She’s got a confession
After leaving music in 2013 and opening a café, she’s making her return
Kathleen Edwards is back with a new album.
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, the latter was her answer to a decade of the nonstop rinse-recycle-repeat music industry treadmill that took its toll.
In 2011, her marriage to producer and Blue Rodeo guitarist Colin Cripps ended and a highprofile 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, 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.”
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 this 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 says.
Her first job at 18 or 19 was being a Starbucks barista, so she knew how to clean an espresso machine and grind coffee as well as “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 from public access by managers, agents and security, café owner Kathleen had no such intermediaries.
“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 on the back shelf: Edwards 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, who invited her to Nashville to collaborate on some songs.
Edwards ended up co-writing “Good Woman” on Morris’s bestselling album “Girl” with Morris and Ian Fitchuk, Kacey Musgraves’ Grammy-winning producer.
The final push toward 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 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 imbued with a spark that sonically symbolizes freshness and liberation, as well as no-nonsense lyrics imbued with another Edwards trademark: honesty. She even makes amend with ex-husband Cripps on “Glenfern,” a reference to the location of the house they bought together in Hamilton.
“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 … ‘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.”
The pandemic cut short Edwards’ tour dates in the States, but she does have an idea to stage some limited capacity shows at the refurbished Paradise Theatre in Toronto.
“I’ve had a long-standing loose relationship with Moray Tawse and Tawse Winery, the company behind the restoration of the Paradise Theatre,” she says. “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 Costellotype 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.”
She and her band will also perform a free album release gig at Quitters on Friday that can be streamed on social media. After her big exhale, 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 says. “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.”
The album release show for “Total Freedom” can be streamed Friday at 3 p.m. at Amazon Music, Twitch, YouTube and Facebook.