Loene Carmen

Lo Carmen (also known by her full name Loene Carmen prior to 2012) is an Australian singer-songwriter, musician, producer, author and actress. Carmen has independently released seven solo albums in the Americana alt-country indie rock vein. In February 2022 her memoir Lovers Dreamers Fighters was published by HarperCollins, "a memoir of coming-of-age on screen and in song that also pays tribute to the iconic Australian women—writers, rebels, activists and fellow musicians—who lit her way". Author Madeleine Lucas said in their Rushh magazine conversation "At its heart, I felt like Lovers Dreamers Fighters is really a memoir about work. I appreciated that because creative work, like domestic work, is not seen as labour a lot of the time." Carmen has described the book as ‘more a cultural history than a memoir … It’s more a kind of love letter to all the musicians and women that have inspired me.’. Early life and career Carmen was born in Adelaide, South Australia, and raised amongst its 1970s music and art community. She is the daughter of rock-jazz-blues pianist Peter Head, founder of The Mount Lofty Rangers, and has a brother Josh Beagley, a guitarist, most notably with funk band Swoop. She began performing while accompanying her father and formed a country band, The Honky Tonk Angels, followed by garage girl band The White Trash Mamas, 'torch rock' 8 piece Automatic Cherry, and Slow Hand, an 'obscure country soul covers' band. Carmen began focusing on a career as a solo singer-songwriter in 2002. Film Carmen was discovered at sixteen working in a Kings Cross pizza bar and cast as the "wild and haunted" Freya Olson in John Duigan's The Year My Voice Broke (1987). Her performance, and that of her co-stars Noah Taylor and Ben Mendelsohn, was described as "deeply memorable, central characters [that] are played by a trio of fine actors in the formative stages of their careers". She was nominated for an Australian Film Institute Best Actress award for her role as Freya, 'arguably one of Australian cinema's most finely developed female characters, evoking the subtle shades of a burgeoning womanliness.' Ben Mendelsohn calls it 'one of the greatest films I have made'.