PREVIEW
KATHLEEN EDWARDS
Saturday, April 12
Liberty Lounge (MRC)
When Rolling Stone magazine pegs you as the "next big thing," the pressure to succeed can be more than a little unnerving.
Ottawa native Kathleen Edwards – whose debut album Failer is a collection of beautiful songs with a less-than-beautiful reflection on a realistic human experience – has been causing a buzz, with mentions in magazines from Rolling Stone to People and appearances on The Tonight Show and Late Night with David Letterman. But her attitude about the whole deal is more laid back than nervous. In a recent interview over the phone from Florida, the latest pit stop on an exhaustive tour schedule, Edwards showed that the pressure is definitely not getting to her.
"They’re the ones who look bad if I fuck up," says Edwards of her devoted followers in the media. "They are the ones who look like they couldn’t pick ’em if I’m not actually one to watch. I’m doing this because I want to do it, not because someone else thinks I’m going to be the next big thing."
Originally recorded as a demo, Failer was written after Edwards had settled into a quiet, slow-paced life in the Gatineau Hills north of Ottawa. With her intense blend of scathingly honest songwriting and whisky-soaked vocals that seem to come straight from the heart, she chronicles the downtrodden, the heartbroken and, more often than not, the slightly inebriated.
"I didn’t even think about the songs being brutally honest or really personal," says Edwards. "I guess there were some people who thought I would regret having songs that personal about me being released, but I kind of look at it like ‘what’s the alternative?’ Writing songs that aren’t genuine and don’t have any elements of real life in them? Why would I want to write songs like that? What am I going to do, write songs like Shania Twain? That’s not who I am and that’s not the kind of music that I want to make."
One of the tracks from the album, "One More Song the Radio Won’t Like," seems to sum up the crossroads that Edwards knew she would eventually have to face in the business end of her career.
"I wrote my song more about the record companies than the radio, but it was always this conversation that was looming that I had songs that weren’t going to make it on the radio," explains Edwards. "In Canada that’s still true and in the U.S. it isn’t. I’m getting played all over the U.S."
Edwards says that radio play is fine if she can get it, but she doesn’t care if she can’t. And she won’t alter her songs in order to get them played on the Canadian airwaves.
"MuchMoreMusic is playing my video, CMT is playing my video, but no one in Canada – aside from the CBC – is playing my album. If they don’t want to play it the way it is, that’s fine," she says. "I’m not going to change it to accommodate the radio programmers out there who think it’s too folky or it’s too country for pop radio, it’s too rock for country radio. Who cares – it’s fucking music! I’m just as happy to go out and find my own records rather than have people with that kind of small vision decide for me what I should be listening to….
"I sound bitter don’t I?" says Edwards wearily, having been thrust into the interview spotlight since her newfound success. "I’m not really. I really don’t care."
Edwards clearly has nothing to be bitter about, and is confident that her songwriting will retain the gritty realism that is drawing fans all over North America, despite the current lack of radio airplay.
"I still find things to write about that are really personal," she says. "My surroundings have changed but my reaction to them is consistent." |
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