Nick Krewen
Special to the Star
Sometimes to move forward, you have to take a few steps back.
Or stop completely.
For singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards, who releases Total Freedom her first album since 2012’s Voyageur, on Friday (August 14), the latter move was her answer to a decade of the non-stop rinse-recycle-repeat music industry treadmill that took its toll.
In 2011, her marriage to local producer and Blue Rodeo guitarist Colin Cripps ended and a high-profile romance with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon broke down a year later.
Finally, in 2013 – she hit a wall.
“Oh my God, did I ever!” she exclaims from her home in Stittsville, located in the west end of Ottawa. “I was just so, so burned out. Even the joy of writing was gone.”
So, Edwards did the unthinkable – she walked away.
“There’s always a strange balance of music being your passion and something that you live to do. You can’t fathom not doing it – it’s in your DNA,” Edwards explains. “But when it becomes something that just takes a shift – whether that’s touring, writing or performing songs about painful things – it was a permanent state of discomfort.
“Because I was really ambitious and have a good work ethic, I wasn’t listening to the inside voices that were trying to tell me, ‘you really need to make a change for a while.’
“I was pretty unwell – and it didn’t seem like I had many other choices.”
It turns out she did.
Edwards relocated to the Ottawa area, buying a bungalow not far from her long-time musical associate and pal Jim Bryson.
“For the next six months, my plan was to just take some time off, get rooted, settle into my place and then presumably start writing another record.”
Diagnosed with clinical depression by his point, Edwards tried to tap into her muse.
“I would get the guitar out, but every time I tried to write something, it was still rooted in this place that I was really just trying to put behind me, whether that was a broken heart or feeling like some of the professional and personal things in my life had not materialized in the way that I’d hoped.”
Creatively unhappy, Edwards focused on one of the consistent joys she experienced during her road warrior days and opened a café called Quitters.
“I had always had this sneaking feeling of whenever I was in a café on tour, I just always thought, ‘ I could see myself doing this,’” Edwards explains.
“I know a lot of people say that, but I had two things going for me – one was that my first job was working as a barista at Starbucks when I was 18 or 19 and I absolutely loved it. I knew how to clean an espresso machine and grind coffee. I knew certain things that corporate Starbucks made part of my genetic code about knowing what it takes to own a coffee shop – just really important basics.
“I had also seen every café from Stockholm to L.A. and I just loved cafés, because it was the one common thread that I had when I felt so displaced on tour every day.”
Quitters opened in Stittsville in the fall of 2014, offering the chance for Edwards “to get out of my music bubble.”
While recording artist Kathleen was heavily protected in terms of public access by managers, agents and security, café owner Kathleen had no such intermediaries.
“Any difficult conversation I would have had to have in real life was made on my behalf by my manager or my agent or somebody else,” she notes.
“But this forced me to get in front of people in a very unprotected way. Suddenly, I’m the first person someone speaks to when they walk into the café.
“And it was really good for my soul to actually decide what my boundaries would be on my own, to put on my big girl pants and be in charge of paying suppliers on time, hiring and firing young people and telling people what I expected from them when they worked for me.
“I also liked building this incredible community of people around me who saw me every day. That is the foundation of our relationship: based on this person who lives in this town and owns a coffee shop, not somebody whose song they heard on the radio.
“That just filled my life with so much more depth.”
Music wasn’t entirely put on the back shelf: Edward performed a handful of gigs each year. But the catalyst that restored her music-making mojo came from Grammy-winning country crossover star Maren Morris, known for such hits as “The Bones,” “My Church,” “The Middle” and “’80s Mercedes” among others, who invited her to Nashville to collaborate on some songs.
“I took the opportunity because it seemed too good to be true – somebody liked my work and wanted to fly me down to Nashville to see if we could write together,” says Edwards, who ended up co-writing “Good Woman” on Morris’ best-selling album Girl with Morris and Kacey Musgraves’ Grammy-winning producer, Ian Fitchuk.
“What a privilege! I got into a room of two really lovely and grounded creative people and I got to exercise that muscle for the first time in four years. It was fun and enjoyable and reminded me of all the things I loved about being with musicians and being a creator.
“It turned my pilot light back on.”
The final catalyst towards making Total Freedom came from a Massey Hall gig opening up for Matt Mays in 2018.
“It was one of those shows that was really exciting to me and played a huge part in keeping me honest to and play new songs. That’s really where the record started, at that show.”
Edwards has always displayed a gift for catchy, gliding melodies and Total Freedom is full of them, 10 confessionals of the heart imbued with a spark that sonically symbolizes freshness and liberation, as well as no-nonsense lyrics that are imbued with another Edwards trademark: honesty.
Songs like “Glenfern,” “Birds On a Feeder” and “Feelings Fade” sound like they poured out of her without much effort.
“That was something I very consciously wanted – a lot of these songs to feel fluid,” she explains. “I didn’t want to agonize over the lyrics. I love that I didn’t have any pressure and I didn’t edit out those sweet, authentic shoot-from-the-hip moments. They’re my favourite parts of this record.”
She even makes amend with ex-hubby Cripps on “Glenfern,” a reference to the street location of the house they bought together in Hamilton.
“That’s the one that really set me on the course of the record because I knew I wanted to start in a clean slate kind of way,” she notes. “I wanted whatever I was writing to reflect the fact that I had just grown so much as a person. I had so much more appreciation for even the hard stuff that I’d been through, that I really healed from a lot of it and I really had some healthy perspective about all of the challenging things that were difficult in my ‘20s and ‘30s.
“So, when I wrote about Glenfern and thought about Colin, I remember sitting in this house in a neighbourhood that was a pretty well-to-do area. I was reflecting on just how earnest and how authentic my time in Hamilton was – and how grateful I was for those memories because they’re so real.
“It really acknowledged me in a way that made me feel like I was really using my true voice and my gratitude for Colin. It was something that I had to do because Voyageur was so positioned as my divorce album from Colin Cripps. I hated so much that that was the narrative because it felt so unfair and such a betrayal to him.
“He had been this amazing person in my life and our marriage didn’t work out. When I wrote ‘Glenfern,’ I got to set that record straight.”
With live music in pandemic mode, Edwards’ touring plans covered a number of dates in the States before they were cut short.
She does have an idea, though, of potential staging some limited capacity shows at the newly refurbished Paradise Theatre on Bloor.
“I’ve had a longstanding loose relationship with Moray Tawse and Tawse Winery, the company behind the restoration of The Paradise Theatre,” she says. “I was booked to play one of the first shows there in April.
“So I’ve been talking to them and I think I’d really like to do a series of shows out of the Paradise and do an almost Elvis Costello-type show of musicians. I’d play and bring in two or three emerging acts, one or two veteran acts and do a beautiful music series that people could watch at home – something that would give musicians some work. That’s my idea.”
After her big exhale, Kathleen Edwards is back chasing her recording career carrot with Total Freedom – but only to a point.
“What this break has really given me is the knowledge that my ego is in a healthy place,” she states. “I can admit, wouldn’t it be great to get a big break? But, making that the thing that you pursue to the point where you get clinical depression is not the way to be.
“I’m lucky I got to learn that.”