Fanny Lumsden - Hey Dawn

Hey Dawn is Fanny Lumsden's highly anticipated fourth studio album and the follow up to 2020's watershed Top 10, 5x Golden Guitar and ARIA Award-winning album Fallow.The album 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."I wanted it to feel good, I wanted to have fun, " she smiles. "I didn't want to think too hard about it - I just wanted to feel."Hey Dawn is, in short, Lumsden's most complete offering to date. But it took a while to get there."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.It's a fitting sentiment for an album that is about the here and now, how it's shaped by the stories from our past, and how they can always be re-written in our future."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."