Kathleen Edwards Digs Deep for 'Flowers'

Posted on Feb 29th 2008 1:00PM by Julia Simon
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Last winter, folkie siren Kathleen Edwards took to her chilly Toronto home for recording parts of 'Asking For Flowers,' her third full-length album, due March 4. "The furnace is really loud there when it's running, and we had to turn off the heat to record," Edwards tells Spinner. "Then we had to stop the process to heat up the house."

But there's no evidence of cold takes on the album. The 29-year-old crooner's unwavering pipes seem particularly suited for heart-on-sleeve laments and indignant grumblings about bad parents and worse lovers, which essentially encapsulate the ethos of her first two albums, 2003's 'Failer' and 2005's 'Back to Me.' Love is no longer so troublesome for the singer, though; if anything, her conviction for it is impressive ("I sure as shit do love you," Edwards declares on 'Sure as Shit.' "And I cuss because I mean it.") But Edwards is still venting her discontent on this release, and she's also venting the discontent of others.

"Writing songs about relationships is such a cliché, and I did not want the ones on this album to be just boy on girl and girl on boy," she says. "I wanted to dig a little deeper into other peoples' stories."

To unravel these tales, Edwards sometimes sings from the vantage of others. While a few of these figures are fictional, 'Alicia Ross,' named after a young woman who was murdered by her neighbor, is, sadly, based on real events. Edwards penned the song after watching the tragedy unfold on the news, and she performs it as if she were the posthumous titular character. "I was so heartbroken by watching Ross' mother try to reach out the media to help her find her daughter," Edwards relates. "Writing the song was my way of imagining such unbelievable loss and pain."

Other weighty subjects are explored on Flowers, including the ballot-busting rocker 'Oh Canada'. The latter serves as Edwards' Neil Young-ish (who is also Canadian) screed about how issues like drugs, racism and global warming are greeted with apathy. "I am a Canadian citizen," she says. "I am a young woman. There are things I see everyday from this position that I don't like. 'Oh Canada' is my 'Rockin' in the Free World.'"