of my life as I have known it, and this next, drastically new chapter, I sing along to the song with my full chest: And after all that I’ve done / I’m not half what I hoped that I’d become / There’s still a long way to go.

The song on The Captain that I have become most smitten with, at this stage of my life, is “Mr. Baylis.” In it, Kasey speaks from the inside of a car to its driver, the titular Mr. Baylis. Put it into gear, we’ve got a long way to go, she sings. You can play your Dylan / when we have to take it slow. What I love most about the song is the euphoric nature of it, the intense and unbridled affection it carries for its subject. It is a love song, surely, but not a love that relies on romance—the formal “Mr.” creates too much distance for that—but rather companionship, the kind of love that emerges from a shared journey. In its liner notes, the song is dedicated to a Bill Baylis, and at the bottom of the lyrics is a note: “thanks bill for driving me across africa.”

When I was first looking at colleges, and going to tour them, my dad was the one who drove me all over the Northeast, from New York to Massachusetts to New Hampshire, even as far as Ohio and Pennsylvania, while I looked for a place to make good on the opportunities he and my mom had afforded me. Indecisive at the best of times, and wary of such a massive choice,

I was perhaps too caught up in my uncertainties about the future to appreciate the sacrifice my dad made in driving me—the work he had to miss, the strain it put on him physically.

But it was on these many-hours-long drives that I started to realize all the things I don’t know about my dad. He doesn’t show emotion easily—or perhaps not always in the ways I wish he would—and this means that I don’t always know how to read him, or how to show him what I am feeling. I began to realize he lived a whole life before me, full of his own losses and struggles, which I didn’t know how to ask about, but which I was sure would unlock him for me, help me make sense of this person in the driver’s seat who I once only saw as a parent.

Our common ground, the space I feel most sure talking to him, has always been art— books, TV shows, theater, podcasts, movies, music. On our drives, we listened to songs on my dad’s phone, plugged into the aux, and then I went and listened to his favorite bands as if searching for answers, as if they could give me a closeness to him I could not ask for directly.

Now, in the car, speeding down the highway en route to the school I finally chose, my dad sits in the backseat with me, and takes a video of me singing along to “Mr. Baylis”—his favorite song on The Captain. The song reaches its final chorus, everything dropping out except for a guitar and Kasey’s voice as she sings the refrain: You just drive Mr. Baylis / Don’t you worry bout the weather / I asked the rain to hold off / And so far it looks just fine.

And then, my favorite part—what I call the breakdown, the drums and the rest of the instrumentation slamming in at half-tempo, completely transforming the pulse of the song, as Kasey sings, We’re only halfway through our journey / But I think we’re gonna make it / And you can sleep when darkness comes around / Cos this road’s the only thing that holds you down.

I look at the camera, at my dad, and we grin at each other, the road humming beneath us.

***

It is 2017, and I am home for the summer from my freshman year of college. It is early July, and my family and I drive across the state to the Infinity Music Hall in Norfolk, where we have tickets to see Kasey Chambers perform. She is on tour in the States to promote her new project, Dragonfly—her first after surgery on her vocal cords, as well as her first double album, featuring big names like Ed Sheeran and Keith Urban.

It's been more than a decade since I last saw Kasey perform live. I am still terrified of death, but I don’t skip the last track on The Captain anymore. Through years of therapy, through discovering and chasing my own passion for music and performing, and simply through the passage of time, I have found ways to cope with knowing that we will not be here forever. By the same token, I no longer long for the void. I can bear not being able to see my parents for extended periods of time—which is good, because now I live over 80 miles from them.

We are up in the balcony, looking down on the stage when Kasey, dressed in a T-shirt and flowing skirt, and her band—four men, one in a battered cowboy hat—appear. They take up their instruments and burst into “Wheelbarrow,” from Kasey’s previous album, Bittersweet.

Kasey’s voice is as fierce and cutting as ever, and it is thrilling—and a little unnerving— to see her in person again: a woman old enough to be my parents when they first started playing me her music. Her once-dark hair has been streaked blond with highlights, and piercings glisten from her face, more lined here, in the present, than it is on The Captain’s cover. I watch the woman who soundtracked my sleepless nights sing in front of a wall pinpricked with light, the crescent moon that makes up the Infinity Music Hall’s logo hanging behind her. I take videos of the performance and post them on my Snapchat story with overly enthusiastic captions, scribble down the set list on a sheet of notebook paper, trying to preserve this night. I sketch a five- pointed star in the corner of the page, add a tail to it.

The third song they play, “This Flower,” is also the third song on The Captain and by now I have realized that the man in the cowboy hat, with the grey beard and electric guitar, is Kasey’s father, Bill Chambers. When she was eleven, Kasey began playing with her parents, Bill and Diane, and her brother Nash in the Dead Ringer Band—so named because the children so resembled their parents. (I’ve seen pictures of my mother / She looked exactly like me, Kasey sings on “Cry Like a Baby,” and a photo in the liner notes confirms it.) Thirty years later, Kasey is still playing shows with her dad, still producing albums with her brother. Bill played on The Captain, which was recorded on Norfolk Island in the summer of 1998, and nineteen years later (my full lifetime thus far), he plays the dobro on “This Flower” as he did back then.

“This Flower” (which is dedicated “to sue” in the album liner notes) is a song of gratitude, presumably directed towards a close friend. Well this flower is my soul / But it’s not half of what I owe, Kasey sings, her voice echoing around the hall. I should give you every rose that ever grew. As a child, I enjoyed “This Flower,” but it didn’t hit for me the way other songs did.

But now, with a school year’s distance from home under my belt, with Kasey and her dad playing beneath me, I find myself glancing towards my dad, towards both of my parents, and feeling my heart swell. I have everything I need because of you.

Kasey closes her set with “The Captain.” Did I forget to thank you, she sings, for the ride I hadn’t tried / I tend to run away and hide. The whole theater sings along with her. And as the song comes to a close, again, I glance to my parents, whisper, I owe one / To you.

This alone would be enough. But a night truly can contain more magic than one deserves, and we clap and whoop and holler loud and long enough that the band returns to the stage for an encore. For the final song of the night, “Barricades and Brickwalls,” Kasey brings out her son, ten-year-old Arlo, to play the cajon. “I will take any opportunity to have three generations onstage at the one time,” she says, gesturing to her son and father.

Bill starts off, electric guitar snarling through the space, creating suspension. Then Kasey leans into the mic, singing, Barricades and brickwalls won’t keep me from you / You can tie me down on a railroad track, you can let that freight train loo-oose...

On this last word, and with two sharp strokes, the band explodes beneath her.

Halfway through the song, Arlo stands up from the cajon and goes to the mic. Kasey stands aside for him, and he pulls out a harmonica that he proceeds to shred the ever-loving life out of, much to our ecstasy. For the final solo, Bill steps forward, running a bottle along the neck of his guitar. Kasey leans towards her father, strumming hard at her acoustic guitar while Arlo beats a steady rhythm between them, and as the song ends, her face splits into the biggest smile.

Never mind heartbreak. Never mind that love can end, and life ends too. Never mind the tracks or the train, the road or the car. Never mind sorrow, never mind sadness. In this moment, three generations of Chambers stand on stage, playing together, and I get to witness it with my own family, and my voice is sore from hollering, and such, such joy is possible.

***

It is 2022. I am 24 now, a year older than Kasey was when she released The Captain, and working on an album of my own. I text my parents to tell them I’ve had a pitch accepted to write this essay, and they are excited for me. Trouble is, now I have to write the damn thing, I joke.

Halfway there, my dad texts me. Think you can make it.

And for a moment, I feel like he is holding me again, swaying with me to a song. It is dark all around us, the CD player offering the only light. But I am not scared of this darkness, and I am not sad. In his arms, I am safe. I am home.

Owen Elphick is a writer, performer, creator, and bookseller from Storrs, Connecticut, currently based in the Philadelphia area. He is the author of Thoughts & Prayers (Wilde Press, 2019), a book-length sequence of poems centered around gun violence in America. His work has been featured in The Hartford Courant, The Emerson Review, and the Under Review, and presented at the National Theater Institute, Emerson Stage, and the Connecticut Drama Association Festival. He makes music under the name OE. You can learn more about him at www.owenelphick.com.