Music preview: Hockey plays a role in Edwards' music The first time Kathleen Edwards played Pittsburgh - February 2003 at Club Cafe - the alt-country darling from Ottawa slipped two songs into her set that revealed her love of hockey. One was the wistful tomboy lament, "Hockey Skates," and the other was "Shinny," a more rowdy song referring to the reckless Canadian style of playing with no pads and no rules. The bad news about Edwards and her hockey fandom is that she's a diehard fan of a team that is not near and dear to Penguins fans, and a team we might see sometime in April. "I do love the Penguins," she says, "partly because of Mario. He's a hero in our country, but I'll always be a Sens fan - and you're goin' down." The good news is that she continues to find a way to slide hockey into her songs - brilliantly. She brightens her third album, "Asking for Flowers," with a rocker that actually manages to reference legendary enforcer Marty McSorley. "It just kind of fell out of my mouth," she says, in a phone interview advancing her show Tuesday night at the Rex. "I was writing the chorus for that song and singing 'I'm a Ford Tempo/you're a Maserati,' and 'You're The Great One/I'm Marty McSorley' just fell out of my mouth. I don't know where that came from but as soon as I said it, I just chuckled to myself and said, 'Yep, that's it.' " The critically acclaimed "Asking for Flowers" is Edwards' first album in three years, and she admits it didn't come as easily as the first two. "It took a lot longer. You can't go and record an album you don't have songs for, so I definitely had to stay home for a while, and I just didn't want to write songs for the sake of writing songs. I don't work well under those kinds of deadlines." During the downtime after her extensive touring for "Back to Me," she started writing the album while working on her piano and violin playing. But she also took a job at a winery in Ontario, partly to be around wine and partly to be away from music. "It was awesome. When you work in the complete opposite hours of the general society, you start romanticizing the notion of 9 to 5. Not that I don't appreciate my life," she says. "I love my life, and I'm really lucky to do what I do, but it was nice to show up at a place to work where I really wanted to be. I really wanted to be at the winery and lose myself in living a different life for a while. It was really hard work, lifting boxes and going hardcore from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day and going home exhausted. It helped me to see what people have to do to keep their lives together." Edwards recorded the 11 songs for "Asking for Flowers" in Los Angeles with her husband, guitarist Colin Cripps, and some ringers including Benmont Tench (Heartbreakers), Don Heffington (Bob Dylan) and pedal steel ace Greg Leisz (Wilco, Plant & Krauss). She hired Jim Scott as co-producer out of fondness for his work with Whiskeytown. "When I met him in 2004, it was like the clouds parting," she says. "I was so nervous going to the studio to meet Jim Scott. I associated him as much with the records I love as the people who actually sang them." Scott adds atmosphere to her rich, graceful songs about relationships, ranging from the feisty rocker 'The Cheapest Key" to the mournful ballad "Alicia Ross," a song about a teenage girl who is murdered and now addressing her mom from the beyond. The tour means having to confront the subject every night, and she says it was especially difficult playing the song to a crowd that included her own mom. "I think she wonders how I came to this place," Edwards says. "It was written in the mindset of 'How would my mother feel knowing that I was killed by someone and then cut up into pieces?' It's really gruesome, but it happens to people. And your mother spends her whole life taking care you of and protecting you and then suddenly someone does that to you. How do you get out of bed in the morning every day after that?" Another topical song is "Oil Man's War," less a protest song than a Springsteen-style narrative about a young man and his girlfriend fleeing north to Canada to avoid getting shipped overseas. As anyone who's seen her knows, Edwards is an outspoken person and an opponent of the war, but she's careful about how she talks about it. 'The thing that's difficult," she says, "is that I'm a Canadian citizen, and I don't really believe it's my place to stand on the stage in Birmingham, Ala., and oppose the war - especially in a place like Birmingham where there are a lot of Republicans and there's a philosophy of supporting the troops. You do bite your tongue a lot. I sometimes don't feel like it's my place. I don't have a family member fighting in Iraq, so how would I know what that feels like?" Scott Mervis Pittsburgh Post-Gazette				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews