Talented artist brings honest tunes here
By Kevin W. Smith
KSMITH@AZSTARNET.COM
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 05.08.2008
It's easy to imagine the music of Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards blaring inside a local Starbucks.
But the ubiquitous coffee goliath doesn't carry her albums.
The caffeine-pusher is missing out on promoting a former-employee-made-good, as the talented 29-year-old used to work at a Starbucks in Ottawa, Canada, beginning around 1998.
"It was like the best years of my life," Edwards said.
The daughter of a Canadian diplomat, Edwards spent some of her youth overseas in places like Korea before settling in Ottawa. She stops at Club Congress Tuesday.
Her music has an upfront and honest attitude that pumps through her dry voice, which can convey open-eyed innocence as easily as cynicism as cold as a Manitoba winter gust.
Edwards' lyrics likewise shift dramatically on her third album, "Asking for Flowers," released earlier this year.
There are tales of childhood panic attacks when the lights went out in "Scared at Night," lighthearted references to obscure hockey players in "I Make the Dough, You Get the Glory," and beyond-the-grave laments from the perspective of a murdered Canadian woman in "Alicia Ross."
The album is a polished piece of catchy alt-country, which can be deceptive as it contains some sharp edges.
Among the introspection and examinations of relationships, like on the title track, there's a missive to Canada's unspoken racism on "Oh Canada."
Elsewhere, Edwards chronicles American protagonists fleeing "up north" to escape an "Oil Man's War."
Edwards certainly isn't the first foreign musician to voice discontent with America recently, but in our phone interview from Indianapolis, she stopped short of taking sides in our politics.
"I'm a Canadian voter, not an American voter," she said.
The audible sheen of the songs on "Asking for Flowers" can be partly ascribed to producer Jim Scott.
Scott won a Grammy for engineering the 1994 Tom Petty album "Wildflowers," a collection of songs that was pivotal in Edwards' coming-of-age.
She knows the album so well, in fact, she geeked out when she learned it was Scott's voice saying "take four" at the beginning of her favorite song, "To Find a Friend."
"I eat that stuff up," she said. "What can I tell you? I'm a shameless fan."
It was surreal for her to make an album with Scott. Perhaps "Asking for Flowers" will be someone else's "Wildflowers."
Yet, working with Scott didn't make Edwards feel like she had made it as a musician.
"I don't know if I'll ever feel that way," she said. "Which is not a bad thing. I definitely had to pinch myself and think that I was definitely on the right path because of that."
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