Heartache & bliss Kathleen Edwards poured her heart - and her heartache - into an ambitious album co-produced with new boyfriend Justin Vernon of Bon Iver The album: Voyageur by Kathleen Edwards is released Jan. 17 The show: Kathleen Edwards plays the Bronson Centre Feb. 9. Tickets at www.ticketmaster.ca Catch her on TV: Edwards appears on Late Night with David Letterman on Jan. 17 (11:30 p.m. on CBS) while Bon Iver appears on Saturdurday Night Live on Feb. 4 (12:30 a.m. on NBC) Kathleen Edwards fiddles with the quail feathers on her fetching green hat and breaks into a crooked grin: "I"m not very good at skirting around." The Canadian singer-songwriter is talking about the confrontational style of her music, a dark honesty that she says is only becoming more acute as she gets older. Full of fluid, melancholic vocals, sinuous guitar playing and deadly, economic wordplay, the 33-year-old"s country-rock songs tackle everything from small-town narrow-mindedness (Hockey Skates) to trigger-happy boyfriends (Six O"Clock News) to her self-deluding wedding day (Pink Champagne). But she could just as well be referring to the conversational elephant that"s draping its trunk around our shoulders as we speak before her gig at the Rough Trade record shop in East London. Because, as wittily, perceptively and earthily as Edwards discusses her itinerant childhood, her self-doubt, her quietly successful career and her exquisite new album, Voyageur, there is one untouched topic that won't go away. Voyageur, a career high point, was co-produced by Justin Vernon, the frontman of the much-lauded Bon Iver. Who also happens to be her boyfriend. It"s hard not to be curious about her relationship with Vernon. Firstly because he is the most eligible of indie bachelors - Bon Iver"s eponymous second album was the most critically praised of 2011 according to Metacritic, the reviews aggregator. And secondly because this represents something of a fairy tale denouement for both of them. Vernon had made his name with an album, For Emma, Forever Ago, themed around a breakup with his girlfriend. And Edwards had seen the end of her five-year marriage to the guitarist Colin Cripps, which had inspired several of the songs on the album. So which came first: professional collaboration, or amorous? "It was pretty simultaneous," she laughs, visibly relieved to acknowledge that elephant. It"s like something out of a movie, I say: two lost souls thrown together by fate. "I know!" she says. "Sign me up for the cliché ..." Her Hollywood ending had an eventful lead-up. Born in Ottawa, the daughter of a diplomat, Edwards spent her childhood in Geneva and then Seoul. "I was uprooted and it made me very solitary," she says, removing the hat to reveal a mane of red hair. "Music became my best friend." By 1999, back in Canada, she was playing open-mike nights, recording an EP, and touring in her Suburban truck, booking her own shows, making just enough petrol money to get her to the next town. She was based in the Ottawa area, and played venues such as the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield. Four years later, with two acclaimed albums under her belt, she was playing the David Letterman and Jay Leno television shows, opening for Willie Nelson and Bryan Adams, being compared to Lucinda Williams and named by Rolling Stone as one of their "10 artists to watch." (She"s back on Letterman to talk about the new album on Jan. 17.) When she first met Vernon, at the suggestion of mutual friends, to work on a couple of songs, she wasn't sizing him up as a producer ("He was just too charming"). But Vernon was newly confident behind a mixing desk after the second Bon Iver album, on which he had deployed his full arsenal of bells and whistles. "It was so nice to be with someone who could articulate all those things and then go and do them." With Vernon"s support, her music evolved from a "kinda rootsy, kinda country" sound to a richer, more textured world with more room for synths, pianos and electric guitars. At the same time her lyrics moved from third-person character studies to more autobiographical songs such as Pink Champagne, a mournful recollection of her wedding day ("I don't wanna feel this way"). Cripps has heard it, she says: "I can't imagine it"s easy for him to hear." How about Vernon - did they talk about their old wounds during the making of the album? "Yeah, we did. It was really easy to be vulnerable, and not feel judged. Justin and I met at a really strange time in both our lives ... We were both ready to have the conversations that we had," she says, and any moments of "redemption or bliss" on the record, and there are a few, are linked to Vernon. She gives him "all the credit in the world" for his role in the album, "but I also give myself credit." But though Edwards is clearly in love - she talks about leaving her home in Toronto and moving in with Vernon in Wisconsin - and delighted with Voyageur, neither has dispelled her artistic insecurities. "Since I finished this record I've never been so scared in my life. I think it"s the best work I've done but what happens, when it comes out, if I still can't sell out a room that I've played three times in London? Does that mean I"m just not very good?" Anyone who hears Voyageur will realize that"s nonsense, but self-doubt only intensifies when one"s paramour is the golden boy of the U.S. alternative scene. Edwards has been supporting Bon Iver on tour and often hears Vernon"s fans chat during her sets. She has learned "not to be super-sensitive about it, to say: 'Well, if I were excited to see Bon Iver maybe I"d be talking too." " But there are still nights when "you walk offstage feeling like you've poured your heart out and someone just f***ing stubs it out like a cigarette". Such dramatic pronouncements confirm her as a paid-up member of the Canadian soul-searching club that stretches from Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell to Rufus Wainwright and Leslie Feist. She puts the tradition down to two things: "Geography and sex. My songs are basically where those two influences meet." The geography bit makes sense - all those wide open spaces - but what"s distinctive about Canadian sex?" She grins another crooked grin: "We have long winters!" Ed Potton Ottawa Citizen				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews