A conversation with Kathleen Edwards Canadian singer-wongwriter sings sweetly and carries a big stick Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards lulls you with a graceful, almost childlike voice, then shocks you out of your serenity with lyrics that can be horrifying or hilarious. "Alicia Ross," a track on her new album "Asking For Flowers," sets a pastoral back-porch scene that subtly segues into a vicious attack. It's based on the true story of a murder in Edwards' home province of Ontario. She displays her wit on the next track, "I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory." In the song about playing second fiddle she's amusingly self-effacing ("You're the buffet, I'm just the table") and references a famous hockey player (Wayne Gretzky) and a not-so-famous player (Marty McSorley) who made his living in a secondary role protecting The Great One on the ice. Edwards, 29, who performs Monday at Higher Ground, talked about "Asking For Flowers" - her first album since "Back To Me" in 2005 - last week by phone from Toronto: Burlington Free Press: Why three years between albums? Kathleen Edwards: Part of it is that I can't write on the road and that's where I spent so much time in the last few years. In 2001, I finished recording "Failer" (her first album), and it came out in 2003, and in the past five or six years, I've been on a major learning curve - touring to publishing to record contracts to being focused on staying a songwriter and meeting a million new people. It's been a pretty crazy five years, and in the spring of 2006, I was going to have to make a new record, and I said, "I'm going to have to go home because I have no songs. I have to think about where to go next and refuel my engines and not put out a record for the sake of putting out a new record." The reason a lot of bands put out crappy records that no one can relate to, that's because they don't stop. Half of the stories on the record are stories of my friends or my family. I wouldn't have been able to reflect on those things on the road. You just don't have the time or the energy. You're always in self-preservation mode on the road. You forget that people work, that people get up at 7 or 6 in the morning. BFP: In an interview on CTV recently you were talking about recording some of "Asking For Flowers" at home and having to turn the heat off because it rattled so much. Can you talk more about what the recording process was like? KE: I went to California and worked with (co-producer) Jim Scott for a few days, and there were certain players I wanted on these songs who were in Canada and I couldn't afford to fly them to California so we ended up doing some stuff in my house. That's my piano at home on the first song, "Buffalo," with the squeak of the pedal and everything, which I think is really hilarious. We had to turn the furnace off because the rumble of the furnace would have added nothing to the production value. BFP: You have a sweet, innocent voice yet your songs are sometimes brutally frank, a contradiction that brings that much more punch to what you're singing. Do you hold back a little vocally to create that juxtaposition? KE: "Asking For Flowers" was one of the first songs we recorded for the new record, and I remember recording it and singing it normally and taking the demo home to Canada and saying to Jim Scott, "I was singing it too sweetly," and he said, "What do you mean? It sounds like you." I said, "Maybe it's a little too precious or girly" and he said, "You gave a great performance, and it's what your voice sounds like." It's one of the first times I thought about accepting that I sound the way I sound. It would be strange to try to change the way I sing because it sounds too pretty. BFP: Some of your songs, especially "I Make The Dough, You Get the Glory," straddle that country/pop/folk/rock line. Did it ever cross your mind to do the whole Nashville thing and make it as a country singer? KE: I just don't think I would sound like myself if I tried to have a certain sound. It just doesn't really interest me. I really even still get confused about being considered a country artist. I think it's because of the songwriting tradition, that country music is such a really deeply rooted songwriting culture, and now what I think sucks about it is it's all about gimmick, a clever turn of phrase. BFP: Do you sometimes surprise listeners, especially guys, who don't expect a female singer-songwriter to know about hockey? KE: It happened the other day. I did a radio event in Denver, and this woman came up after and said, "My husband and I came and he said, 'She's going to be another chicky singer-songwriter,' and you do that song with Marty McSorley and everybody laughs at it," and they walked away with one of my records. The thing I don't want to be is a songwriter in the sprit of Jewel - boring. Books I love are books that make you laugh and cry, and I don't mean that in an Oprah's Book Club way. The stories I'm telling, I'm trying to make them real. Brent Hallenbeck Burlington Free Press				Album reviews Feature articles Interviews Show reviews