Jem Cassar-Daley had to be bribed to sing with her famous dad – but not any more

When Jem Cassar-Daley was little, she and her family would pile into the car at their Brisbane home and make the three-ish-hour drive south to her Nan’s place near Grafton.When they neared the massive Clarence River as it splits the land at Harwood, just inland from Yamba, her parents would tell her to roll the windows down and breathe in the smell of cane sugar as it wafted from the factory on the riverbank. It’s a core, treasured memory, one the Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung songwriter immortalised in her gently melancholy 2024 single, Big Container.She can still see and smell it in her memory now, as we sit at a dark marble table in Sydney’s Ace Hotel to discuss her debut album, tattoos used to come off in the pool. “You could see all the smoke coming out, and we’d smell it, and it was so beautiful,” she smiles, buoyed that as a Northern Rivers person, I picked up on the reference to the famous local landmark.“I love that you know that,” she says with a laugh. “Driving down the M1 on holidays is still so vivid in my mind.”Musical roots: “I just always thought that all families sang together,” the 25-year-old singer says.Steven SiewertJem didn’t have to go far to find famous Northern Rivers landmarks. Troy, her dad, is one of Grafton’s most famous sons: a beloved country artist who has been releasing albums and touring the country longer than Jem has been alive. He and her mum, singer and radio broadcaster Laurel Edwards, brought up Jem and her brother Clay in Brisbane in a house bursting with music. Growing up, Jem didn’t really have any idea her parents were different from her friends’ parents – except for the singing.“I just always thought that all families sang together. My friends would be like, ‘Oh, you guys sing?’. I’d say, ‘Well, don’t you all sing at home?’,” Cassar-Daley laughs, mock exasperated. “Like, I genuinely thought it was just so normal because it’s all we did. It took me a while to realise that not everyone did that.”She started scribbling down songs before she was a teenager, recording them with a mic that was lying around the house for Troy to use for demos. “I think one of the first songs I wrote was Why Is It So Windy Today? That’s a famous one in our house,” she remembers. “I’ll have to find the recording … and I still ask that today, why is it so windy? What’s going on?”Singing at home? Wonderful. Singing on stage with her dad? Not so much. Jem recalls another clear memory of clinging to her dad’s leg while he was on stage in Tamworth, terrified of the crowd and the bright lights. “Dad said we’d go get ice cream after,” she says. “I basically had to be bribed.”That couldn’t be further from the truth now. Over the past five years, Cassar-Daley has steadily asserted herself as one of Australia’s sharpest indie-pop songwriters. She’s released a fistful of popular singles, chief among them being King of Disappointment in 2023 – a piercing kiss-off about being ghosted – and last year’s yearning Kiss Me Like You’re Leaving.She’s got a whole heap of touring under her belt, including a recent headline show in the Sydney Opera House’s intimate Utzon Room (some fireworks blasted from Vivid Sydney boats behind her during the set, which added a certain unplanned specialness to the occasion). She’s also collected a few awards along the way, including song of the year for King of Disappointment at the Queensland Music Awards; last year, she earned a place on the Brisbane Walk of Fame and was named the QMA Indigenous artist of the year.From the outside, it might seem like Jem’s professional music career was pre-destined, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. She started a Bachelor of Arts degree at university in 2020, “hell-bent” on trying something else and “doing everything right by the book”. That lasted about a month, she recalls with a laugh. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna just put this on hold for a minute and just go play some shows and do what I want to do, and I can always come back to it.’ I ended up going on the road with my Dad … It was like 80 shows in a year.”With her attention turned fully to music, Cassar-Daley spent the next few years diligently chipping away at tracks, travelling to the UK and Nashville for writing and recording sessions. In 2022, she released her debut EP I Don’t Know Who To Call, featuring the single Changes and a devastating cover of I Just Don’t Think I’ll Ever Get Over You – written by one of her favourite songwriters, Colin Hay. While all that was happening, she packed up and moved away from her beloved Brissy, spending a bit of time in Melbourne before settling in Sydney earlier this year.Tattoos used to come off in the pool gets its name from a moment when Jem was 21, when she jumped in the pool and realised her brand-new ink wouldn’t come off, no matter how hard she scrubbed. And like that scene of the sugar factory in Big Container, Cassar-Daley’s songs are lifted from the page by these clear and expressive scenes.While she credits Hay and Joni Mitchell as some of her biggest influences, you can also trace the threads back to more recent pop powerhouses like Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift. The characters in Cassar-Daley’s world are vividly drawn – whether they’re sleeping on the couch in the other room after a fight, or dreaming of wedding dresses after a breakup, or scrolling through Instagram obsessing over a new partner’s ex-girlfriend.Sometimes these characters are Jem, but other times (like on Speak Now) she writes from a friend’s perspective about having to call off a relationship before it gets to the altar. The push and pull of love and the people enmeshed in it is tattoos’ chief concern, most beautifully on the sorrowful and resigned Into Sunsets.Cassar-Daley knows people will draw connections between her and her father – but this is a source of pride, not anxiety. “I have always idolised my dad as a musician,” she says. “It’s been such a massive inspiration for me. He’s always told me to just do my own thing and stay true to myself and write what I wanted to write and not worry about anything else. That’s been a really important message that I’ve carried from my dad of just trying to be true to myself as much as I can throughout my writing process and who I am.”There was a moment early on in her career when she considered dropping the recognisable last name, but that thought didn’t last for long. “There was a thought of just going by Jem,” she says. “But I was like, ‘Look, there’s four of us, probably, in the world’. I don’t know if we know of any other Cassar-Daleys! It just felt right, it just feels like me.”Jem Cassar-Daley’s debut album tattoos used to come off in the pool is out now. 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