Pages tagged “kathleen edwards”

Today, Pitchfork—the snarkalicious online music zine everyone loves to hate—will release a book, printed on actual paper. The tome is called The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present, and it is billed as containing “all-new essays and reviews written with the sharp wit and insight for which the site is known.”

Kathleen Edwards rocked with an immaculate band, spitting bile at the sun, particularly on set closer "The Cheapest Key." Edwards sang "B is for bullshit and you fed me some," but I'd argue that "B" is actually for "badass." She is just that.

Kathleen Edwards has been a busy bee lately: she has a new album, a new video, upcoming tour dates and an upcoming appearance on late-night television.

This will be the second time Edwards appears on the David Letterman show: the first time found her on a bus for 13 hours, desperately trying to get there on time to promote her debut album, Failer.

Her performance is scheduled for April 22, and this time the Ottowa-turned-Toronto native is promoting her third album, entitled Asking for Flowers, which came out on March 4. Here’s hoping she gets to take a plane this time.

Her new video, for the song “The Cheapest Key,” showcases her sense of humor as she plays a troubled teacher with a penchant for booze and bikinis in the classroom. Seems like she really knows how to mold those young minds:

Related links:
Feature: Kathleen Edwards: North Americana
Kathleen Edwards on MySpace
KathleenEdwards.com

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

When Kathleen Edwards released her first CD Failer in 2003, her quavering, countrified Canadian, love-child-of-Lucinda-and-Neil sound created a rabid band of new fans. Then came 2005’s Back to Me, which kept the fire burning, staying lyrically close to Failer’s personal, relationship-focused angst. This month Edwards, 29, releases her third album, Asking for Flowers, which covers new artistic and sonic terrain and elevates Edwards into the ranks of many of her roots-rock role models. A diplomat’s daughter, Edwards landed in Korea at 13. The experience informed the Ottawa-born songwriter’s first two albums with loneliness, introspection and an inchoate longing for the vast swath of the Canadian prairie. The haunted, poetic storytelling in those works tells the tale of a lonely, misfit girl who retreats into herself—and who hears a brooding roots-rock echo. “I felt very alone and within myself,” Edwards says, “and I also got to see so much—cultures, lifestyles. I got to connect with a lot of older people who taught me a lot. I actually don’t think I dated anyone my age. Seoul, Korea, at 13 is hard on a Canadian girl, because at that age your small life revolves around you and your friends. Instead I was thrust into an Asian culture where I was very unhappy. I just wanted to be back in Canada, in my comfortable, safe environment. Instead I spent those years alone and experiencing things, writing poetry and looking inward.” Edwards’ new album features a significant lyrical growth-spurt and a little less navel-gazing, with songs that touch on the topical without compromising her storytelling strengths. The title cut paints a devastating picture of mental illness’ impact. “‘Asking for Flowers’—yes, that one broke ground for me,” Edwards says. “I feel very moved singing it, really telling a true, honest, unromantic version of what mental illness and emotional devastation feels like. I wanted to write a song that could have been about your grandmother losing your grandfather.” Other new standout songs include “Oil Man’s War,” an aΩecting, Springsteen-esque tale about a young couple determined not to knuckle under; and “Run,” a downbeat alt.country anthem that summarizes the album when Edwards sings, “the smell of the world came into my lungs.” With this accomplished new song-cycle, Edwards knows she has ventured into uncharted territory—she is admittedly scared, a growing artist riding the edge. “I had to step back and figure out whose stories I was going to tell—it’s hard to figure out life stories about people when you’re living in a tour bus. You know, after a while everything gets reduced to bodily functions [she laughs] … you kinda take 10 steps back intellectually on the road in a tour bus.” The commercial consideration—is there a single among these gem-like stories?—is a painful question. “I’m trying to be honest with myself about content, without being too precious about it. After this, I have no idea if I’m ever going to be able to put another record out. What’s scary about your third album is you realize you now have financial obligations to your band and your record company. I was given a lot of creative leeway with Asking for Flowers, and that’s frightening, too. I invested more in this record than I did in the first one. “All you can do is be the artist you are. I feel like a child most of the time,” Edwards says, her voice thick with feeling. “Like I’m the youngest person in the room, emotionally and spiritually. I’m still really grasping at straws—I don’t have any idea who I’m supposed to be.” Asking for Flowers goes a long way toward answering that question.

Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards will release her new album Asking for Flowers March 4 on Zoe Records, and set out on a 21-date U.S. tour shortly after.

Edwards burst onto the folk rock scene back in 2003 with her brooding debut album Failer, and won rave reviews for her 2005 follow-up Back To Me. Since her first album was released, she has performed with the likes of Aimee Mann, Willie Nelson and My Morning Jacket, and has seen her music showcased on television’s Austin City Limits and in Cameron Crowe’s 2005 film Elizabethtown.

Edwards’ upcoming tour, her first in more than two years, will begin March 27 in Portland, Maine. Confirmed dates are listed below, with more on the way:

March
27 - Portland, Maine @ The Big Easy
28 - Boston, Mass. @ Paradise Rock Club
29 - Northampton, Mass. @ Pearl Street
31 - Burlington, Vt. @ Higher Ground

April
5 - Chicago, Ill. @ Metro
6 - Detroit, Mich. @ Magic Bag
8 - Pittsburgh, Pa. @ Rex Theatre
10 - New York, N.Y. @ The Fillmore at Irving Plaza
11 - Annapolis, Md. @ Ram's Head
12 - Philadelphia, Pa. @ The Fillmore at TLA
14 - Alexandria, Va. @ The Birchmere
16 - Asheville, N.C. @ Grey Eagle Tavern
17 - Louisville, Ky. @ Headliners
18 - Birmingham, Al. @ WorkPlay Theatre
19 - Nashville, Tenn. @ Mercury Lounge
30 - Indianapolis, Ind. @ Music Hall

May
9 - Boulder Col. @ Fox Theatre
13 - Tucson, Ariz. @ Club Congress
14 - San Diego, Calif. @ Belly Up
16 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Troubadour
17 - Santa Barbara, Calif. @ Lobero Theatre

Related links:
KathleenEdwards.com
Kathleen Edwards on MySpace
Paste: Kathleen Edwards: North Americana

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Question: Which bear is best?

Actually relevant question: What do you get when you cross singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards with musicians who have performed with the Heartbreakers, the Wallflowers, Leonard Cohen and Wilco?

Answer to first question: black bear.

Answer to second, actually relevant question: Kathleen Edwards’ new album, Asking for Flowers, out on March 4, 2008. It will have been three years since Edwards’ last critically acclaimed album, Back to Me. Also, please note that track #9 is called “Oh Canada,” so it may be a song about bears, which will have actually made the first question somewhat relevant. We here at Paste are all about making connections.

Asking for Flowers tracklist:

1. Buffalo
2. The Cheapest Key
3. Asking For Flower
4. Alicia Ross
5. I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory
6. Oil Man's War
7. Sure As Shit
8. Run
9. Oh Cana 10. Scared At Night
11. Goodnight, California

Related links:
KathleenEdwards.com
Kathleen Edwards on MySpace
Bears.org

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

“I have reoccurring dreams about The Edge,” Kathleen Edwards says matter of factly. The hip Canadian chanteuse and I are boozing and schmoozing at a cozy New York nightspot called The Slipper Room, which is hosting her publicity company’s annual Christmas party. With the smell of Maker’s Mark wafting from her glass, Edwards notes that, while she’s not a huge U2 fan (don’t get her started on Bono) there’s something ineffable about the band’s guitarist.

Edwards and I are two of a mere handful of writers, musicians and industry types paying attention to Nashville singer/songwriter Jessi Alexander, whose cover of Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” sparked the Edge musings. A good portion of the memorable guitar work on Edwards’ new album, Back to Me, recalls Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, at which she grins and says, “My guitarist thinks he’s The Edge, but he really sounds like Tom Petty.” Petty, amusingly, is the only other artist about which Edwards has recurring dreams.

“I wish I had reoccurring dreams about Andrew W.K. [instead]. That, I wouldn’t mind.”

When I meet with her the next morning, Edwards’ strawberry-blonde locks are fashioned in tiny pigtails, and she’s wearing thick, black-rimmed Buddy Holly specs she scored at Oliver Peoples in Manhattan.

Her baby-blue hotel room is comfy, with its stocked bookshelf, homey wallpaper and white coffee table—Ryan Adams’ number is scratched onto the back of a receipt (he wants to meet her in the studio today). With the honk- and whistle-filled bustle of Lexington Avenue and the frosty Gotham air pouring through the open windows, Edwards sits Indian style, sipping coffee and cracking jokes often.

In both appearance and conversation, she’s hardly the sad, pissed-off introvert she seems on her celebrated 2003 debut, Failer. We discuss Edwards’ former love for New Kids on the Block (Jordan Knight was her favorite) in between talk of the people and places flowing through Back to Me, and how she “totally choked” when she initially went in to record the disc.

“People think that I’m dark and brooding and suicidal,” she says. “You know what it is? I have all this pent-up, like, darkness and then I get it out, and then when I see people, I’m like, ‘Hey! My name’s Happy!’”

With each girlish giggle and self-deprecating anecdote, the easy-smiling singer emerges more and more—like your best friend’s little sister, the girl who’s forever shadowing the fellas. It’s appropriate, then, that when we ambled into her hotel room, the tube was tuned to SportsCenter. That said, she’s a natural beauty—equally alluring in the previous evening’s party dress as she was in the flannel shirt she wore for her first New York gig nearly two years ago.

While fun and quirky, the 26-year-old Ottawa native is confident but modest. Considering all the adulation heaped upon Failer, Edwards could have justifiably gotten a little full of herself over the past year. But before she could, the sophomore jinx jitters knocked her down a notch, at least in her own head.

“I remember doing interviews right up until the end of the Failer tour, and people were like, ‘So what’s the new record gonna be?’ and ‘How are you gonna go into it knowing that your last record did so well for you?’ I was like, ‘Oh, no problem,’” she says with a sweet, slightly embarrassed grin. “I was like, ‘I’m just gonna forget that there’s a record company, and I’m just gonna do my thing,’” she laughs.

“But I got to the studio and totally choked. I freaked out for the first couple of weeks. I was like, ‘This sucks’ and ‘What are we doing?’ I was doubting everything. And the songs that I knew were great, or I felt really good about months before, I was suddenly like, ‘I think this probably sucks.’ … Suddenly, my barometer was totally out of whack. I was in a couple of weeks of utter self-doubt, which was good, actually, but poor Colin [Cripps], who produced the record, he really held it together and stayed so even-keeled, which was amazing.” As the songs drew closer to completion, she regained her confidence. After some 200 shows in the past year, Edwards was less uncertain, however, about her singing. “On Failer, I didn’t sing like I felt good about singing. I really struggled to sing well, and I think that’s obvious—it’s tough to hear if I’m even singing. But on Back to Me, I’m singing more, rather than trying to; I’m not forcing it as much, I’m just singing.”

The same cast of barflies, lovers, friends and traitors on Failer return for Back to Me, simply because Edwards missed them.

After her career started blossoming last year, via a steady stream of rave reviews, Edwards began spending progressively less time in her rural hometown, opting for Toronto instead during breaks on the lengthy Failer tour. For a while, she kept a place back home, which she shared with a roommate. But eventually, she put her things in storage, with love—or something close—beckoning some 280 miles southwest in Toronto.

Back to Me charts the impact of the move on her heart, finding the lonely singer longing for her former life. “Thematically, the record’s about, sort of, dislocation and relocation and absence,” she says. “My worst nightmare would be to make a record that’s like”—she takes on the voice of any number of knucklehead stoner musicians who immediately send our eyes into the back of our heads—“‘I just spent the last year on the road, and it sucked.’ That’s not at all what those songs are about.

