I'm a little nuts!!! I am practically bouncing off the walls!! Why? Cuz I wasn't able to go on the internet for, like, about a week so I am completely off!!! *sings* If I was a ball, I'd be bouncing off the wall....
OK, I promised the article.... voila! (I'd like to say, before the article, that Tim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo fame sang "Hockey Skates" with Kathleen at Bluesfest. It was wonderful!! Kathleen kissed him and when he got off stage she went (singingly), "I got to kiss Tim Cuddy..." *grin*)
Kathleen Edwards
Failer Passes With Honors
By Rick Cornell
As showcased on her full-length debut Failer, there's a disarming directness to the songwriting of Ottawa, Ontario's Kathleen Edwards. It's a characteristic that's in line with her breathy, on-the-verge-of-soaring voice, which is like an arrow humming toward your heart or whichever body part she's aiming for. It turns out that Edwards displays the same directness in conversation, and I'm not ashamed to say that it disarms the hell out of me during the 30 minutes we spend on the phone. It's not that I require much winning over: Failer, released in Canada last year and just out in the U.S. on Rounder, was one of my favorite albums from last year. And thanks to this double-release loophole, it may very well end up as one of my favorite albums of this year, too.
"I find people sometimes are surprised that I'm as open as I am lyrically about certain things," says Edwards, both discussing and demonstrating that directness. "To me, it just seems that I don't know any other way of writing." She doesn't keep a journal or a little notebook of ideas, so her thoughts travel unfiltered to her songs. "I usually have a melody idea or a lyrical idea, but I'm sitting down playing guitar and I apply it [the idea] later. And then the song comes after that," is how Edwards describes the way her songs are typically born. "Songs usually start out as one-liners for me."
Edwards' love for music can be traced back to her parents, with a mother who's a classical pianist and father who played Gordon Lightfoot covers in clubs while in college. She recalls Christmases spent around the piano; her parents even met while performing in a choir. And her parents' Foreign Services work made her childhood that much more interesting, courtesy of time spent living in Europe and Asia. It's not exactly the same as Kasey Chambers experiencing the Wild Thornberry life with her family in the Outback, but Edwards did face a similar lack of exposure to commercial radio and popular music during those formative years. Instead, she was immersed in violin lessons. "One thing that happened when I was quite young is that I wasn't exposed to pop radio," Edwards explains. "Growing up overseas, there's American Forces Radio, but we really didn't listen to it that much. Playing the violin was sort of that one consistent thing through all the moving from country to country."
When she finally did start absorbing something other than the classical music that dominated the house, it was the Bob Dylan and Neil Young records that her brother played, calling those revelatory LPs "the first kind of 'real music' that I listened to that wasn't classical." Not surprisingly, she picked up an acoustic guitar soon after. There are much worse things on which to cut one's musical teeth, and the literate, richly detailed writing style of Dylan and Young's roots, rock and folk blend echo in Edwards' work. Failer also can bring to mind early Suzanne Vega with shades of Lucinda Williams, as well as Aimee Mann by way of Freedy Johnston or Ryan Adams.
Those are all hip (and, other than Adams, completely unsubstantiated) inspirations, but Edwards is forthright enough to swing open her closet door and reveal the musical skeletons hunkered down within. "I remember coming home from one posting. I was probably 9 or 10, and of course all the girls at that time were listening to New Kids on the Block and Tiffany," confesses Edwards. "So, you know, I'm guilty of the association. I had a couple New Kids on the Blocks tapes." And a New Kids on the Block show was her first concert experience, although she couldn't really make out the Kids from her and her good-sport mother's nosebleed seats.
Edwards didn't brave a stadium show for more than 10 years after that, her desire to see the Wallflowers finally leading her to a new arena on the outskirts of Ottawa where they were opening for John Mellencamp. "And I hated it," Edwards reveals. "Not because I didn't like the music, but I hated the venue. It's not just that venue; I hate seeing music in a stadium."
I have no doubt that Edwards and her band will be big enough to play stadiums someday, but the music on Failer is too intimate to be considered arena-ready. Her stories make you want to shush the people at your table and pull your chair up closer to the stage, not pump your fist and spill a $6 beer. Much of her music does have a roots-rock crispness, but it's best played out in clubs with gravel parking lots and beer in pint glasses (not plastic cups) and a lot of wood and maybe even a coal stove throwing off some serious heat. Don't ask me to explain it, but Edwards' songs seem to be constructed of gravel and pint glasses and wood, and then warmed over a coal stove.
Maybe it's the place, physically and mentally, where a lot of those songs were written. "I'd written 'Six O'Clock News' and 'Hockey Skates,' and I kind of knew that I was able to write songs and that I was potentially able to write more songs that I'd be proud of," Edwards recalls. "But I was never able to sit down and focus and do it." She then moved out of the city of Ottawa, not that far from the house in rural Quebec where she lives now. The move, and the absence of phones ringing and TVs beckoning that came with it, enabled the self-described "sucker for visual distractions" to resume writing. "Suddenly it was like I had all this time on my hands, and it [Failer] just kind of came out."
What immerged was a confident, involving and ultimately revealing collection of songs. "Every song has a part of me in it - not necessarily something that happened to me, but maybe an observation that I had about someone else." The gorgeous "Hockey Skates," spotlighting a narrator on the verge of surrender, builds its chorus around a hockey metaphor, while in the equally striking "One More Song the Radio Won't Like," Edwards makes the line "Johnny Rocket Star / Picked up a girl at the bar" sound like a hipster nursery rhyme. The feisty, near-mocking "Westby" chronicles a young woman's affair with an older, married man. It teams up with "Maria," which opens in a pleasing tangle of loud electric and slide guitar, to offer the album's most rocking one-two punch.
"Six O'Clock News" (the album's opener and the tune she performed on her mid-January network TV debut on The Late Show) and "The Lone Wolf" are the only two cuts that truly qualify as story songs. "'Six O'Clock News' was definitely a song that I made up," offers Edwards. "But it was based on a lot of shit that was going on in the area, with husbands holding wives in their houses with children next to them and guns and shit like that." It's a modern, seemingly preordained, tragedy with a telling mid-song couplet that foreshadows doom while also giving the album its title: "And I know your mama calls you good for noth / She says her baby's a failer, and she don't want you callin'."
From their stripped-down, cabin-feverish beginnings, the songs then evolved into band versions with fleshed-out arrangements that Edwards had already been hearing in her mind's ear, featuring everything from pedal steel accents to brass parts and vibes. (It's worth noting that a key member of the band for the album is fellow Ottawan Jim Bryson, a well-respected singer/songwriter and an early booster of Edwards.) "When I wrote them, in my head I kind of knew how I wanted them to sound in the end," she says. "I had an idea of arrangements and instruments that I wanted to use, you know, back-up vocals here and string arrangements there. I had already had time to think about how it was going to come together. And in the end, I think it came together exactly how in my head I had hoped it would."
Edwards considers that statement for a couple of seconds before continuing. "I guess I don't mean every single part. I think what I mean is I had a general sense of what kind of song I was writing and, in the end, what kind of record I wanted to make. Or maybe the better way to say it is what kind of record I didn't want to make." The result is far, far from a failer.
