Singing In The Wires Kathleen Edwards gets plugged in to her own muse "...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." – Kathleen Edwards Having had her whole life to draw upon for her much-buzzed-about 2003 debut Failer, with enough raw stuff left over for her 2005 follow-up Back To Me, Kathleen Edwards faced a familiar problem for a songwriter after she finished touring in support of the latter. "I had no new material," she said, "and no ideas." Did she panic? No more than her hockey heroes up in Canada do when they're down a goal or two. During a lengthy hiatus, in fact, the Ottawa native did her best to avoid writing. She concentrated on singing, contributing alluring backup vocals to John Doe's A Year In The Wilderness (Exene who?) and performing at Farm Aid and on the Grand Ole Opry. She learned to play piano, having been trained on classical violin beginning at age 5. And she settled into married life in an old brick house outside Hamilton, Ontario, with her ace guitarist and producer, Colin Cripps, and his collection of vintage radios and clocks. "I had no plans to make a record," Edwards said. "I was in no rush. I recorded things in different segments of time. For the first time, I didn't care if a song was five or six or seven minutes long, or had longer instrumental parts. I wasn't worried whether a song was radio accessible. By then, I was happily beyond the feeling that I had a strong debut and if I didn't follow it up with something equally good, the world would come to an end." She had a good excuse not to strap on her guitar and get back to the roots-rock drawing board. With its ancient knob and tube wiring, her house is not receptive to the plugging in of amps. "It's the thorn in my side," she said. 'There is a send line and a return line which are secured onto ceramic knobs throughout the house. Insurance companies hate it when you buy a house with it. But there's really nothing wrong with it. What sucks about it is that the entire line is connected, so if you were to cut the line and insert new wiring and a plug in a room, it will interrupt the rest of the entire house. When you built a house in 1929, the house was built to last, not like today." Ultimately, for an artist who at age of 29 writes songs that are built to last, the "goddamn wiring" proved surmountable. On her new album, Asking For Flowers (due March 4 on Zoe/Rounder), Edwards deepens her artistic voice without losing any of her tomboyish edge or Tom Pettyish energy. As she demonstrates on "Oh Canada" (which features Petty sideman Benmont Tench on organ, and is not to be confused with the Canadian anthem "O Canada"), she can slash and burn with the best of them. She wasn't born under the flag of Neil Young for nothing. But she's never too fired up to miss the telling narrative detail. "My life is like a picture left out too long in the sun," she sings on the album's title track. "Now I'm trying to remember all the faces of the names I've loved." One of the reasons Edwards has been able to conquer the sophomore jinx as a songwriter is her willingness and ability to go beyond personal revelation and look outside her own experience, finding expression in lives she hasn't led. If a certain sameness characterized her earlier efforts - one recurring criticism of Back To Me was that it sounded like a remake of her debut - Asking For Flowers charts new territory in painting scenes, telling stories and, above all, creating moods. Being happily married can't help cramping her style a bit by detoxifying her caustic outlook on romance. Flowers isn't without its kiss-offs and romantic fare-thee-wells, but her canvas has expanded. On "Oil Man's War", which is set during the Vietnam era but is handily adaptable to the present, a young man plots to stay with his girlfriend and avoid fighting on foreign soil. "Oh Canada" is a snarling indictment of a society in which 'There are no headlines when a black girl dies." On "Alicia Ross", based on an actual story, Edwards assumes the voice of a young suburban Toronto woman who was missing for more than a month when it was determined she had been murdered by the guy next door. "You know that scene in ‘Ghost' where Patrick Swayze jumps in Whoopi Goldberg's body to become that person?" Edwards asked. "I wanted to do that with this girl. I was trying to channel her, to reveal the last thoughts she had about her mother, who had to beg for someone to come forward with information about her daughter. "I probably could have picked easier stuff. But once I started, I was so drawn to this person, to this family, to this story, I knew I had to sit down and write it until I was finished. It was disturbing. But I drank gin until it was done. Gin played a major role." Asking For Flowers, which features pedal steel wiz Greg Leisz, lyrical bassist Sebastian Steinberg and guitarist/keyboardist Jim Bryson, was produced by Jim Scott. His work on the 1997 Whiskeytown classic Strangers Almanac made Edwards a fan of his for life. She has credited Ryan Adams' "brutal, perfect simplicity" on the Whiskeytown album with changing the way she writes songs. Spare and succinct, "Goodnight California", the final track on Asking For Flowers, is one of her most deeply affecting songs. Building slowly and plaintively over organ, harmonica and Edwards' swatches of vibraphone, its textures deepened by strings, the tune is a middle-of-the-night classic. "I won't let you in my heart," she sings. "But you are always on my mind." 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. Lloyd Sachs No Depression				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews