Kathleen Edwards – Singing in the wires
Strings also intensify the longing on “Buffalo”, which was inspired by her epic drive to Manhattan through a snowstorm to appear on the David Letterman show. The song’s brief, repeated, steadily intensifying chorus might have been inspired by the classical minimalism of Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Edwards, who employed a similar method on the Failer track “National Steel”, cops to being taken with the modern Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s popular Symphony No. 3 (“The Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs”), on which a female vocalist belatedly appears to sing a beautiful ascending and descending line. “It’s about simplicity,” said Edwards. “But the lyrics gotta fit into the melody.”
Edwards was born and raised in a rural setting in Ottawa; she left for the big city of Toronto when she was in her mid-20s. Her late father, Len Edwards, was a diplomat; she spent parts of her childhood in South Korea and Switzerland. But, she said, “We’re simple people.” Her mother was a musician who played organ in church. Her grandfather was a wheat farmer from Saskatchewan who hunted for food — a detail Edwards provided when asked about the gun that gets taken off a shelf in “Scared At Night”, a touching song she wrote for her father. In it, she gracefully links the lesson her dad learned as a boy from his father’s mercy killing of an accidentally shot farmyard cat and the lessons her father passed on to her about dying.
“Writing ‘Scared At Night’ was a pretty intense experience,” she said, “because as I was writing the song, it became clear to me how significant these certain memories were. I didn’t know it until the words came out. I cried a lot, and by the end I realized they were moments in my life that formed me. These were moments my parents were trying to teach me something about life, and being faced with how death is a part of that.”
Since the release of the feisty Failer, reviewers often have compared Edwards to Lucinda Williams. Entire reviews, most of them favorable, have been built on the notion that she not only subscribes to the same combination of toughness, tenderness and romantic disillusionment, but also sounds like the grand dame of alt-country.
Understandably, Edwards chafes at this reductivism. “People think Lucinda Williams is my musical role model,” she said. “But Tom Petty is my musical role model. And Ani DiFranco has had more of an impact on me, just the spirit of her. I didn’t grow up with Lucinda. I only heard Car Wheels two years before I made my first record, and it’s the only album of hers I’ve heard. Well, also Essence. But that’s not a lot of time to be influenced.”
Edwards’ first recording was a self-made, six-song EP called Building 55. She pressed a few hundred copies and sold it during a car tour across Canada in the late ’90s and early ’00s. Word about this hard-edged original out of Canada spread. When Failer was released, it eventually incited a media blitz, with much of the attention centered on “Six O’Clock News”, a mini-melodrama about a doomed young guy with a gun and the girl who can’t help loving him, and “Hockey Skates”, about a rebellious small-town girl who is “so sick of consequences.” (An Ottawa Senators fan, Edwards sang the Canadian national anthem at this year’s NHL All-Star Game in Atlanta in late January. She name-drops Marty McSorley, onetime “enforcer” for NHL legend Wayne Gretzky, on a peppy song from Asking For Flowers called “I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory”.)
One of the standout tracks on Back To Me was the churning, Petty-esque “In State”, sung from the perspective of a wised-up girl who comes to terms with a prison-bound guy “who wouldn’t even be yourself if you weren’t telling a lie.” Far from being a retread of “Six O’Clock News” as some have suggested (though Edwards has acknowledged it was sort of a “prequel” thematically), “In State” is catchier and more potent, sonically. Like the Joan Osborne hit, “One Of Us”, which hinges on Eric Bazilian’s stinging, soaring guitar riff, “In State” has a powerful hook in Cripps’ lacing guitar lines.
Edwards hates the “In State” video. An Escher-like affair, it shows her looking down from a hotel room on successive versions of herself getting out of a car. Each Kathleen sings into the camera, gesturing broadly, as she walks through the hotel to a room where her band assembles. The video has nothing to do with the song and, she said, “I look stupid in it.” But seen in heavy rotation on CMT, it provided a boost in showing off an artist whose physical beauty, however poorly utilized, is as fresh and strikingly off-center as her songs.
Edwards is aware that however bold her songs are, they won’t win her the cultish devotion enjoyed by newly emerging female artists who are more in the indie-rock realm — fellow Canadian Leslie Feist, for example. “The underground media ignores me,” said Edwards. “I’m too pop.” But for her, being pop doesn’t mean accepting the commercial compromises that so often go with it.
“There are so many people my age trying to make a go of it who think the only way to do it is (a) to get a song in a commercial, (b) have a hit song on the radio, or (c) have a song in a TV show,” she said. “A lot of my peers have songs in commercials. I would have a really hard time knowing that’s a decision I’d make.
“Tom Petty is not about product placement. He’s about giving a shit about what you do with your music. He’s about taking pride in it. I think The Last DJ is a really great record. Some people thought it was just a rant against record labels, but it’s much more than that.”
In Runnin’ Down A Dream, Peter Bogdanovich’s epic documentary about Petty, Stevie Nicks is heard expressing a dream to leave Fleetwood Mac for the Heartbreakers. It remains to be seen whether Edwards, having enjoyed those memorable moments with the great X man John Doe, will ever collaborate with Petty. But it would sure be fun to see the results if she did. Maybe that’s the “In State” video they should have shot.
On the subject of Canada’s national pastime, ND contributing editor Lloyd Sachs admits he didn’t play fair with Kathleen Edwards, quizzing her on hockey legends of his era like Frank Mahovlich. She graciously resisted the opportunity to expose his vast ignorance on the sport.