Kathleen Edwards – Total Freedom
Dualtone – 14 August 2020
By the time her last album, Voyageur (2012), Kathleen Edwards was worn down by touring and suffering from depression. In response, she took a ‘working sabbatical’ from the music business and opened a café in suburban Ottawa called Quitters Coffee.
Lured back in by an invite from fan and artist Maren Morris to take part in a songwriting session, their collaboration formed part of Morris’ 2019 album, Girl, and helped spark her decision to throw herself back in, the result being manifested on this, her fifth album, produced by Ian Fitchuk and longtime collaborator Jim Bryson.
It opens with the first song she wrote after rekindling the spark, Glenfern, a jaunty Suzanne Vega-ish walking beat number named after the street on which she used to live with her ex-husband, Colin Cripps, on which she remembers the past (“It seems so long since those Hamilton days and the first house we bought together”) and their relationship (“I was so lucky to be under your wing”) with affection and closure as she sings “it almost killed me but I’ll always be thankful for it!”
There’s rather less affection in her memories with Hard On Everyone, a song she’s described as about her “waking the fuck up”, a train time drum beat driving it along as the chorus notes “Everything in this house is afraid/What wouldn’t be under your weight” and how “you treat me like a lie you use/When you lose control”.
But there’s calm and serenity too, rejoicing in life’s simple living solo pleasures as on the strings-swathed airiness of the simply strummed Birds on a Feeder (“I got birds on the feeder/I got dogs and they’re sleeping/I got total freedom/No one to need”), of reconnecting with old childhood friends on the brushed snare shuffle Simple Math (“You and I were only eight/Growing up on the same street… And now your girls are the same age…I don’t care how old we get/I’m just one and you’re one and we’re two together/I’m okay being friends forever”) or Who Rescued Who, a song in memory of the stray golden retriever she adopted and of burying his ashes under a catalpa tree, a number revisited in a one-take acoustic bonus track version entitled Dogs and Alcohol.
Ashes To Ashes is another song about the passing of someone close, this time a regular customer at her café of almost her own age who died while shovelling snow, a low key rumbling drums, twangy guitar meditation on the unfairness of death and mortality per se (“God is not in the clouds, everything in this world comes around”) written just a few minutes after the funeral.
Returning to break-ups, the bouncy root-pop of Options Open, which features vocals by Daniel Tashian, relates to a relationship that seemed promising, but soured, although her tone here is more ‘take it on the chin’ than bitter as she declares how “I swore I wouldn’t go near you with a ten-foot pole” but “I blame it on the weekly flyer/That took me down to Crappy Tire/’Cause you were smiling when I looked up/I guess we’ll always have a parking lot”.
Less forgiving is Fool’s Ride, a rockier number that opens with the line “Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker” and continues to tackle blinkered naivete, “you know how to spend my money/You know how to spin a story/You know how to take me for a fool’s ride in the country”.
The title of the sparsely strummed, strings adorned Feelings Fade pretty much speaks for itself, a song about falling out of love that finds her working through past experience trying to make sense of what happened, the album ending with Take It With You When You Go, a break-up autopsy (“You’re just a picture in my wallet that I can’t tear up”), about wanting to move past the pain and memories that starts with a simple acoustic strum and gradually builds with organ, guitars and soaring vocal before ending on a drum roll that symbolically cuts off like a door closing on the past.
For the first time, the album cover has Edwards facing out full-on, an image that embodies the music and the emotions within, a triumphant return to music. If you were to liken the album to a drink served at her own Quitters coffee, it would be a full-bodied dark roast with a satisfying taste of the sweet and the sharp.
Total Freedom is out on 14th August. You can watch Kathleen Edwards – Live from Quitters Coffee – Album Release Show tomorrow (14 August) at 8 pm via Youtube here.
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