Creative freedom

Kathleen Edwards is experiencing total freedom.

Years removed from taking a break from the music industry, the songwriter, who turns 48 on Saturday, has come to a certain peace about who she is as a person and a musician.

On her latest full-length, Billionaire, released last year, she wrote almost enough music for a double album, but time constraints limited her to a tight 10 tracks. Local music fans will get to hear some of those songs when Edwards returns to the Winnipeg Folk Festival Sunday.

“I think it’s an age thing. I think I’ve gotten less caught in, ‘What if this isn’t good, or is it?’ And now I’m like, ‘Oh, nothing is a waste of time on the creative front. Everything has a purpose.’

“And even if it’s a song you work on for days and it doesn’t get recorded, it’s still a creative idea that sort of solicited something else either before or after, so I’m sort of definitely in a much more liberated stage of my writing life,” she says over the phone from her St. Petersburg, Fla. home where she is prepping for a three-day drive with her two dogs (a golden retriever and a labradoodle, both 13) to her parents’ home in Ottawa. She will leave the dogs with her mom and dad, pick up her band and hit the road for a month.

Edwards has returned to making music full time after calling it quits in 2014 following the release of four albums of well-received melodic Americana that earned her a global fan base. She retreated back to the Ottawa area she got her musical start in, and opened a coffee shop called Quitters in the community of Stittsville just outside the nation’s capital.

The time off was a much-needed mental-health break for Edwards, who had been grinding it out on the road for more than two decades since releasing her debut EP, Building 55, in 1999.

She opened a coffee shop (which she sold in 2022) because she knew the ins and outs of the business from working at a Starbucks as a teenager; and besides, there wasn’t a place to get a decent cup of joe in Stittsville, she says.

“The coffee shop was truly some of the best years of my adult life in terms of experience, and just growing as a person and being, and building something at home,” she says.

“When I moved to Stittsville it was at a time when I was really kind of depressed and really needing to find something sort of grounded and home feeling. Then it turned into something way more than I could have ever imagined. It was really special.”

Getting away from life on the road also provided Edwards with some new lyrical inspiration. Instead of writing fictional stories, or tales about how she believed other people were living, she got to meet a variety of people every day, hear their stories and live a life outside of a touring van.

“You can’t digest life’s nuances when you’re just backstage at a club every night. You have go and be living a life in other facets and taking time off. I mean it was (work), I actually worked harder running my coffee shop than I did playing music, but I think it’s one of the things I think we forget: we put all this pressure on artists to put out, for lack of a better word, the word that’s used these days all the time is content. Content content content content, and it’s like, what are you making that’s worth sharing with the world as an artist if you’re in such a hurry?”

Edwards was drawn back into writing music in 2017 by American songwriter Maren Morris, who asked to collaborate with her.

Not wanting to head into the Nashville sessions empty-handed, Edwards went through some of her archives, listened to recordings on old hard drives and went through notebooks filled with lyrics and ideas. There she found a demo for the song Good Woman, and rewrote it with Morris.

That was the spark Edwards needed to realize she did miss making music — not all the parts that make up the profession — but the creative aspects and challenges that come with finding that perfect chord structure, lyric or melody.

“I loved trying to tell a story and write a song and structure it and figure out what words are the most appropriate and how it can mean something to her (Morris) and I just immediately went, ‘Oh my God, I need to go back to this. I love it,’” she says.

Edwards got down to writing and recorded her fifth album, Total Freedom, which was released in 2020, the same year she married property developer Sean McAdam.

She was ready to hit the road again and support the record, but the pandemic shut everything down, so any momentum Edwards had was snuffed.

When the world opened up again, she recorded a EP of cover songs by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, the Flaming Lips, Tom Petty, Supertramp and Jason Isbell’s song Traveling Alone, which featured an appearance by the acclaimed musician, who had asked Edwards to open some of his shows in 2023.

When it came time to record Billionaire, she reached out to Isbell — one of the musical highlights of last year’s Winnipeg Folk Festival — for advice about who she should hire to produce it. He offered his services, and together with his co-producing partner Gena Johnson, a plan was hatched.

Isbell’s backing band the 400 Unit appears on the album and his distinctive guitar solos are featured on several songs.

“It was a huge operation. I don’t know what the word is, it’s like, it wasn’t an olive branch, but it was kind of like someone from a yacht throwing down a ladder for you to hop aboard. It was truly a very generous and supportive gesture on his part,” she says.

The album is filled with Edwards’s confessional, personal lyrics, including a song about her love of living in Florida with her husband, a shot at anonymous internet trolls who picked on her friend John Roderick (a songwriter who became known as “Bean Dad” on Twitter in 2021), the end of relationships and losing friends.

The title track, which sounds like a love song, thanks to a soaring chorus of “If this feeling were currency then I would be a billionaire,” was actually born out of grief over losing a young friend, Amanda, who worked at Quitters and died suddenly of a medical issue.

“The relationships you build in your life are the value that you have in your life, and that’s where that line comes from. My friend who died enriched my life in ways that are immeasurable, and I would have traded places with her so she could live her life but I didn’t get to choose that, and so in return, my plan is to live life as well as I can without worrying about what others will think of me and try to honour a life well lived in its place because she can’t.”

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca