Her Canadian roots show through It was almost three years to the day between the releases of Kathleen Edwards's last album, "Back to Me," and the new "Asking for Flowers." Considering the two-year gap separating "Back to Me" from her highly regarded debut, "Failer," the delay may not seem like much. more stories like this But by her own reckoning, Edwards was on the road nonstop from 2001 to 2006, during which time she made her first two albums and learned to be a touring musician in one extended fit of creative energy. For number three, she took a break. "I just was constantly on the go," she says. "And in early 2006, I basically had no perspective on where I was going and what I wanted to do, and I just needed time to go home and reassess. I couldn't make a record with songs I didn't have, so I had to just stay home for a while and sort of wait for the songs to reappear in my head again." "Asking for Flowers" is Edwards's third album, and very possibly her best. The Ottawa-based singer, who plays at the Paradise Rock Club tonight, began writing songs as a teenager once she discovered (no thanks to her high school English class) her passion for reading, and her songs often play like short stories set against a rootsy backdrop. As a result, Edwards has been portrayed as chasing one particular artist's shadow ever since "Failer" helped make her name. "Honestly, this is kind of funny," she says, "but I don't see how I sound like Lucinda Williams. She's from Louisiana. I'm from Canada. Sometimes I struggle to know how we sound similar." Certainly, "Flowers" is steeped in her homeland, from casual references to the CBC (that would be the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and NHL player Marty McSorley to songs like "Oh Canada" and "Oil Man's War," which probe what it means to live above the 49th parallel. But ironically, it's that infusion of geography that extends the Williams comparisons beyond whatever superficial similarities their music may share, as both artists draw heavily on the places they know best. According to Edwards, it couldn't be any other way. "What is supposed to be my geographical center if not the country that I live in?," she asks. "I can't help it. It's my identity. It's where I'm from and generally what I write about. I'm not writing about places I don't know anything about or places that I don't know inside and out." Even so, Edwards doesn't let her own country off the hook. In the searing "Oh Canada," she co-opts the title of her national anthem in order to shine a light on injustices that many of her countrymen sweep under the rug. "A lot of people look at Canada and say, 'Oh, it's such a great country and there are no problems there, and there's no racism and there's no poverty,' or, 'They're really socialist,' and this and that. And the truth is, I think sometimes Canadians do that a lot and then become complacent to things that are wrong," says Edwards. "I don't think it should take the murder of a white person to signal a problem, when there are a lot of people of all different colors being killed by gun violence in the city." Edwards's willingness to sing straightforwardly about tough topics found a fan in six-time Grammy winner Jim Scott (the Dixie Chicks, Wilco, Foo Fighters), who shared the producer's chair with her for "Flowers." He says that material as strong as Edwards's is rare. "I think writing really good songs is really hard," says Scott. "I think it's almost impossible, and that's why there's so few great songwriters out there. But especially on this record, it's not a feel-good record. There's a lot of really heavy topics and a lot of sadness in this record, and that's pretty great." Still, as befits someone who once took a Greyhound bus from Canada to New York for a "Letterman" appearance, Edwards manages to leaven "Flowers" with humor. On one song, "I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory," the singer compares herself to McSorley, one of hockey's most-penalized players and someone who faced criminal prosecution for an on-ice assault in 2000. "I'm not [picking on] Marty McSorley," Edwards swears. "In fact, I want him to be in my music video for that song, because I think it would be awesome. Despite the way that maybe his career ended in the NHL, he allowed Wayne Gretzky to be great. He took a lot of hits for Wayne, and he dished a lot of them out so that Wayne could get all of the glory. "Basically, I'm aligning myself as Marty McSorley in the song," says Edwards. "And I'm not all bad." Marc Hirsh The Boston Globe				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews