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Short version
Multiple award-winning country music artist/icon Fanny Lumsden talks about her fifth album, Traditions, which is being released on 30 October 2026 on her own label, Red Dirt Road Records. She is also embarking on a tour.
Long version
‘We were told to have it all, so now we want to have it all, and really that just means doing it all.’
Fanny Lumsden says this early on in our interview about her new album, Traditions, which will be released on 30 October 2026. For those who aren’t aware, Lumsden has already released four studio albums, for which she has won two ARIA Awards and ten Golden Guitars, some of which are for music videos made by Lumsden and her husband and longtime collaborator Dan Stanley Freeman. She has a devoted fanbase partly grown through the Country Halls Tours she embarked on, with Freeman, several years ago and which she has kept up even as her profile has grown, including in the United Kingdom, where she has toured several times. Lumsden and Freeman have their own record label, Red Dirt Road Records, and it’s on this label that Traditions will be released. It was on this label that they originally released albums, so in that respect that are returning to a tradition, of sorts.
It’s the running of the record label that probably tips Lumsden over into the extreme end of ‘doing it all’, but that too is part of the enterprise that exists because she has always dreamt big then been prepared to work to make those dreams manifest. She has not ever expected anything to be handed to her, nor has she ever compromised the high standards she set from her first album, Small Town Big Shot, and maintained through all of her releases and in her shows.
Traditions continues, well, that tradition of high standards. Lumsden has always been a wonderful songwriter – clear-eyed about humanity and eagle-eyed on the details that make songs (and live shows) vivid. She knows how to break a listener’s heart and offer them succour, sometimes in the same song, because she understands that art is there to help us process life by offering us doses of emotions and experiences and memories. There is so much life in this album. So much heart and soul and love too.
Lumsden gives us her all – it’s partly why she is so beloved. Doing it all may be exhausting at times – no doubt especially as an album is being released – but what she has also done on Traditions is create something indelible. For the fifth time. That is not just a tradition; that’s a legend.
Preorder Traditions: https://store.fannylumsden.net
Fanny Lumsden is going on tour in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. Dates and tickets here: https://www.fannylumsden.net/traditionstour
Listen to Fanny Lumsden on Apple Music
Watch Fanny Lumsden’s videos on YouTube