“I think it’s more, like, ‘I’m in Toronto and I miss my home, I miss my friends.’ It’s the little things that creep up on you after forgetting that they’re around. You forget, ‘Oh f---, I have all these great friends who I used to see every week or two, and I don’t see them at all anymore.’—just feeling sort of out of touch with something that was so wonderful in my life. But it was replaced with something else really wonderful. But it still doesn’t replace it. You still think about it.”

In “Copied Keys,” she offers, “This is not my town, and it will never be / This is our apartment filled with your things / This is your life, I get copied keys.” On “Independent Thief,” featuring My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, she bemoans the watered-down big-city drinks and her newfound loneliness: “I don’t want nothing from you / All I need is just some company.” In “Away,” she yearns to be back in an Ottawa dive: “I was rehearsing a part from down at the bar / My mouth smelled like a drink / We were laughing, I think / I’ve been away.”

“I think the only way of me trying to be a part of their lives or be a part of my old life,” says Edwards, “was to actually include them in what I’m doing now.”

Such life changes are rarely easy on anyone, but Edwards gave up something she spent her childhood seeking—stability. Although she’s spent the majority of her life in Ottawa, she grew up the daughter of a foreign serviceman who eventually became a Canadian ambassador. Consequently, she spent many of her formative years in Switzerland and Korea. After high school, though, there were no more two-year sabbaticals in Seoul, and her roots became further entrenched as she plied her craft in local bars. “When I moved to Toronto, I left something that I always wanted in my life since I was a kid, which was a community of friends and being able to live in the same place for years. I loved it, and I loved living in the country.”

On the new album, except for some accordion here and a pleasing horn arrangement there, musically, the formula is still very much the same. Back to Me is vintage Americana, if a bit more rousing at times. “I certainly don’t think I’ve gone on any departure of any kind, and I wasn’t ready to,” Edwards says, searching briefly for the right words. “I feel like I know what I’m good at at this point, without having tried too many other things. Not that I don’t want to try and expand on what I’m doing. [But] I don’t think what I’m doing is f---ing rocket science either. I try to have a good song and everything else just naturally falls into place. And I think everything on this record just came extremely naturally to accompany the songs.

“I totally love and respect songwriters who are open to trying anything and everything. But I’m a bit closed-minded still, and I’m still not ready to venture into a land where I feel like I’m not sure if it’s good and I’ll just do it anyway, just to try it.”

Edwards starting playing violin at age five, and took up guitar at 12. That same year, she began spending her summers at music camps, where the boys strummed Neil Young covers and the girls Ani DiFranco tunes. While she fell in love with Annie Lennox and Sinead O’Connor as a teen, DiFranco proved the biggest influence on her first recording, a 1999 EP co-written with a fellow Ottawa singer/songwriter Edwards describes as “much more ‘grrrr, chicky girrrrrr.’ I’m really percussively playing.

“While I don’t have the same sort of connection to her records the way I did when I was a teenager, I still think a huge part of my lyrical influence and the way that I write lyrics is based on her—not content wise. I loved how at the end of each line, there was always this poignant statement where you were like, ‘Yeah!’ I liked that she didn’t write any songs that weren’t about anything.”

After discovering Whiskeytown’s Stranger’s Almanac, Edwards found herself primarily listening to male voices and writing more Americana fare—even while she didn’t really know what Americana was at the time. “That record changed my life, my musical life—that and a few of Richard Buckner’s albums, too, like Devotion + Doubt and Since.

“What changed everything for me about Whiskeytown was the songs and that the songs were just so full of imagery without being these run-on songs—there was a start and a finish. And there wasn’t all this fluff in there to get to one line. It was like every line, every verse, to me, was complete, and I loved listening to songs that really evoked a lot of cinematic imagery. I was probably 20 when I first heard Whiskeytown. At that time, I didn’t know there was a Lucinda Williams, I didn’t know who Gram Parsons was; I knew who Steve Earle was, but I’d never listened to him before that.”

Her Whiskeytown epiphany led to the cycle of songs that would become Failer. Once she had the disc’s marquee track, “Hockey Skates,” she could feel the tide shifting: “I remember playing that song at local clubs and people would be like, ‘That’s awesome.’”

But even after the disc’s release, it wasn’t until she appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman that she got props from critics in her own country. “Things would have been very different last year had they not agreed to have me on the show. It really had this avalanche effect, where people were like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna be on Letterman?,’ especially in Canada. … ‘Now the national media will pay attention to you.’ I was doing 10 interviews a week with the Canadian national press … My record was out for months before and no one gave a shit. Maybe people liked it, but no one was willing to bring any attention to it until I had gone to an American program. I was pretty irritated by that, because I thought, ‘How many people are out there in Canada who are great songwriters [and] aren’t going to be playing on Letterman, but deserve national media attention. How stupid is it that we have to be vindicated or valued by American media to be valued by our own.’”

On a less serious note, Edwards cracks up when remembering some of her initial ideas for Back to Me, recalling how she told some journalists how the record would be sort of a “space record, kind of like a Sea Change/Beck record or something.” While that didn’t transpire, she says, “I certainly like to think that this record will stand up on its own. And whatever I choose to do after this, It will always be about the songs, because that’s what I like. I like writing good songs.”

“I have reoccurring dreams about The Edge,” Kathleen Edwards says matter of factly. The hip Canadian chanteuse and I are boozing and schmoozing at a cozy New York nightspot called The Slipper Room, which is hosting her publicity company’s annual Christmas party. With the smell of Maker’s Mark wafting from her glass, Edwards notes that, while she’s not a huge U2 fan (don’t get her started on Bono) there’s something ineffable about the band’s guitarist.

Edwards and I are two of a mere handful of writers, musicians and industry types paying attention to Nashville singer/songwriter Jessi Alexander, whose cover of Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” sparked the Edge musings. A good portion of the memorable guitar work on Edwards’ new album, Back to Me, recalls Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, at which she grins and says, “My guitarist thinks he’s The Edge, but he really sounds like Tom Petty.” Petty, amusingly, is the only other artist about which Edwards has recurring dreams.

“I wish I had reoccurring dreams about Andrew W.K. [instead]. That, I wouldn’t mind.”

When I meet with her the next morning, Edwards’ strawberry-blonde locks are fashioned in tiny pigtails, and she’s wearing thick, black-rimmed Buddy Holly specs she scored at Oliver Peoples in Manhattan.

Her baby-blue hotel room is comfy, with its stocked bookshelf, homey wallpaper and white coffee table—Ryan Adams’ number is scratched onto the back of a receipt (he wants to meet her in the studio today). With the honk- and whistle-filled bustle of Lexington Avenue and the frosty Gotham air pouring through the open windows, Edwards sits Indian style, sipping coffee and cracking jokes often.

In both appearance and conversation, she’s hardly the sad, pissed-off introvert she seems on her celebrated 2003 debut, Failer. We discuss Edwards’ former love for New Kids on the Block (Jordan Knight was her favorite) in between talk of the people and places flowing through Back to Me, and how she “totally choked” when she initially went in to record the disc.

“People think that I’m dark and brooding and suicidal,” she says. “You know what it is? I have all this pent-up, like, darkness and then I get it out, and then when I see people, I’m like, ‘Hey! My name’s Happy!’”

With each girlish giggle and self-deprecating anecdote, the easy-smiling singer emerges more and more—like your best friend’s little sister, the girl who’s forever shadowing the fellas. It’s appropriate, then, that when we ambled into her hotel room, the tube was tuned to SportsCenter. That said, she’s a natural beauty—equally alluring in the previous evening’s party dress as she was in the flannel shirt she wore for her first New York gig nearly two years ago.

While fun and quirky, the 26-year-old Ottawa native is confident but modest. Considering all the adulation heaped upon Failer, Edwards could have justifiably gotten a little full of herself over the past year. But before she could, the sophomore jinx jitters knocked her down a notch, at least in her own head.

“I remember doing interviews right up until the end of the Failer tour, and people were like, ‘So what’s the new record gonna be?’ and ‘How are you gonna go into it knowing that your last record did so well for you?’ I was like, ‘Oh, no problem,’” she says with a sweet, slightly embarrassed grin. “I was like, ‘I’m just gonna forget that there’s a record company, and I’m just gonna do my thing,’” she laughs.

“But I got to the studio and totally choked. I freaked out for the first couple of weeks. I was like, ‘This sucks’ and ‘What are we doing?’ I was doubting everything. And the songs that I knew were great, or I felt really good about months before, I was suddenly like, ‘I think this probably sucks.’ … Suddenly, my barometer was totally out of whack. I was in a couple of weeks of utter self-doubt, which was good, actually, but poor Colin [Cripps], who produced the record, he really held it together and stayed so even-keeled, which was amazing.” As the songs drew closer to completion, she regained her confidence. After some 200 shows in the past year, Edwards was less uncertain, however, about her singing. “On Failer, I didn’t sing like I felt good about singing. I really struggled to sing well, and I think that’s obvious—it’s tough to hear if I’m even singing. But on Back to Me, I’m singing more, rather than trying to; I’m not forcing it as much, I’m just singing.”

The same cast of barflies, lovers, friends and traitors on Failer return for Back to Me, simply because Edwards missed them.

After her career started blossoming last year, via a steady stream of rave reviews, Edwards began spending progressively less time in her rural hometown, opting for Toronto instead during breaks on the lengthy Failer tour. For a while, she kept a place back home, which she shared with a roommate. But eventually, she put her things in storage, with love—or something close—beckoning some 280 miles southwest in Toronto.

Back to Me charts the impact of the move on her heart, finding the lonely singer longing for her former life. “Thematically, the record’s about, sort of, dislocation and relocation and absence,” she says. “My worst nightmare would be to make a record that’s like”—she takes on the voice of any number of knucklehead stoner musicians who immediately send our eyes into the back of our heads—“‘I just spent the last year on the road, and it sucked.’ That’s not at all what those songs are about.

“I think it’s more, like, ‘I’m in Toronto and I miss my home, I miss my friends.’ It’s the little things that creep up on you after forgetting that they’re around. You forget, ‘Oh f---, I have all these great friends who I used to see every week or two, and I don’t see them at all anymore.’—just feeling sort of out of touch with something that was so wonderful in my life. But it was replaced with something else really wonderful. But it still doesn’t replace it. You still think about it.”

In “Copied Keys,” she offers, “This is not my town, and it will never be / This is our apartment filled with your things / This is your life, I get copied keys.” On “Independent Thief,” featuring My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, she bemoans the watered-down big-city drinks and her newfound loneliness: “I don’t want nothing from you / All I need is just some company.” In “Away,” she yearns to be back in an Ottawa dive: “I was rehearsing a part from down at the bar / My mouth smelled like a drink / We were laughing, I think / I’ve been away.”

“I think the only way of me trying to be a part of their lives or be a part of my old life,” says Edwards, “was to actually include them in what I’m doing now.”

Such life changes are rarely easy on anyone, but Edwards gave up something she spent her childhood seeking—stability. Although she’s spent the majority of her life in Ottawa, she grew up the daughter of a foreign serviceman who eventually became a Canadian ambassador. Consequently, she spent many of her formative years in Switzerland and Korea. After high school, though, there were no more two-year sabbaticals in Seoul, and her roots became further entrenched as she plied her craft in local bars. “When I moved to Toronto, I left something that I always wanted in my life since I was a kid, which was a community of friends and being able to live in the same place for years. I loved it, and I loved living in the country.”

On the new album, except for some accordion here and a pleasing horn arrangement there, musically, the formula is still very much the same. Back to Me is vintage Americana, if a bit more rousing at times. “I certainly don’t think I’ve gone on any departure of any kind, and I wasn’t ready to,” Edwards says, searching briefly for the right words. “I feel like I know what I’m good at at this point, without having tried too many other things. Not that I don’t want to try and expand on what I’m doing. [But] I don’t think what I’m doing is f---ing rocket science either. I try to have a good song and everything else just naturally falls into place. And I think everything on this record just came extremely naturally to accompany the songs.

