SUSAN TEDESCHI and Derek Trucks do it. Kathleen Edwards and Colin Cripps do it. Faith Hill and Tim McGraw definitely do it. Often. And in front of thousands of people.
Like those other husband-and-wife duos, Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson make music together. “It’s so normal for us to have music be part of our everyday lives,” said Chambers, who toured with Nicholson, a fellow Aussie, before dating and then marrying him in 2005.
Marriage comes with unknowns: how to raise kids, how to spend money. But for Chambers and Nicholson, both 33, the unknown was writing country songs together. “I was really nervous. … What if we don’t have a similar songwriting style and we write this god-awful song and we have to get a divorce?” she said. “I would fake a headache. Most wives do that to get out of sex. I did it to get out of songwriting.”
Chambers grew up performing with her mom, dad and brother in the Dead Ringer Band. Nicholson, as a kid, found his mom’s old four-string guitar and started writing songs.
In 1999, Chambers released “The Captain,” winning two ARIA Awards, the Australian equivalent of the Grammys. (She has since won five more for her solo work.) She met Nicholson through her brother, Nash, a producer.
“We sort of knew each other through music,” Chambers said. They toured together and sang together and finally got together romantically, but still didn’t write songs together. “We talked about doing an album,” Chambers said. “It just sort of didn’t happen and didn’t happen.”
Finally it did happen. After much hand-wringing.
“I started out such a big fan of Shane and his songwriting,” Chambers said, so working with him proved to be a little intimidating. “‘Oh, my gosh, you’re writing with Shane Nicholson!’ ” she recalled thinking. And then, “‘Oh no, you’re writing with your husband.’ I definitely built it up to be something bigger than it was in my head.”
They wrote “Rattlin’ Bones,” released last year, slowly and casually, after dinner, in front of the TV, with a few drinks, anything to ease Chambers’s fears.
“She was nervous because she hadn’t written with other people,” Nicholson said. “It can be difficult. The main thing with working well with each other is mutual respect. Trust the other person’s opinion. I knew that everything else would be OK, and if we persevered long enough, we would come up with all the songs we love.”
“Rattlin’ Bones” is a roots-rock country album full of banjo and fiddle and melancholy lyrics. It’s a departure from the poppy tunes the two typically write on their own and showcases the couple’s tight, complementary harmonies. It won best country album at the 2008 ARIA Awards.
“It wrote itself,” Nicholson said. “We just had the idea of the sound of the record and the feeling of it.”
Yin and yang, Nicholson is more comfortable with songwriting, while Chambers prefers the spotlight. “I take over the show,” Chambers said. Chatty and personable on stage, she may talk about song origins, or her two boys, Talon, 7, and Arlo, 2. (Talon is from Chambers’s previous relationship.) Nicholson remains in the background.
“Musically, Shane is running the show … he does all the hard work. I take all the credit. It works out great,” she said.
Despite the success of “Rattlin’ Bones,” they have no intention of writing together again soon. “We always said we want to take time off of the duo thing. We want to get to the point where we miss that,” Chambers said.
Nicholson has a recording studio at their home in Copacabana, a seaside town about 55 miles north of Sydney, and he released his own album, “Familiar Ghosts,” last year.
“I think in a lot of ways (music) is what our relationship is based on. So I think that is, has been and always will be our biggest connection,” Nicholson said. “That’s how we met, how we bonded. I don’t even know what it would be like if we didn’t have the music together, just having the mutual appreciation, love and passion for music is one of the biggest things we share.”
Songwriting or not.
