From laying low to standing tall Kathleen Edwards got the glory for new alt-country album. Burnt out from the touring that followed her 2005 album Back to Me, Canadian alt-country singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards returned home to Ontario to "lay low for a while," as she puts it. Rushing back into the studio - even if she'd been so inclined - wasn't a possibility for one simple reason: "I didn't have any new songs." So, Edwards settled into married life with guitarist/producer Colin Cripps (one of her four touring band members), worked in a local winery, sung on some friends' records, and mastered piano "so that I'd be more versatile a musician and less afraid of that instrument." She emerged recently with Asking for Flowers, the most acclaimed and accomplished record of her career. Gone were many of the wistful boy-meets-girl tunes found on her first two albums; Edwards was dealing with weightier topics, ranging from the death of her grandmother ("Scared at Night") to murder (the true-life "Alicia Ross") to racism ("O Canada"). But Edwards has retained (and even expanded on) her open-hearted and clear-minded lyricism - not to mention the very wry sense of humor that comes through on certain tracks, such as the get-lost love song "I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory." "I trusted my instincts throughout this process," Edwards said. "I wanted to try some new things. I wanted to hear strings. I was less afraid of putting a six-minute song on it. If something didn't feel right, I addressed it. If it did, I went with it." Working with producer Jim Scott - who had mixed her last album and engineered Tom Petty's 1994 Wildflowers, which Edwards calls 'The soundtrack to my teenage years" - was incredible, she says: "I'm in every one of those songs, even the ones that aren't about my own life, and hopefully that comes through." Nicole Pensiero The Philadelphia Inquirer				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews