Fanny Lumsden Announces Highly Anticipated Fourth Album ‘Hey Dawn’

Fanny Lumsden has announced the release of Hey Dawn, her much anticipated fourth studio album and follow up to 2020’s watershed Top 10, 5x Golden Guitar and ARIA Award-winning album Fallow. It will be accompanied by a national tour with her incredible band The Prawn Stars, kicking off on July 28 in Bendigo, visiting cities and regional centres.

Hey Dawn has been pre-empted by the #8 airplay hit, Millionaire – a vibrant and up-tempo indie-pop track so warmly embraced by Double J, ABC Country, KIX, Triple A, Triple M Country, iHeart Country, ABC Local Radio, and many more staunch supporters across the country.

The video for Hey Dawn was directed and produced by Fanny Lumsden and Dan Stanley Freeman with long-time collaborator, DOP Sam Brumby (King Stingray).

“We filmed this clip out at Gunbar on the Hay plains in NSW, starting in the hall and moving out into that vast open landscape. I have always told my stories using landscapes and this album will continue to do that featuring different parts of the Riverina, however not tied to any in particular, more a reflection of each song,” Lumsden said. 

“I wanted Hey Dawn to be connected to the heart of communities, that being the hall, however, have it feeling dark and empty and then using that big sky and plains to drive home the gentle optimism and possibility that comes with the end of the song and with being in a landscape like that. It is further mirrored in the closing song of the record - however that’s a story for later and the theme of this album.”

Before album Hey Dawn drops, Lumsden and The Prawn Stars will jet off to London, to play a host of shows including Glastonbury Festival’s Avalon Stage on June 23 – a pinch-me moment for Lumsden.

“I genuinely cannot believe we get to play such an iconic and huge festival, literally on the world stage,” she says. “I’m hugely excited to bring my band over and bring our prawn star energy to that stage. However not before we go and play some halls in regional Australia including Tallimba Hall – the tiny community where I went to primary school."

The album Hey Dawn is a rich character study, with the singer-songwriter reflecting on the stories that have shaped her and those around her. It’s also a more sonically diverse outing than Lumsden’s previous records, incorporating elements such as guitar-based indie-pop into her trademark world of gorgeously crafted, emotionally rich acoustic songwriting.

Following the release of Fallow, Lumsden spent an exhausting 18 months navigating the logistical nightmare of touring in a time of COVID-related border closures and show cancellations. When combined with the residual trauma of the 2020 bushfires that nearly claimed her property in the Snowy Valleys region of New South Wales – the desire to write music temporarily deserted her.

When it finally returned it did so on the coast of Western Australia, as Lumsden and her husband (and bandmate) Dan Freeman navigated their way home from the Northern Territory after border closures prevented them from entering Queensland for the final show of the Fallow tour. The circuitous route proved to be a blessing.

Lumsden and her band travelled to Tasmania to work with long-time producer Matt Fell at his studio in the picturesque Gowrie Park, many of the songs were still only ideas and shapes – an unfamiliar scenario for a singer-songwriter more used to being meticulously prepared.

The initial sessions were disrupted by a catastrophic storm that forced them to relocate to the eastern side of the island. It was there, in an Airbnb, that Lumsden awoke one morning just as the sun was rising over the ocean.

“I literally just said, ‘Oh, hey dawn!’,” chuckles the singer. The seemingly innocuous moment became something more when the sessions returned to Gowrie Park and Lumsden visited a local market in a nearby hall, in which a man was playing piano.

“The only pre-idea I had for the record was I knew I wanted the sound of a piano that felt like you were in a hall when you were a kid, and I walked into this hall and this old man was playing this vision of what I had in my head,” she recalls.

That night she went back to her accommodation and wrote Hey Dawn, the stunning title-track that pairs celestial vocal harmonies with gentle piano before climaxing with Bacharach-esque flair. Finally, the album made sense.

“I was a bit stuck after Fallow and didn’t know where to go, and that unlocked it: ‘Oh, you just need to wake up, it’s a new day, it’s a new moment, every day is a new moment, and you just need to be where you are right now. Forget about Fallow, forget about all the other things, just be now.’”

Alongside her regular bandmates – husband Dan on bass, brother Tom on backing vocals, Josh Schubert on drums, and multi-instrumentalists Benjamin Corbett and Paddy Montgomery – she also welcomed the input of outside musicians such as EVEN’s Ash Naylor.

“You have to tell the stories of the moment you’re in, and you have to put them out and trust that that is okay,” smiles Lumsden. “It’s a new day, we’re here.”

 HEY DAWN TRACKLISTING:

1. Hey Dawn
 2. Great Divide
 3. You'll Be Fine
 4. Ugly Flowers
 5. When I Die
 6. Lucky
 7. Soar
 8. Millionaire
 9. Enjoy The Ride
 10. Stories

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