Kathleen Edwards

After a bout of depression stopped her music career, opens up on what brought her back

KATHLEEN EDWARDS FELT LIKE SHE WAS ON A HAMSTER WHEEL. After more than a decade of grinding, she had achieved commercial and creative success as a country rock songwriter — but it had come at the expense of her personal life and mental health. Throughout the creation and promotion of her 2012 album, Voyageur, things finally came to a head.

“That whole time, I was gradually going downhill and I didn’t know what was wrong with me,” she remembers. “It took so much out of me that I needed to just go home and get well. I don’t think music made me clinically depressed — I think the lifestyle set me up to not make a transition into an adult woman and [didn’t] provide me with the things I needed to be well.”

We’re speaking now because Edwards is finally back after a lengthy hiatus; she recently released her fifth album, Total Freedom, and she speaks warmly and openly about how she has managed to achieve a healthy balance between her creative output and personal wellbeing.

This sense of peace has been hard-earned. For the past six years, Edwards stepped back from music completely, retreating to her home in Stittsville, ON (a suburb of Ottawa). This isn’t to say she relaxed; instead, she launched her business, a café called Quitters Coffee, its name cheekily referring to how she had put music on the back burner. It was the perfect antidote to her emotionally draining music career — not because it gave her time to recharge, but because it kept her so busy that she couldn’t possibly give music any thought.

“It’s like I have quadruplets, and they consume every piece of my free mental space,” she says. “I’m thinking about my business because I have 20 employees and there’s always things that need attending to. It disempowered the role of music in my life, but only in a good way. It disempowered the voice of ego and the voice of expectation.”

Edwards stopped writing songs and set aside her instruments — literally. In summer 2015, an intruder broke into her house by walking through an unlocked door and stole a 1957 Les Paul Junior guitar out of her living room. She was so disconnected from music that it was several weeks before she even noticed that the instrument was gone.

Her creative spark was suddenly and unexpectedly reignited in 2017, when she was invited to Nashville for a cowriting session with country star Maren Morris. The experience reminded Edwards of all the good things about music and none of the bad. “Oh my god, of course, that’s what feels great about playing music,” Edwards says of the experience. “It’s this thing, where we’re working on ideas and you’re building something and you’re surrounded by people who are like-minded in that way.”

Back home in Ontario, the creative momentum continued. “My pilot light came back on,” she says simply. “It was cool.”

Flash forward three years, and Edwards is in a radically different place than she’s ever been in before. In the background of our Zoom call, her two dogs are sleeping soundly on the floor. At one point, she swivels the webcam around to show the bright yellow goldfinches fluttering around the bird feeder just outside of the window. In every way, she’s embodying Total Freedom’s title.

Now 42, she no longer feels the pressure to hang her entire identity on her music career. She calls this an “entirely new chapter in my relationship with music” — one in which she is no longer competitive with her peers and no longer trapped within the bubble of industry.

“I’m in such a new and uninhibited place in my life,” Edwards reveals. “I’m not worried about the chatter. I’m not worried about selling a lot of records. I’m not worried about how much press I’ll get. I’m not worried that I’ll get a bad review.”

This new perspective is all over Total Freedom, an album that channels the wry alt-country of her early days with an emphasis on plainspoken confessions and War on Drugs-style heartland atmospherics. Opener “Glenfern” pays beautiful tribute to Edwards’s ex-husband (and longtime collaborator) Colin Cripps, and the singer reflects candidly on the joys and struggles of her music career: “We toured the world and we played on TV / We met some of our heroes, it almost killed me.”

There’s a sweetly heartbreaking tribute to a late dog (“Who Rescued Who”) and a touching ballad about a rekindled childhood friendship (“Simple Math”). The tone is one of gratitude and feeling emotionally liberated — even when that means calling out a shitty relationship for what it is, as on “Hard on Everyone” and “Fools Ride.”

Total Freedom is a gorgeous glimpse into the musician’s new life — a contentment that has, at least in part, been interrupted by COVID-19. As a touring musician and business owner, Edwards has been doubly dinged by lockdowns, and with playing shows off the table, she has had to return to managing Quitters, just so she can give herself a paycheque.

“I don’t know if my business will survive,” she admits. “I think it will, but I won’t know for a year. Because, you know, the taxman has basically been called off for six months, so we’ll see if I’m able to survive.”

Even while conceding “this shit’s scary,” Edwards is reassured that her difficult emotional journey may help to inspire fans who feel overwhelmed by their own mental health struggles.

“Just from experience and recovering from clinical depression, I can hear the voices of people saying my music got them through a difficult time now in a way that it brings tremendous meaning to the struggles that I went through just to get to where I am today,” she explains. “I like the idea that I can bring all those difficult things I navigated and recovered from, and I can continue to have purpose in that arena for people, because it brings me a lot of joy now.”

PHOTO

CHACHI REVAH

The Montreal-based artist also known as Ashanti Mutinta has been blowing minds (and eardrums) with her ferocious, metal-inspired hip-hop, and her recent album God Has Nothing to Do with This Leave Him Out of It has earned international attention from Bandcamp and the Needle Drop, along with a slot on the 2020 Polaris Music Prize short list — not to mention the top spot on Exclaim!’s Best Albums of 2020 So Far. As if her rapid ascent wasn’t already impressive enough, she did it all with minimal help from industry insiders like publicists, managers and agents.

In a time when the music industry is moving toward a model centred on big corporations like Spotify and Apple to get music to the masses, Backxwash’s commitment to her own authenticity, and refusal to cater to those who aren’t on her side, is refreshing and fiercely self-evident.

“I think that sometimes,” she tells Exclaim!, “the publicist comes off as mechanical, and if you want to display your personality, I think the barrier between your publicist and yourself has to be very thin. You always see these things pop up like, ‘Hire a publicist and maybe they’ll be able to get your name out!’ but the benefit of doing it yourself is having your personality show and being authentic, if that’s the way you want to approach it.”

Authenticity is the name of Backxwash’s game. Across a growing series of EPs and albums, culminating in God Has Nothing to Do with This and follow-up EP STIGMATA, Mutinta has delivered a series of aggressive flows tackling topics like witchcraft, selflove, racism and gender identity on top of industrial beats in the vein of clipping. and Death Grips. Backxwash distills the spirit of speed metal and hardcore into brisk, energetic bursts of horrorcore punctuated by smoother R&B-flecked jams like “You Like My Body the Way It Is” and “Redemption.”

So what does Backxwash look for in a collaborator? First and foremost, it’s a matter of shared ideals. “I wouldn’t want to work with anyone who’s a bigot, anybody who shares dangerous opinions,” she says. “Anybody who is respectable is a person I want to work with, essentially. Most of the people I’ve been working with, a lot of the collaborators for the last album were mostly, I’d say, 90 per cent of them are trans people, because I think they can relate.” It echoes the raison d’être she spits out in “Bad JuJu,” a track from her 2019 debut album Deviancy: “Fuck everybody, fuck patriarchy, fuck evil standards of beauty we’re supposed to live in, fuck society.”

Born in Zambia before moving to Vancouver, Mutinta’s love of hip-hop was ignited after discovering “Mo Money Mo Problems” as a teenager. While Montreal was where Backxwash got her start after moving there in 2017, first at hip-hop institution Le Cypher and later through her high-octane live shows, she’s just as quick to credit the internet for linking her with collaborators — including Ada Rook and Devi McCallion, both halves of recently disbanded Toronto-based noise-pop duo Black Dresses. “I’m very grateful for Black Dresses for everything they’ve given, they’re incredible people,” says Mutinta.

“I think people are able to make collectives and meet like-minded people in spaces where people don’t really want to look your way until you look or sound a certain way. People on the internet are able to make connections and work with like-minded people. You talk to people on the internet and you can see what they’re about and gauge if you want to work with them or not.” She adds, “I think it’s a great opportunity to gauge what the person’s about, but again, it is through the internet, so there’s no sure way of knowing so you have to judge with your heart.”

It’s why Backxwash aims to be herself in everything she does, every tweet (where she’s just as likely to riff on her favourite video games and anime as she is her favourite music), every beat (on recent releases, she’s producing almost every track) and every rhyme. Though you can hear the intensity and raw earnestness in her earlier albums, Mutinta only now believes she’s finally cracked the code to making music that reflects her truth.

“I started writing lyrics for the new album and, when I was writing the lyrics, one element that I was always feeling was, ‘This kinda feels plastic,’” she reveals. “If I wanted to at least say something, my whole existence is political as a Black trans person, so I just wanted to write what I felt at the time. This is music, you gotta do what you do, you gotta write what you feel. So I started writing what I feel, and I don’t think I will stop!”

She’s also been steadily getting her footing as a producer, and is channelling her love of metal and heavy music in the samples heard all over her newest releases. (For a list of Backxwash’s many connections to metal, check out the sidebar.)

Backxwash’s unabashed love for her varied inspirations has led her to be surrounded by a mighty social media following and tight circle of like-minded collaborators, including QTPOC-focused label Grimalkin, a manager she teamed up with shortly after finishing up God Has Nothing to Do with This and a creative director, all of whom she sees more as partners instead of as colleagues or employees. As she explains, “I made sure that the person who I’m working with wants me to be my authentic self and doesn’t want anything to come off as plastic. I don’t want anything to come off as plastic. I just want to be who I am.”

At a time when the largely white, cis, straight and male leadership of the music industry is being rightfully taken to task for decades of exclusionary practices, Backxwash’s rapid rise aligns with her desire to burn down the oppressive institutions that govern the industry (and society at large) and start anew.

“I think we would have to start it from the ground up, just restructure the whole industry. From predatory deals and predatory executives, not even executives but people who hold a certain power, and if we could just redistribute the wealth that is around in the industry, that could help a lot,” she says.

“I think the wealth disparity between an upcoming musician and a musician that’s made it is very high. You get that weird thing where there’s a hierarchy. In my ideal situation, the money around the industry wouldn’t control a lot of the aspects of the industry.”

Even the Polaris Music Prize, which annually awards $50,000 to a Canadian artist as determined by a jury of music critics, is in her sights: “In the time of coronavirus, I hope somebody who’s not well off already wins that prize, because I think that would help a lot of people.”

For years, Backxwash has found herself on the outside of the industry looking in, and by biding her time and honing her craft, she’s now ready to burst in and burn it down from the inside.

“I remember trying to rap growing up and people coming through and saying, ‘We can’t really invest in your sound right now until you catch to us and sign this contract.’ I’m pretty young while that is happening. Imagine being indebted to a recording contract while growing up. That would be terrible.

“I just really like the music that I make, and it’s more about creating... saying that you just want to be in it for the love is a privilege in itself. I think most musicians would like to at least profit off the stuff they’re doing. Some musicians just want to survive. I guess the dream for me is, the thing that takes priority is, I just really enjoy doing this stuff. I’d like to live off it if I could, but priority is, I just like to make this stuff and I would just like to be able to live comfortably while making really dope shit.”

FOR NEARLY 30 YEARS, LONG- STANDING POP- ROCKERS SLOAN AND THEIR TIMELESS, feel-good tunes have become ingrained into Canadian music’s fibres. Featuring four singer-songwriters, Sloan have been considered the country’s “Fab Four” since their early days, earning comparisons to the Beatles for their unique approach to songwriting.

Sloan have outlived countless scenes and trends, while continually releasing consistently great albums that pay homage to their varied influences. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing for the band. In fact, for most of 1995, Sloan didn’t even really exist. After spending their first four years putting Canada on the musical map, they were set to call it a day and go their separate ways.

Not long after forming in Halifax in 1991, Sloan were at the forefront of East Coast Canada’s indie rock explosion. The following year, they signed to Geffen, which at the time was home to influential acts like Sonic Youth and Nirvana, giving Sloan an immediate affiliation that helped promote their debut album, 1992’s Smeared.

This same year they founded murderecords, their own independent label with distribution from MCA. “[The label] was all about releasing bands from the East Coast and a few of our favourite bands from afar,” singer/guitarist Jay Ferguson tells Exclaim! “When we toured, we always brought bands along that we either released records by or we thought deserved to be seen by more people.”

In 1994, Sloan returned with Twice Removed, their sophomore album that found them dropping the grunge and shoegaze influences for Beatles-esque pop and cerebral indie rock song structures. At first, a lot of their fans were confused by what they were hearing, while Geffen deemed the album unmarketable. All of a sudden, Sloan were no longer a buzz band.

Despite becoming a CanRock classic in the years to come, Twice Removed was immediately deemed a commercial flop — a point that was hammered home in the year-end issue of SPIN, where it was tipped as one of the “10 Best Albums You Didn’t Hear in 1994.” Morale in the band was at an all-time low, and consensus was that Sloan should break up.

“Andrew [Scott] had moved away and we were all not getting along,” explains singer/bassist Chris Murphy. “Twice Removed didn’t do very well and I was thinking we were all young enough to start over. Plus, we had murderecords going, so Jay and I had that to keep us busy. We had decided in December [to break up], but we didn’t want to tell anyone because we were still contractually bound to Geffen. So we were playing coy, but we had told friends and then word got out.”

While deflecting questions about the split, Sloan fulfilled the remaining Canadian dates already booked for February, which were some of the biggest shows they’d headlined to date. As far as they were concerned, however, they had played their last show.

“But then this gig came up,” says Murphy. “[Sloan were] kinda done. Edgefest was supposed to be our last show ever.”

During this inactive period, Toronto promoter Elliott Lefko approached Sloan about curating a summer festival at the city’s newly christened Molson Amphitheatre, now Budweiser Stage. Presented by local radio station CFNY-FM, also known as 102.1 the Edge, the daylong event was announced as the summer’s third instalment of Edgefest. Sloan’s official farewell gig, nicknamed “Sloanfest,” was set for August 5, 1995.

“In order to entice us, [Lefko] asked us to bring a bunch of murderecords bands onto the bill,” says Jay Ferguson. “Since we thought murder was becoming more of a focus for us, it felt like a good way to showcase that Local Rabbits, the Super Friendz and Thrush Hermit had new records coming out.”

As a bonus, the label gave away a limited edition 7-inch record to the first 1,000 fans, featuring scheduled performers Thrush Hermit (whose Edgefest set would end up being the day’s most memorable — see the sidebar), Stinkin’ Rich (now Buck 65), Local Rabbits and Jale. Almost every band on murderecords was added to the bill, along with non-roster invites like Plumtree, Zumpano, Pluto, Change of Heart, the Monoxides and Mystery Machine.

One act on the bill that both Sloan and the audience were completely unaware of was some new band from Newport Beach, California, called Sugar Ray. Unknowingly added to the line-up by the promoter, Sugar Ray’s brash, in-your-face raprock stuck out like a sore thumb among the rest of the bill’s easy-going indie rock.

“From what I remember we were allowed to curate it, and a lot of the bands were picked by us,” says Murphy, “When I see a full list of who played that day I still forget that it was anyone but our friends. But some of the bands were glaringly not our idea. Sugar Ray? Who? 13 Engines? Oh yeah, they wouldn’t end their set and we had to cut ours way down. Having as many friends there as we did made for about as much closure as we could’ve hoped for.”

By the time Sloan were set to take the stage, the rust they had gathered after months of inactivity began to show. “Between February and August we didn’t play or rehearse, so we were probably terrible,” says Murphy.

“I walked on stage and my cables were all in a knot,” says

THE THIRD INSTALMENT OF EDGEFEST 1995 MAY HAVE BEEN ADVERTISED as Sloan’s farewell show, but ask anybody there that day and they’ll tell you that the headliners had the show stolen out from under them.

Fellow Haligonians Thrush Hermit were Sloan protégés widely expected to follow in their footsteps. At the time, they were signed to murderecords and had just released their second EP, the Steve Albiniproduced The Great Pacific Ocean. It was no surprise that the band were set to play Edgefest alongside their peers. Instead, the surprise came once they began to play.

Forgoing songs from their recent release, Thrush Hermit curiously opted to play an entire set of Steve Miller Band covers.

“I can’t remember specifically, but the train of thought collectively was we were touring a bunch and we were listening to Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits on cassette a lot. We thought, ‘Man, these are the ultimate summertime hits!’” admits former Thrush Hermit singer and guitarist Joel Plaskett. “The joke spread into this thing where, all of a sudden, we were rehearsing seven Steve Miller songs."

Plaskett and his bandmates knew this was the biggest crowd they’d ever performed in front of, so they wanted to ensure their set would stand out from the other rock-centric acts on the bill.

“I think, with Edgefest, it was a lot of ’90s bands in the same genre playing their tunes,” he remembers. “We wanted to do something that wasn’t a dig at Sloan, but celebrated the day in some fashion that would be remembered, and also complement the fact that this day was for them.”

Being a relatively new band to the thousands of onlookers, there was plenty of confusion once the band began playing consecutive Steve Miller songs, but they proceeded to win the crowd over. Still, the performance didn’t happen without some feeling it was a missed opportunity for Thrush Hermit to promote their own music.

“Having not grown up with Steve Miller Band’s music, I had no idea what was going on,” says Jay Ferguson. “I remember knowing the first song and thinking it was hilarious that it was a cover, but then the next one and the next one, thinking, ‘What the hell are they doing?’”

“My feeling at the time is that I felt pissed that they did it, even though I was having fun,” adds Chris Murphy. “I was this label guy, going, ‘You know, that’s not very cool.’ But it was pretty cool. It really went over. It was the most memorable set of all.”

For Plaskett, the set was Thrush Hermit doing what they did best: having some fun and putting on a rock show that their fans would always remember.

“It’s one of those things where people were like, ‘What the hell?’ and others were like, ‘Whoa! Awesome!’,” he says. “But I’ve had a lot of people come up to me over the years and go, ‘That’s what I remember about that day,’ which is really, ultimately, the feather in the cap. That people really remember it.”