’Welcome to a major new Australian talent...’ Bruce Elder, SMH

Kate Fagan: Diamond Wheel
Reviewed by Bruce Elder
Sydney Morning Herald, 13 July 2007

"The Fagans are this city's pre-eminent folk music family. Beyond the parental core of Margaret and Bob there are James, who spends most of his time playing bouzouki and guitar with Nancy Kerr, and Kate who, until this release, has devoted most of her career to the family group.

With this solo album Kate, with superb assistance from Rod McCormack (guitars), James Gillard (bass) and John Watson (drums), has demonstrated that she is a gifted singer and poet with the talent to become one of this country's enduring singer-songwriters.

Her music hovers between country and folk (think Shawn Colvin, Mary Chapin Carpenter) and her lyrics are lucid, emotionally persuasive and evocative.

Her palette of musical styles ranges from touching ballads such as Highway of Rainbows and through the backwoods folkiness of One More Drive and Dollar Bills and Diamond Towns to songs such as Roll You Sweet Rain, which sounds as though it is part of some ancient folk tradition. And, well, Clear Water sounds like a song Joni Mitchell forgot to add to one of her early albums.

Seriously, Diamond Wheel is that good. Welcome to a major new Australian talent."

"What a treat, an album made by a poet who is a musician, or alternatively a musician who is a poet... A thoroughly adult album, where the music speaks for itself and the singer is content to facilitate... The album held me from beginning to end." Peggy Seeger

"Sydney's Kate Fagan is going to be worth following for the next decade or two." Bernard Zuel, SMH

Kate writes about some of the songs:

"Clear Water is about Lighthouse Beach in Myall Lakes national park, north of Sydney. I first went to that beach in winter. There was no-one around, only gulls and eagles and the skin of a whale that had beached and been buried. The slow tide was washing sand away from its incredible jaws. I felt I’d never been anywhere so profound in my life. White horses are the foamy peaks of wind-driven waves.

Angel & Mr Cash: I was mesmerised by Rick Rubin’s amazing video clip for Johnny Cash’s version of ‘Hurt’. The song emerged from the light and dark in June Carter’s face as she gazes down at her soul double, for one flickering instant, from a flight of stairs.  She’s on her way somewhere else maybe, and knows the feast of their life on earth together is coming to its end. I had to watch the clip half a dozen times straight just to stop the prickling feeling in my skull.

Dollar Bills & Diamond Towns was written on a train. I was thinking about friends who travel constantly and move in & out of my life. There'll always be a light for them, just like the countless lights people have left on for me when I’ve travelled away. Those lights mean more than any dollar bills and diamond towns ever could.

Roll You Sweet Rain was written a few weeks before we made Diamond Wheel, on a farm at the foot of Barrington Mountains. Everything was so thirsty in drought. I wrote the song in a storm, realising I hadn’t heard that sound for ever. The fruit trees are century-old twisted persimmon trees on a hill on that land. At night you can see tiny strings of house lights on the mountain.

Child Upon the Road is my version of a very old traditional ballad, The False Knight, in which the devil is outwitted by a straight-talking child he tries to hoodwink on the highway. I had to write a fourteenth verse because the song arrived suddenly around 2am. I switched on the light and scribbled it down and there were only 13 verses. It was too freakish so I wrote one more for luck & superstition."