“I totally love and respect songwriters who are open to trying anything and everything. But I’m a bit closed-minded still, and I’m still not ready to venture into a land where I feel like I’m not sure if it’s good and I’ll just do it anyway, just to try it.”

Edwards starting playing violin at age five, and took up guitar at 12. That same year, she began spending her summers at music camps, where the boys strummed Neil Young covers and the girls Ani DiFranco tunes. While she fell in love with Annie Lennox and Sinead O’Connor as a teen, DiFranco proved the biggest influence on her first recording, a 1999 EP co-written with a fellow Ottawa singer/songwriter Edwards describes as “much more ‘grrrr, chicky girrrrrr.’ I’m really percussively playing.

“While I don’t have the same sort of connection to her records the way I did when I was a teenager, I still think a huge part of my lyrical influence and the way that I write lyrics is based on her—not content wise. I loved how at the end of each line, there was always this poignant statement where you were like, ‘Yeah!’ I liked that she didn’t write any songs that weren’t about anything.”

After discovering Whiskeytown’s Stranger’s Almanac, Edwards found herself primarily listening to male voices and writing more Americana fare—even while she didn’t really know what Americana was at the time. “That record changed my life, my musical life—that and a few of Richard Buckner’s albums, too, like Devotion + Doubt and Since.

“What changed everything for me about Whiskeytown was the songs and that the songs were just so full of imagery without being these run-on songs—there was a start and a finish. And there wasn’t all this fluff in there to get to one line. It was like every line, every verse, to me, was complete, and I loved listening to songs that really evoked a lot of cinematic imagery. I was probably 20 when I first heard Whiskeytown. At that time, I didn’t know there was a Lucinda Williams, I didn’t know who Gram Parsons was; I knew who Steve Earle was, but I’d never listened to him before that.”

Her Whiskeytown epiphany led to the cycle of songs that would become Failer. Once she had the disc’s marquee track, “Hockey Skates,” she could feel the tide shifting: “I remember playing that song at local clubs and people would be like, ‘That’s awesome.’”

But even after the disc’s release, it wasn’t until she appeared on The Late Show With David Letterman that she got props from critics in her own country. “Things would have been very different last year had they not agreed to have me on the show. It really had this avalanche effect, where people were like, ‘Oh, you’re gonna be on Letterman?,’ especially in Canada. … ‘Now the national media will pay attention to you.’ I was doing 10 interviews a week with the Canadian national press … My record was out for months before and no one gave a shit. Maybe people liked it, but no one was willing to bring any attention to it until I had gone to an American program. I was pretty irritated by that, because I thought, ‘How many people are out there in Canada who are great songwriters [and] aren’t going to be playing on Letterman, but deserve national media attention. How stupid is it that we have to be vindicated or valued by American media to be valued by our own.’”

On a less serious note, Edwards cracks up when remembering some of her initial ideas for Back to Me, recalling how she told some journalists how the record would be sort of a “space record, kind of like a Sea Change/Beck record or something.” While that didn’t transpire, she says, “I certainly like to think that this record will stand up on its own. And whatever I choose to do after this, It will always be about the songs, because that’s what I like. I like writing good songs.”

It was one of the highlights of the year for me,” Kathleen Edwards says of the 2003 SXSW convention in Austin, Texas. Her breakout performance there this year became one of the most talked-about acts at the festival. “The year before I’d gone, and I’d played this little club. I wasn’t signed to Rounder yet, and it was actually the first time they came out to hear me play. So it was amazing to go back and have things be drastically different. I remember the year before when I went, Norah Jones was kind of everyone’s cup of tea, and it felt like I had been put into that sort of place at SXSW this year.”

