Six-time Golden Guitar winner and one of Australia’s most beloved country artists, Amber Lawrence today releases her eighth studio album Suburban Cowgirl, alongside her debut children’s storybook The Suburban Cowgirl.Equal parts celebration, retrospective and defiant declaration, Suburban Cowgirl the album is the most joyful and self-assured record of Amber’s 21-year career – and the one that finally puts a name to what she has always been.”I’m from Mascot,” Amber explains. “I love country music. I love telling stories. I always was the Suburban Cowgirl. It just took an album to make it official.””This album is the moment of life I’m in,” she says. “I’m allowed to feel guilty and chase my dreams at the same time. I’m allowed to go out with the girls. I wanted people to hear this and realise – you’re allowed to do that too.”The album’s focus single ‘Sing Me Home’ – written with Australian-born Nashville writer Isabella Kearney Nurse – is the emotional spine of the whole record. A three-minute love letter to 20 years on the road, it opens with a nod to Amber’s very first release (“I wouldn’t be here today without the yodeling blues”) and lands as a profound thank you to the fans who have fuelled every kilometre of the journey. “When people say my song helped them get through something in life,” Amber says, “that’s just another little bit of fuel to keep on driving and keep on singing.”
Also released today is a part origin story, part love letter to dreaming big in unlikely places, The Suburban Cowgirl. The book tells Amber’s own remarkable real-life journey – of a little girl in a big, noisy city who sets out to become a country singer – through a child’s eyes.Amber is a little girl in a big city. Some people call it the Big Smoke. Instead of cows, there are cars. Instead of grass there’s gravel … And it’s just too noisy for her to sing a song. But Amber has a plan, and with the help of her friend, Magpie, she sets out to become The Suburban Cowgirl.Taking readers from suburban Sydney to the bustling streets of the Tamworth Country Music Festival, The Suburban Cowgirl is a story about resilience, creativity and following your dreams – no matter where you come from.For Amber, the timing of the book couldn’t feel more right. Her son is seven and has just started primary school. She has spent 21 years building a career that began exactly where this story does – in the suburbs, with a dream that didn’t quite fit the postcode. And now, with her eighth studio album releasing on the same day, that origin story is being told in two formats at once: one for the fans who have been on the journey with her, and one for the next generation of kids who dare to dream something unlikely.It’s a natural next chapter for an artist who has always made room for younger audiences – Amber has previously released three children’s albums including the beloved The Kid’s Gone Country series and Aussie Aussie Christmas – but The Suburban Cowgirl is something more personal. It’s her story. And she’s inviting kids everywhere to see themselves in it.And if that isn’t enough, Amber will be hitting the road with the Suburban Cowgirl tour commencing on July 8th. As an Ambassador of the Gympie Music Muster, Amber will be there from August 27-30, as well as other shows to round out the year.
ABOUT SUBURBAN COWGIRL THE ALBUM
Built across stolen pockets of time – between school drop-offs, P&F duty, 80 shows a year, a headline festival slot in Lithuania and a trip to the Philippines to entertain Australian troops – Suburban Cowgirl arrived differently to any record Amber has made before. Deliberately, piecemeal, and more considered for it. After the weight of her previous ARIA-nominated album Living for the Highlights – made in the shadow of six miscarriages and the loss of a baby boy – Amber set out this time to make something unashamedly fun.The result is an album that opens its arms wide. ‘That’s Cowgirl To Me’ – featuring an unexpected, scene-stealing whistle that producer Matt Fell (Troy Cassar-Daley, Fanny Lumsden) refused to replace with a guitar solo – is a cinematic, unapologetic career anthem co-written with long-time collaborator Melanie Dyer. ‘Kick the Doors Down’, written in four hours with Phil Barton on the last day of a Nashville trip when Amber was jet-lagged, guilt-ridden and “somewhat defeated”, became the mantra that unlocked the whole record. ‘You Can Admit You Like Country Music’ was sparked by an appearance on The Project in the wake of Beyoncé’s country album – a cheeky, celebratory reckoning from an artist who has believed in this genre for two decades before the world caught up. ‘Live a Country Song’, co-written with the Wolfe Brothers , is its warm companion piece – a reminder that you don’t need a red dirt postcode to live one.‘Comeback Queens’ and ‘Something To Dance To’ deliver pure, crafted joy – the kind of feel-good songs that are deceptively hard to write and impossible to resist. And sitting at the emotional heart of the album is ‘Smallest Years’ – born from a phrase Amber had carried in her diary for years: “blink and you’ll miss the smallest years.” Written with Liam Quinn after the two discovered they were on exactly the same page about making moments count with their kids, the song is simple, devastating and completely universal. Amber knew it had landed when her stoic husband heard it and teared up.Suburban Cowgirl is the work of an artist who has learned – the hard way, the long way, and entirely on her own terms – that limiting beliefs are the ones worth kicking hardest. That the girl from Mascot, under the flight path, who quit her Qantas job and drove to Tamworth, was always exactly where she was supposed to be.