Music

Interview: Kathleen Edwards

Tom Jenkins | Monday 23 January, 2012 16:36

The process of writing an album can be a cathartic and therapeutic experience. The problem is, once those emotions are committed to tape, exorcised if you like, one then has to spend the next year talking about them to irritating music journalists. One such irritant, i.e. me, is currently debating this unfortunate conundrum with Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards.

‘Albums, all albums I suppose, are snapshots of a few years of a life’ she says. ‘I’ve had some joyous experiences but also some really painful ones. I’ve experienced redemption, felt elated, renewed…I feel like a new person. It’s hard to then go back and dissect those feelings’.

We’re discussing Edwards’ new album Voyageur, her fourth and the follow-up to 2008’s acclaimed, Polaris Prize nominated, Asking for Flowers. It appears, after repeated listens, to be an album of transition. Relationships, old and failed, new and liberating, are alluded to. One gets the feeling Edwards has started something of a second life recently. Excitement, albeit with a hint of nerves, peppers her speech when she talks about it.

‘It’s my best work, the music I love’ she says. ‘It’s lived up to my expectations. After the last record I felt I’d fallen into a certain pattern of songwriting. With Voyageur I feel I’ve accomplished something different’.

Accomplishing something different involved sharing writing duties for the first time, primarily with John Roderick of The Long Winters. Edwards spent several weeks demoing songs with Roderick in Seattle, a process she found ‘pretty scary…pretty uncomfortable’, at least at first. ‘Playing these half-finished songs to somebody when you don’t even know if they’re any good…ultimately I’m not much of a co-writer. I don’t want it to turn into a session of parliament you know? But I wanted a different end-place, a different end result’.

That leap of faith appears to have paid off. Voyageur has been garnering rave reviews pretty much across the board. It features a host of collaborators including Norah Jones, Stornoway and Francis and the Lights. The legendary Linda Rondstadt was even muted at one point, ‘but it didn’t work out…she would have been amazing’, sighs Edwards.

In a recent interview, Edwards’ current beau and Voyageur co-producer Justin Vernon of Bon Iver expressed his desire to see her step out of the boxes into which she’s been placed. ‘The whole Canadian Americana thing…I have no control over labels’ she says. ‘I wanted to make a record about who I am as an artist. I’m starting rehearsals with my band tomorrow then we’ll be playing these songs for the next six months. I can’t really think about anything else’.

Voyageur is out now on Rounder Records

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