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MobileSouth Vienna native cracks Top 40 of Australia’s country charts
Northeastern grad had never written a song until she moved Down Under.
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SOUTH VIENNA — Olivia Newton-John. Kylie Minogue. The Bee Gees. Jenny Queen.
Can you name the one who graduated from Northeastern High School?
Taylor Swift. Brad Paisley. Dolly Parton. Jenny Queen.
Now can you name the one who’s considered an Australian country act?
It’s one thing that Queen, a South Vienna gal, ended up living in Sydney, Australia.
But then things got weird — Southern Hemisphere weird.
In a land where toilets flush in reverse, and our summer is their winter, Queen has cracked the Top 40 of Australia’s country chart.
For a second time.
She’s even labelmates with arguably the greatest Australian group of all time — The Wiggles.
And rumor has it, she’s on a short list of nominees for best female performer at the Australian equivalent of the Grammys.
Yeah.
You’re not the only one who’s shocked.
“It feels like a practical joke that went awry,” Queen confessed during a recent visit home.
But this is serious stuff.
No, really.
“I had to send back clippings for people to even take it seriously,” she said.
Queen, who moved Down Under in 2000 with her future husband — the head of Island Records in Australia — had no intention of becoming a singer-songwriter, let alone a charting singer-songwriter, in a faraway place where today here is tomorrow there.
“I had never written a song in my life until I moved to Australia,” she said.
But considering she knew no one in Australia, the English-lit grad (who also, it should be noted, has a master’s in international relations) turned to writing music out of loneliness.
“There’s no reason I shouldn’t try this,” she remembers thinking.
There was just one thing — her husband couldn’t know.
“I didn’t want him to know I was doing it,” Queen said. “He’s a professional.”
Make that a professional employed by a ginormous record label.
As a result, Queen is shy to talk, discuss, explain or acknowledge anything relating to her age, clear down to when she graduated from Northeastern. (So maybe you remember her, maybe you don’t. She graduated a year early in the mid-’90s.)
“He never would have signed me because of my age,” Queen said.
Luckily, she can write.
The first indie label she took her songs to in Australia signed her.
That was the first shock.
“It wasn’t supposed to work this way,” she recalled. “I’m supposed to go 100 places and you’re supposed to say no.
“I had a skill I didn’t know I had.”
But with an album — her 2004 debut, “Girls Who Cry Need Cake” — came another new feat.
Performing live.
The first show went well. Kind of.
“I thought I was going to throw up,” she said.
Queen released her second album, “After the Dance,” earlier this year. The album is her first for a new label, ABC Music.
That’s ABC, as in the Australian Broadcasting Corp.
The lead single, “Lost Thing,” made the Top 30 of the Aussie country chart. A second single, “Shoot the Radio,” also has made the country Top 40.
Her videos are being played on Australia’s country music channel. She’s gotten airplay as far away as the U.K.
“Somebody called and said I was on Wikipedia and I was so excited, and there were a bunch of things that were wrong,” Queen said.
It’s not really country music per se, even though Queen has alt-country influences and connections (Jon Graboff of Ryan Adams’ Cardinals plays pedal steel on the new one).
And as a singer, Queen has a voice unlike anything you’ll hear on domestic country radio — she’s got the doe-eyed innocence of Susanna Hoffs, only it sounds like she’s made a mess of her mascara and been up all night writing poetry.
“Stories,” she said. “A lot of country music is storytelling and almost everything I do will tell stories.”
In a profile this past spring, the Sydney Morning Herald summed up her sound to a tee — “ideal sad-girl music.”
Naturally, she’d love to have success back home as well.
“But I’m real happy with what’s going on in Australia,” she said. “One continent at a time.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.
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