Pop: Mistress of the killer line Her razor-sharp lyrics put alt-country singer Kathleen Edwards in a class of her own, says Mark Edwards There's an episode of Friends where Joey makes a new year's resolution to play guitar and asks Phoebe to teach him. Phoebe agrees, but won't let him hold a guitar or learn any of the real names of the chords. On the surface, this is all comedy shtick, covering up the fact that Phoebe can't really play - "I don't know the actual names of the chords, but I made up names for the way my hand looks while I'm doing them" - but maybe the scriptwriter was exorcising some personal demon, because just maybe they went to the same music teacher as Kathleen Edwards, the rising singer of Americana. "My first violin was a box with a ruler sticking out of it," says Edwards, recalling her childhood music lessons, "and I had that for a month. I went to lessons and I'd say, when am I going to get my violin? 'That is your violin.' No, when am I going to get my real violin? It was torture, and my parents were in on it too. I was five, you know." With this combination of early musical training and early traumatic experiences, it's hardly surprising that Edwards has emerged as one of the best new singer-songwriters around. Following the release of her debut album, Failer, she's been compared to Lucinda Williams. Given that Edwards is a rootsy, countryish, tough-sounding female singer, the comparison is the obvious one, but a few listens also reveal echoes of Neil Young's melodic sensibility and (although Edwards is only 24) his world-weary vocal style, plus some of the look-out-I'm-coming-through push and shove of Springsteen's early albums. Altogether, it's a brilliant debut. The woolly hat Edwards wears throughout our interview is another reminder of the early Springsteen look. Matched with jeans and a plaid shirt, it gives Edwards a down-to-earth, plain-speaking look that is only underlined by the fact that she has called her publishing company Potty Mouth Productions. 'that's been my nickname for a few years. I curse like a sailor when I'm on stage," she says. "Somebody once told me: 'You only say fuck because you don't know a better word to use.'" This claim is roundly refuted by the razor-sharp lyrics to her songs. Take, for example, Westby, the tale of a young girl mixed up with a much older man. The true nature of the relationship is revealed when the girl says: "And if you weren't so old, I'd tell my friends about you. But I don't think your wife would like my friends." Other lyrics on the album - "No-one likes a girl who won't sober up", for example - suggest that as well as a potty mouth, Edwards also likes a drink. 'The large amount of alcohol content in the record is very realistic to the lifestyle I was living and that the people around me were living," Edwards admits. "But I hated seeing people I really cared about wasting the little money they had in their pocket on buying everyone a round week in, week out. They were people who I thought had the potential to do so much more with their lives, but they're the only people who can dig themselves out of it. Those are some of the people in these songs." Edwards almost joined them. Having only recently left school and moved out of her parents' home, she says: "I'd just been let off the leash. I was living on my own, and I wanted to do everything I could, wanted to go out every night, but, as time went by, I realised that the one thing that I really wanted to do, and kept insisting to myself that I really wanted to do, I wasn't actually doing." So Edwards moved to the country, a 40-minute drive outside Ottawa, and rented a farmhouse that didn't even have a television. "And it was: you can either go for a walk in the field, or you can clean your room, or you can feed the cats, or you can play the guitar. So it was a lot easier for me to finish a song, instead of half-finishing it then going to the local bar." Edwards talks enthusiastically of her new home, as you might expect of someone who spent much of her childhood travelling the world, including spells in Geneva and Seoul, since her father is a Canadian diplomat. And we should probably pause here and consider the implications for Canadian diplomacy if that violin story ever got around: "While we would normally accept your word on this, Mr Ambassador, the small matter of your statements concerning the true nature of a box and a ruler has been drawn to our attention..." One of the highlights of Failer is One More Song the Radio Won't Like, a witty debunking of the music-industry chancers - "his name was at the door, but no-one knew what for" - who told Edwards they loved her album, but there wasn't a single on it, so she'd better go away and write one. Fortunately, the title of the song has proved heavily ironic, since radio does indeed like Edwards's music. Although she has trouble getting airplay in Canada, it's a different story in the USA, where she's been embraced by both radio and television, recently appearing on both the Tonight Show and David Letterman. "Yeah," says Edwards, "it's funny how what everybody said about radio singles..." She tails off and shrugs. For someone nicknamed Potty Mouth it's a surprisingly polite way of saying, "I was right and they were wrong." On Letterman, Edwards played the album's opening track, Six O'Clock News, a dark tale of lives spinning out of control. The song ends with a man killing himself, leaving his pregnant lover numb with grief - "I can't feel my broken heart"; but you're only half-way through the first verse when Edwards hits you with the killer line: "You spend half your life trying to turn the other half around." "People hit 35, 40, and they're like, hey, I want all these things now - oh, I should have done this and this and this, and then maybe I'd be in a better position to have them. But as someone who's 15-20 years away from that, I can see how it happens. It's the last thing that enters your mind, that you're going to get old one day, and there are going to be things that you don't want to have to be doing then. You see, I write songs that are like, hey, I figured it out, it all makes sense now - but that's bullshit." As our interview winds down, it becomes clear that Edwards's only concern about her sudden success is that it's keeping her away from her garden. "It's a bit of a bummer," she says. "I spent a lot of money on perennials last year, and they're just going to go to shit." Mark Edwards timesonline.co.uk				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews