Kathleen Edwards embraces rock ‘n’ roll side on new album ‘Billionaire’

MIKE DUNN

KATHLEEN EDWARDS

Long before Canadian songwriter Kathleen Edwards took a bus from Ottawa to appear on Late Show with David Letterman, she was the girl who always brought her guitar to camp. It was a remote Canadian summer camp where social time was spent either around the campfire or in a canoe.

“Songs were the soundtrack to your time there,” says Edwards, who will perform at The Vogel at The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, Sept. 17, and The XPoNential Music Festival in Camden, Sept. 20. “I was very musically inclined, and so I was excited to be one of the kids who ended up learning how to play some of the songs that were fixtures at the campfire. They were John Prine songs, Joni Mitchell songs and Neil Young songs.”

As she got older, the trips got longer, and “when I was 17, the last summer there — I would have aged out and become a counselor — I went on a trip from Yellowknife, which is in The Northwest Territories, all the way to the Arctic Ocean,” she says. “It was about a 50- to 60-day canoe trip with one food drop. And my counselor was the one who said to me, ‘Have you ever thought about writing songs for a living?’ … I just played other people’s songs, and it was the first time that somebody ever planted the seed that I could also write my own songs. So that kind of spun the wheel. … Bit by bit I figured out how to put those pieces together.”

Listening to the music of the early- to mid-’90s captured Edwards’ imagination. “The Cowboy Junkies, Ani DiFranco, Natalie Merchant, The Cranberries … I lived in that music,” she says. “I remember thinking to myself — I would listen to music on the bus as a teenager — do people feel this way? Does everyone here feel the same way about this that I do? Now I realize probably the answer was no. I probably just loved it more.”

The cover of Kathleen Edwards’ album, “Billionaire.”

Throughout her career, Edwards’ albums have received critical and popular acclaim for the honesty and the poetry of her storytelling. With Billionaire — co-produced by Jason Isbell and Gena Johnson and released in August — she ventures beyond the acoustic realm in which songwriting often begins. “I really wanted to make a record that was reminiscent of more of my rock ‘n’ roll side, musically,” she says. “A friend of mine said to me, ‘It really reminds me of your Back to Me album.’ ”

That 2005 album “was a lot of more rock, a lot of electric guitar-led songs,” Edwards says. “That was great to hear because I really did want to have a higher-energy recording, because for years since I sort of have a split personality as a musician. I don’t really love playing solo all the time. In fact, I had to do a lot of duo and trio shows, which I really enjoyed, but I always missed the bass and the drums, and these records of mine have bass and drums throughout almost all of them.

“To go on tour acoustically was great and I made the most of it, but I really wanted to tour with a band, and the truth is it’s expensive to travel with seven people. So I thought, ‘Well, if I make a record that sounds like that, then I’ll have to go on tour that way as well.’ ”

Edwards left the music industry in 2014 to open a coffee shop named Quitters in Stittsville, Ontario. “I took a really long break from music,” she says, “and in that time my life was so enriched and I found so much positive grounding during that time with myself, having a routine and owning a business, just having a different chapter in my life. When I came back to music (with the 2020 album Total Freedom), it was such a joyful thing because I wasn’t attached anymore to all those mixed feelings that I had from my 20s into my 30s, about feeling like it never really happened for me.”

She says she thinks the Billionaire songs “are a byproduct of feeling really like, I just wanna go out and have fun. Part of that is playing shows with my band, and I love soaring guitar solos and having punchy, fun songs to sing that aren’t always intense and heavy, they’re just fun. A lot of those songs are rooted in a lot of gratitude for how my life has changed, how I’ve grown, and who’s with me and who I get to spend my time with — not taking it for granted and really trying to enjoy it.”

The cover of Kathleen Edwards’ EP, “Covers.”

Before Billionaire, Edwards had recorded Covers as an interim project while she figured out where she would make her next record. On the EP, which she released in March, she covered Isbell’s “Traveling Alone” (listen below) because she felt a “kindred tether to him … I think one of the criteria on a cover song would be that I don’t feel like I’m pretending. The lyrics felt very real to me and I felt like I could have written it.”

She sent a copy to Isbell’s manager, who forwarded it to him. “Isbell got in touch, and from there a plan to make an album together was hatched,” Edwards says. “It was just incredibly fortuitous. I really feel nowadays that nothing is a waste of time because when you put things out in the world, you just don’t know what’s going to land and what door might open. You have to focus just on staying the course.”

The 11 days Edwards spent in the studio with Isbell (who sang and played on the album in addition to co-producing it) and Johnson did not represent the typical way she records an album. “I came in thinking that if there was something about the songs I’d written that Jason felt he had feedback about or had arrangement changes to make, I was all ears, when in fact he just wanted me to play the songs as I brought them. One thing I learned was I showed up with really fucking good songs, which is a good feeling when you walk into a room and you don’t know anybody.

“I felt incredibly vulnerable in that time. It was challenging. I think anyone would feel that way. But I think the thing I (also) learned is that Jason offered to do this because he obviously thinks I’m a great songwriter, and he brought a team of people to support me. It didn’t take very much to actually record great passes of these songs. That speaks to the talent level of him and his band. And Gena is an incredibly talented producer and audio engineer.

“I tend to overthink the quality of my work in the studio. And Jason was like, ‘Chip-chop, that’s done!’ And I was like, ‘Whoa! How do we know that’s done?’ And he didn’t say this but (she glances at her wrist the way you check your watch), ‘because I’ve got somewhere else to go.’ That really pushed me to accept that there wouldn’t be lots of tinkering on this album … I usually make records over a period of a few months.”

KATE YORK

KATHLEEN EDWARDS

The lyrics, revealing aspects of Edwards’ mindset, are replete with true gems.

In the title track (listen below) she sings, “If this feeling were currency/I would be a billionaire,” as she mourns the loss of a young friend who was Quitters’ manager and expresses gratitude for having known her.

“Say Goodbye, Tell No One” was one of the first songs she wrote on the record. Edwards processes the difficulties of owning the shop, having to be the one to fire a poor-performing employee or lay people off during the pandemic. “People change, people grow/You can take it in stride or slam a door,” she sings.

In “Little Red Ranger,” she sings about a young person leaving the nest: “Driving your little red Ranger all over L.A./Someday soon, you’re gonna call home/To tell us that you’re gonna stay.”

Edwards considers Billionaire’s last track, “Pine,” to be a true country song. When she was on the road for two days from Ottawa to Nashville, this line popped into her head: “When we go our separate ways/ The thought of you stays.” By the time she got to Nashville, she had written almost all of the song.

She was thinking about how hard it is when a tour ends and “you all go back to your separate lives. It’s hard to be away from people that you have this incredibly intense relationship with, playing music and just slugging it out, like being at camp. I always joke, it’s like you go to summer camp for a couple of weeks and it takes you days to detach from all the kids you’re out in the middle of the woods with.”

The fun and vitality of Billionaire is partly due to Edwards’ relocation to St. Petersburg, Florida. The cover photo shows her as a snowbird, completely content with her new home.

“It’s incredibly freeing,” she says. “I’m married to someone who lived in the same house for the last 20 years and for him especially, it’s been fun to watch him thrive and find a new chapter in his life unfolding. And I bounced around a lot … I’m super-inspired by the things that are refreshingly different from maybe the last place I was in … I’m from fucking Ontario. Do you know how fun it is to live in a place where 10 minutes down the road there’s a beach that goes as far as the eye can see?”

This will be her fourth performance at The XPoNential Musical Festival, which is presented annually by Philadelphia radio station WXPN.

“XPN and the people with the station, obviously (general manager) Roger LaMay and (programming head) Bruce Warren and (‘World Cafe’ host) Raina Douris, who’s actually from Canada — all those people and the volunteers at the station have been with me from day one, in and out of different chapters of my career,” Edwards says. “And I was invited to XPN when I wasn’t really doing anything. Roger and Bruce have always been some of my biggest supporters. And when I come to XPN fests, I’m sort of in awe that I still get asked. I still feel like the kid who’s trying to elbow her way out to the main stage listing, and then I realize I’ve been part of that group this whole time.

“I think I’ve been to Philadelphia more than any other place in the country. I’m just great with that.”

Kathleen Edwards will perform at The Vogel at The Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, Sept. 17 at 7:30 p.m. (visit ticketmaster.com), and The XPonential Music Festival at Wiggins Park in Camden, Sept. 20 at 6:15 p.m. (the festival takes place Sept. 19-21; visit xpnfest.org). For more about her, visit kathleenedwards.com.

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