Now, it seems impossible to think of what happened to Norah Jones in the months after last year’s SXSW—the near universal acclaim, the constant play on MTV2, the Grammys—and not wonder if Edwards is headed in the same direction. But if the thought crosses her mind, she doesn’t mention it. Edwards remains quite humble, and while she’s clearly ambitious, the accolades she’s received don’t seem to have raised her expectations particularly high. She still considers herself a nobody—when asked whether she’s bigger in the U.S. or in her native Canada, she replies, “I don’t think I’m big anywhere.” It seemed somehow fitting that of the four artists at this Paste cover shoot, Edwards was the only one not accompanied by at least one label representative to make sure the photos and interviews went smoothly.

The album that’s gotten Edwards so much attention is Failer, a collection of 10 country-inflected songs that fits comfortably under the Americana heading. She delivers the songs with straightforward confidence and disarming simplicity, and the album, though not particularly adventurous, possesses an extraordinary overall consistency, especially for someone so young. Edwards’ primary strength as a songwriter is melody, and much like Tom Petty and Neil Young, both of whom she cites as influences, she’s adept at composing strong, simple tunes that persistently work their way into your head. Her voice sounds wise and weary—almost jaded, which has led to countless comparisons with Lucinda Williams. But the comparison doesn’t quite fit—Edwards has none of Williams’ terse, spitting delivery, and none of her intensely psychological self-scrutiny as a writer.

“It’s a real honor to be even in the same sentence as Lucinda Williams,” she says, “but in terms of people thinking she’s been a big influence, it’s not really accurate. I think that what she’s done in the last 15 years paved the way for me to be received the way I have been. But people like Aimee Mann and Ani DiFranco have been far more influential for me personally.” Why country music, then? “Because my biggest influence to date is Whiskeytown. It just opened doors for me to listen to music that had country inflections without thinking of them as cheesy or tacky. I loved that they used country instruments in a way that wasn’t straight-ahead country. I’d never appreciated pedal steel before, and then it became my favorite instrument. To this day, I think Ryan Adams is my favorite songwriter of my generation.”

Edwards has been touring steadily for over a year now, and her audience is building. Immediately after the photo shoot she was whisked away to LaGuardia to catch a flight to Boston, where she co-headlined a show with The Thorns. The singer-songwriter started the year opening for Richard Buckner, followed by months of solo dates, and a lengthy stint opening for Guster, for Edwards a less than satisfying experience. “The Guster fans just couldn’t be bothered. I had people in the front row leaning there, looking bored, talking on their cell phones. I’d rather be at home, writing or hanging out with my cats.” And home is where she’s headed now, after another week of shows. There she’ll have some time to relax before starting work on her next record in the spring.

“A year or two from now, I’ll be opening for her,” Richard Buckner said of Kathleen Edwards, a 24-year-old Canadian who—on his 2002 tour anyway—is opening for the veteran songwriter. “Whatever it is, she’s got it.”

Her debut, Failer, certainly suggests as much. The throaty Edwards sounds like Lucinda Williams with far fewer miles on the odometer, and she mines similar veins of hard living and love gone wrong for her lyrics.

But Edwards doesn’t sound like an acolyte. She’s got moxie, but a refreshingly fragile honesty in her writing tones down the bravado. On “Hockey Skates,” when Edwards asks “if the ‘boys’ club’ will “crumble just because of a loud-mouthed girl,” the swagger and self-effacement form a neat balance. She’s aware of the cost, but not afraid to confront it.

That symmetry pervades Failer. Edwards slips comfortably between song styles—from straight-ahead rockers (“One More Song the Radio Won’t Like,” “12 Bellevue”) to country and folk-tinged tunes (“Mercury,” “National Steel”)—without suggesting that she’s trying on any of them. She sounds like she’s been at it for decades.

The arrangements help. The 10 songs include a nice range of instrumentation (organs, alto/baritone/soprano saxophones, vibes, banjo and pedal steel) all expertly done. But ultimately Edwards’ voice and lyrics stand out; it would be nice to say that about the debuts of more artists.

(You can purchase Kathleen Edwards' Failer here.)