Australia is not exactly awash with country music divas but Kasey Chambers is something special with a sunny personality to boot, writes Joe Breen

"What comes through is the grounding I got in music when I was growing up. I guess that's why they call it, grounding! I'm just lucky my dad loved good music. It could have been a lot worse." Kasey Chambers is recounting her novel upbringing in the south Australian outback where she, her mother and her only brother spent the first 10 of her almost 30 years helping her dad hunt foxes for a living. They lived on the go, cooking their meals on an open fire and then sleeping in bunks in her father's Land Cruiser. For schooling her mother used a correspondence course to teach her children academic basics, but her real education was listening to the music her parents loved.

"We didn't have any TV or radio. I only heard the music my dad was into - Hank Williams, Gram (Parsons), Emmylou (Harris), Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. I thought that was the only kind of music in the world."

She still does. It takes something special to rise above the layer of mediocrity that is most country music these days. Kasey Chambers has it in abundance. Her three albums to date, The Captain, Barricades and Brick Walls and her latest, Wayward Angel, showcase a woman who sings with simple, honest passion about herself and the world around her. It's a home-grown, cynicism-free recipe that has brought her much success in her native country and also increasing notice abroad, including the US. Although the glacial smile of Olivia Newton John once charmed Nashville's country sceptics, there is not exactly a long tradition of Australian country singers. But Chambers is quick to point out that, for her, the American country capital is the songwriting city of Austin, Texas, not Nashville, Tennessee.

"I would like to think there are only two kinds of country music - good and bad. I'm mostly into alternative country music. That's what I grew up on and that's what I still listen to now."

Although the birth of her first son three years ago has tempered her love of travel, she still spends a lot of time on the road - it's in her blood. When the family left the outback she played in her father's band for a while. And now Bill Chambers plays lead guitar in hers, a crack little combo to judge by her albums. Her brother, Nash, produces her records, manages her and finds time to do the concert sound, while her mother handles the merchandise side of things. "We all get along really well. Lots of people say to me 'I couldn't tour with my family', but I guess that's where the closeness comes from, living in the outback, just the four of us."

But just how much did that upbringing affect her?

"It's very different when I think of it now, especially as I'm around people all the time now. I'm meeting people and I'm playing to people every night. And we live in a very civilised area. So it's very different when I compare it. But when I was young I didn't know any different. I thought everybody lived like that."

On her new album she has a track called For Sale in which she bemoans celebrity and its trappings. Has it been hard growing up in public?

"Moments of it. But," she adds laughing, "I'm not someone who gets mobbed at airports. The public side of being a singer is not something that gets to me every day unlike, say, Kylie Minogue, who can't just be Kylie Minogue unless she's at home alone in her house."

Do her albums have a particular tone? "No there is never a particular thread. All my albums take me three years to write except the first one which took me 10 years! So it's never going to be one feeling running through the album. I don't set aside specific time to write my next album. It's just different songs from different parts of my life about different things I'm going through . . . but they are all recorded together, so its more of a sound running through the album than one feeling."

That said, she feels that with Wayward Angel she has "found my own sound a little more - it's a little more me. But I think everyone does that as they get older."

Kasey Chambers and her band play Whelans in Dublin next Monday, May 2nd. Wayward Angel is available on Virgin