Kathleen Edwards

One thing I have learned this year is that Kathleen Edwards remains a big star. Sometimes these articles just pop out of nowhere. But really they pop out of everywhere. This is a story about one of the great Canadian singer-songwriters of our generation and I’m making a bet that you might not have heard of her.

Back in 2008, before Spotify and before Netflix really got going, HBO ruled the airwaves. I was not a father and not a husband and if you wanted anything other than BBC you had to get something called a satellite dish because where I live cable TV was never a thing.

2008 was the year we bought our first house and it was in Buckinghamshire and it came with a pre-loaded satellite dish. In a dark, wet and grey country like ours, there was only one thing to do and that was to get Sky. Shortly after that, when F1 moved to Sky, it became an essential part of our home entertainment.

At exactly this moment in history, HBO had decided that Charlaine Harris’s vampire novels, totally unknown in the UK, deserved a bigger audience. They cast the ethereal Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse and put together the most terrifying opening credits I have ever seen, in which maggots eat a dog carcass. We gulped. This was our sort of thing.

True Blood had all the glamour, sex, death and music you could ever wish for and it deserved its enormous audience. It might be the only TV series I ever bought the soundtrack for and of course, this being 2008, it was on CD. We still have the disc in the loft but I immediately ripped the CD onto my hard drive and put it on something we called an iPod so I could listen on the move.

In the days when people actually bought music as a physical object, we really used to listen hard. Speaking only metaphorically, I wore that disc out. There was no plastic left on it, it was just that rainbow piece of foil left.

On that disc was a catchy song called The Golden State that became my favourite. I had never heard of John Doe but it turns out that he had an enormous acting career, the longest-running show of which was Roswell, which fit into my UFO-heavy early 2000s very well. I was still Paul Charles back then and not quite sure if aliens had arrived or not. Now I know they have not.

Roswell came at the end of the linear TV era when US studios thought a series was 20 or 25 episodes. Which means that although the show lasted only three years, there are no fewer than 61 episodes. That would be six or eight seasons now.

Anyway, nobody here knew who John Doe was but his song on True Blood was a duet with a similarly anonymous singer called Kathleen Edwards. I loved that song so much I began digging and I bought her third album, Asking for Flowers. She just had something special.

What that was is harder to describe. What Kitty had was a certain look at life that seemed very English. Full of wry humour, quiet humour, sarcasm and cynicism. The very title, Asking for Flowers, says a lot. What kind of a relationship is it when she has to ask him to buy her flowers? It calls to mind a more recent song, Gas Station Flowers, by Zandi Holup, another girl with an eye for the humour that can hide in despair.

The Cheapest Key is a musician’s song, in a way, but is just as accessible. It is also full of a certain kind of humour. It starts of with a simple ABC of how terrible her guy is. F is for... yes, you guessed it. But then comes a line that stuck with me.

Here comes my softer side
[WHOOSH!]
And there it goes...

The narrator is a hard woman, ballsy, strong. But she has her limits and this jerk is on the way out. It’s brilliant and remains my favourite on the whole album, closely followed by I Make The Dough.

This week, I played Sure As Shit while cooking and my wife asked if it was Joni Mitchell. Edwards can do any kind of song. I like the catchy-angry songs with some drums, but she does the girl-guitar acoustic thing brilliantly too.

A couple of years later, Edwards released her fourth studio album, Voyageur. What I had no way of knowing was this. Over in Nashville, a sixteen year-old singer-songwriter called Isabella Richardson was at the record store to buy Voyageur. Not Voyager, you understand, but Voyageur. The u makes it more French, more interesting, or maybe more Canadian. It might even mean something slightly different.

Voyageur was a bigger deal than Asking for Flowers. This was 2012, the year the Olympics came home to London and no lesser authority than the BBC wrote a review of Voyageur which you can read. It was the year she appeared on Letterman, and not for the first time.

It might not be an exagerration to say that Voyageur changed Issy Richardon’s life. She was the age my daughter is now, so I can imagine a little of her reaction. Back in those days, our teen days, music was the most important thing. We watched a lot of movies and TV shows but music was diffferent. Music was the only thing you could put on in your bedroom. Only the rich kids had bedroom TVs. Music was something you could control, independently of your parents, and with headphones they had no idea what you had on.

This is how important Kathleen Edwards was to the young Issy Richardson.

Oh myyyyy!! I first heard of her when I was 16 years old in Nashville, TN. Her album Voyageur is a masterpiece that I was undoubtedly striving to live up to as an artist ever since. It’s not only been in my top five albums but it’s linked to every moment in my life happy or sad (big moment or small). I always go back and listen to it when I want to feel like coming back to me. She somehow captures this essence that is indescribable. Lyrically and musically!

Fifteen years later, Voyageur is still in Issy’s top five albums and still her inspiration as a songwriter. Just think about that! I will ask what her other 4 albums are and come back to you. Issy also disclosed that she wants the song Sure As Shit to be played at her wedding.

As I came to learn this year, Isabella would leave Nashville for LA and begin what looked like being an enormous commercial music career until the pandemic sent her back home to Australia. That must hurt, at least a bit, but the end result of everything was that Issy ended up in Buckinghamshire near me. I know! Nashville, California, Australia... Buckinghamshire.

This is the real music business, and this is real music for real music fans.

Had Isabella stayed in LA she would have had competition up the wazoo. It is very difficult to get noticed and to stay noticed in that town. But I can assert without fear of contradiction that she is the biggest star in the small town she lives in today. I cannot name the town in case that guy from First Aid Kit, her debut EP, catches up with her.

As I listen to Voyageur for the first time, I wonder whether Empty Threat spoke loudly to Isabella. It is about whether the singer, a Commonwealth expat, will move to America. When Isabella heard this, she had already made that leap, a leap that would not remain an empty threat for Edwards either.

I loved Billionaire, Edwards’ latest studio album, when it came out last year, but I was only streaming it at the time. This year I bought it on MP3, the year I kicked Spotify off my phone and plugged in my NAS hard drive with all those old CDs still on it. Such a device will cost you about $250 but will last fifteen or twenty years and you can still stream to your phone using Plex. It becomes an asset you can pass down, and when you reach my age, passing stuff down becomes more of a live issue.

I had the idea to write this piece when I saw Kitty’s viral reel about her frustrations with social media. A new friend of mine, Katrina Cain, with her angelic voice so pure that it caused the judges to spin around on The Voice, has been posting about the evils of social media as well. My generation will never understand why your generation thinks social media matters in any way.

Algorithms and the data behind them is my day job. The last thing I need at home is to be worrying about how many views my post got, and what % of them were men or were aged over 40. Nobody cares. It’s not that deep, guys.

Let me try to explain what is deep though.

For the best part of 20 years I have been buying and playing the music of Kathleen Edwards, and so has Isabella Richardson, even though we lived in different worlds at different times. This means, I am certain of it, that there are thousands upon thousands of men and women of all ages, all around the world, playing the music of Kathleen Edwards.

This won’t show up on any social media dashboard because many of the albums came out before streaming. My Kitty Edwards collection does not sit on a server owned by Daniel Ek in the Mojave Desert, destroying the cactus and drying out what little water there is or killing the lizards and killing the dreams of teenaged singer-songwriters. My music collection lives on a windowsill in my house. It has a little blue light to tell me it is working, and I can play the stuff on my phone and on my Sonos and in my car.

This is the real music business, and this is real music for real music fans. It is not often I finish a piece with a tear in my eye but I need Kathleen Edwards to read this, and to understand how important she remains to me and countless others she will never hear from.

You can catch up with all the Kathleen Edwards music here.