Kathleen Edwards - Voyageur It would be easy to pigeonhole Kathleen Edwards on several fronts, and not just because she exudes a pugnacious Canadianism that sometimes can sit uneasily with American listeners, who typically expect nothing but quiet politeness from their northern friends; this woman sings about sex and drops lines about Marty McSorely and the CBC. The answer to how Canadian is Kathleen Edwards? is: more than you. "I'm moving to America!" she yelps at the start of her first album in three years, but quickly backtracks. "It's an empty threat." But in some ways it's not: last year she divorced Canadian music scene kingpin Colin Cripps and shacked up with Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon, symbolically moving her emotional allegiance southwards, or at least laterally (Vernon lives in Wisconsin). It's a testament to the way people feel about her up north that they worried enough about her "becoming American" (like Neil Young, who once long ago traded in his maple leaf for a Topanga Canyon bumper sticker), and she, in turn, loved them enough in return that she felt it necessary to reassure them with the very first track from her very latest album that she wasn't really going anywhere. Beyond the overt otherness of Edwards, her second "problem" is that she owns a voice that might just be too pretty for the brittle words and hard stances that define her work. It's not a folk voice, neither in the traditional sense or even within the looser strictures of the indie or freak folk world (and she conforms imperfectly to any of these genres in other ways, as well). She's often compared to Suzanne Vega, but with qualifiers: Vega with a machine gun, or Neil Young strapped to her back. No one knows exactly what to make of Kathleen Edwards, but it's becoming harder to simply ignore her. On "Voyageur" she front-loads the prettiest material, so it's a little like excavating a mine that produces wistful nostalgia and sunsets in reverse; by the time you get to the album's first real breakup song, "A Soft Place to Land," the pain starts to seep in through the (here we go again) Canuckishly optimistic sarcasm, like spidery cracks in a tastefully applied paint scheme. "My love is a stockpile of broken wills," she sighs, "like Santa Fe, margaritas and sleeping pills." "House Full of Empty Rooms" requires no explanation, but the presence of Vernon begins to assert itself by this point, which feels awfully voyeuristic; would you want to supervise the recording of what amounts to essentially your girlfriend's diary entries, set to music, about her ex-husband and how she might not have deserved that guy's love but now she's with you so everything's cool and you'll just help her make her record and buy her plane tickets to Eau Claire every two or three weeks until she gets her head straightened out and stops writing songs about some other dude? Apparently, if you're Justin Vernon, the answer is "yes, please sign me up." "Mint" is where the electric guitars come in and also the point where Edwards unleashes her inner Liz Phair. "The taste of it," she coos. "You were a field of it." Swaying like a rustic porch swing, it almost feels like a Jayhawks song, except one probably about oral sex instead of abandoned railroad stations. The innuendo gets so thick on "Going to Hell" ("From mountain paths to prairie grass, anywhere you go I'll follow," she tells her lover) that she's apparently taken to explaining in concert that it's also about Canadian geography, "because I lust for Canada." Dirty or not, it's a gorgeous song, perfectly representative of the flirty but firm backbone that Edwards develops over the last third of "Voyageur." The set ends with "For the Record," which really does read like testimony: "So hang me up on your cross / for the record, I only wanted to sing songs." Norah Jones guests on the song, almost inexplicably, but there are a lot of things that are still kind of hard to understand about Kathleen Edwards, despite her best efforts to over-explain most of them. This very appealing record, however, plays like easy-listening or torch balladry, sometimes within the running time of a single song, and helps make clear that Edwards does not love misery so much as she loves the idea of being miserable, while fully retaining the right to also be sexy or tough or silly. Or Canadian. Tjames Madison SoundSpike				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews