After a self-imposed exile from the music industry, the Ottawa singer-songwriter is clear-eyed and serene, writing just for the thrill of discovery.
Near the end of Total Freedom, Kathleen Edwards sings a song for her dog. Narrating in the second-person to Redd, her golden retriever, the 42-year-old songwriter reflects on the day they first met: “You were so sweet, immediately.” She goes on to describe their walks together, the compliments they received from neighbors, and the place she eventually buried his ashes. It is a quietly emotional and personal narrative, weaving in a thread about her own habit of self-medicating with alcohol. But more than any of these novelistic details, what’s most striking is her serenity, the focus in her delivery and peace in her voice as she quietly breaks your heart. It is a love song for a lost friend: the kind of thing you might sing alone, at home, when no one is listening.
This is the tone of Total Freedom, the Ottawa songwriter’s first album in eight years. And if it sounds like the work of someone who had a lot of time to focus on the things that matter, that’s because it is. Beginning with 2003’s Failer, Edwards released a string of expertly written records on the edges of heartland rock and alt-country, building a tight knit fanbase (which includes Maren Morris, who asked her to co-write a song on her most recent album). But after 2012’s atmospheric Voyageur, produced by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Edwards found herself disillusioned with the industry. Playing its songs every night was destroying her voice, and the shows themselves had become draining and financially unsustainable at a point when she hoped to be crossing over. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, no one cares. I’m just not good enough,” she reflected. “The only reason I sold two hundred tickets is because Bon Iver fans are coming to see if Justin might show up.’”
All of this was on her mind when she drove past a storefront for lease near her hometown. An inside joke with a friend became a life preserver, and she decided to retire from the music business and open a coffee shop. She called it Quitters. Located in the small town of Stittsvile, Ontario, it evolved into a local fixture with a loyal clientele—multiple Yelp reviews note the stellar music in the stop—and Edwards found a hard-won, person-to-person sense of gratification. She felt fulfilled. She spent more time with her dogs.
Slowly, the songs came back. There was “Who Rescued Who,” the one about Redd, and “Ashes to Ashes,” a plainspoken eulogy for one of her Quitters customers. But the one that got the ball rolling was “Glenfern,” a breezy rock song that filtered her past life as a touring musician through frank new perspective: “Now when I find myself looking back,” she sings calmly, “I think of all the cool shit that happened.” (Of course, she wasn’t totally ready to chase away those demons: “We bought a rock and roll dream,” she confesses, “and it was total crap.”) If Edwards’ work once recalled the dark, pastoral story-songs of Lucinda Williams, her writing here feels more akin to recent work from Mount Eerie or Sufjan Stevens—memoristic folk songs that scour hard memories for new lessons.
The production matches her clear-eyed realizations, and the resulting album feels like a creative breakthrough, written solely for the thrill of discovery. (Or as she put it to the New York Times, “I mean, what’s going to happen? I go back to working at the cafe? OK, sounds good!”). “Bird on a Feeder” is a gorgeous song about solitude, played on acoustic guitar with subtle flourishes of piano. In each verse, she follows the same pattern of thought, counting each passing season and reflecting on the ways her internal atmosphere has changed. She concludes each chorus with a brief observation—“no one to need”—and her delivery could be affirming, inquisitive, or hopeless with each repetition.
Other songs refuse to be misinterpreted. In “Hard on Everyone,” Edwards sings about the dynamics of an emotionally abusive relationship, revisiting the gravelly texture of her early work to summon the strength to fight back. “Fools Ride” travels similarly rough terrain, as she reflects on a long series of warning signs ignored with the hopes of finding contentment: “Here comes the red flag flying in the shit parade,” she recounts as a dizzy-sounding rhythm section tumbles behind her.
These are unsparing accounts of tough subjects, but Edwards navigates each song with tenderness and humor, allowing her to tear apart old idioms (“Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker”) or invent new ones (“Love is simple math/I can be a total pain in the ass”). Listening to her reckon with these complicated emotions, it occurs to me how many people dream of finding this kind of wisdom: stepping away from the daily rituals, imagining themselves happier and lighter in the aftermath.
Through these songs, you hear that freedom, but Edwards also reminds you how the past lingers, how actual escape is more elusive than it seems. In a virtual live set earlier this month, she covered the Neil Young classic “Comes a Time,” a decades-old song about how the world moves on despite the small catastrophes that happen every day. She heard it on the radio a few nights earlier and found herself humming it while walking the dog. It seemed to suit the times, so she learned to play it when she got home. As tree branches blow outside her window, for a minute, the future seems simple enough.
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