The Return of Kathleen Edwards
The singer-songwriter quit music and opened up a café. Now she has a new album.
“ ‘Total Freedom’ will be my fifth album. Part of me loves the idea that I can put out a record during this time and get my music out there but also stay home and be part of people’s confidence rebuild.”
“I opened Quitters Coffee in my hometown of Ottawa, in a neighborhood where there really was nothing going on. I’ve spent the last few years really rooting myself in this community.”
“There are sweet, older customers who ask, ‘Oh, are you the country singer?’ When I was younger, I probably would have said, ‘You’re not using the right word to describe me!’ Now I’m, like, ‘Yes, I’m the country singer, nice to meet you, no problem.’ ”
“There’s definitely a performance aspect to running the café. Sometimes I sense that people want me to act like I know them as intimately as they think they know me, because they’re familiar with my work.”
“I mean, maybe they knew me then. People change.”
“I don’t listen to my records very often, but once a year I might check in on a song or two and think, ‘That’s me? Weird! Who was that girl?’ But I also go, ‘Right, holy shit, I wrote a lyric on “Failer,” my first record, that went, “I’m a little bleeder with white pants on.” Cool!’ ”
“I always strove to do good work. With ‘Total Freedom,’ I wasn’t thinking in terms of good or bad. I just kind of made it.”
“One of the first people I let listen to ‘Total Freedom,’ hilariously, was my ex-husband, Colin Cripps, who played with me for years and produced ‘Back to Me,’ my second album. His first remark was that he thought my voice sounded great.”
“When I started out, I really didn’t know how to sing. I knew I could if I needed to, but never worked hard at trying to be a better singer until ‘Asking for Flowers,’ my third record.”
“After ‘Voyageur,’ the next album, my voice basically gave out. I sang like shit every night and ended up cancelling shows. It was a horrible episode.”
“A lost voice is certainly not an uncommon thing for a musician who performs four or five nights a week. Our life-style choices aren’t always the greatest. We don’t often treat our bodies like an athlete training in the Olympics. We tend to make poor life-style choices, and just sort of plow through.”
“In this case, the breakdown was my body’s way of telling me that I had been punishing myself, and that there was something I wasn’t dealing with.”
“I remember a show at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles shortly after ‘Voyageur’ had come out. I felt like I had the weight of the world on my shoulders. I had worked really hard to make the album while I navigated a very difficult personal chapter in my life. My marriage had ended, and I was dating Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, who produced the record, and was the biggest star in indie music, for lack of a better term.”
“Before the show, I found out that I had only sold two hundred tickets in a room that probably holds something like eight hundred. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, no one cares. I’m just not good enough. The only reason I sold two hundred tickets is because Bon Iver fans are coming to see if Justin might show up.’ ”
“All the stress revealed itself in how I stood on stage each night and tried to sing. I was a piece of stone going, ‘Just get through, just get through, just get through.’ And so my voice gave out.”
“I thought that there was something seriously wrong. I went to a doctor. He said, ‘Here’s some steroids to get you through the next few weeks, but you need to fucking go home and rest for a bit. You’re obviously burned out, and you need someone to teach you how to use your voice so that you’re not gripping so hard every night.’ ”
“I was like, ‘Wait, that’s it? I don’t have throat cancer?’ ”
“My mother was thrilled. She’s been trying to get me to go to a vocal coach since I was fifteen!”
“Once I moved back home, I kind of thought, ‘I don’t think I have this in me anymore.’ ”
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“I had been propelled for so long by the pressure of other people’s expectations for me to keep playing. I was like, ‘You gotta keep going, you gotta keep going, you got people relying on you, a manager who’s spent years promoting you, bandmates, the publisher, this, that—blah blah blah!’ Like, all that shit, right?”
“As soon as I removed that one little piece and said, ‘I don’t think I want to play music anymore,’ I just felt so much better.”
“The week I signed the lease and incorporated for Quitters, I showed up to my parents’ house very excitedly to share the news. They clenched their teeth and were like, ‘But you’re so good at music!’ ”
“Guilt wasn’t a good enough reason for me to stay in it. I opened Quitters, and it’s done really well. I’ve become good at something else. I work my ass off, sometimes for eighteen hours a day in the kitchen. But the café isn’t something I’ve lived off of financially.”
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“Music was.”
“There came a point where I started to miss music. Well, aspects of it. I missed performing, for sure.”
“Two years ago, my friend Matt Mays invited me to open a pair of nights at Massey Hall. I didn’t want to play without new material. It just wasn’t as exciting. So I committed to the shows and made them the deadline for creating new work. Once that ball was rolling, it just kept going.”
“ ‘Total Freedom’ is an incredibly hopeful album.”
“Don’t mind my dog. She’s very concerned about the local squirrel and rabbit population. It’s her job, you know, to make sure I don’t get eaten by a rabid rabbit!”
“Well, because of the pandemic, my label wanted to postpone the album’s release. I thought about how many times someone came up to me after a show, when it was clear that I was really struggling onstage, to offer a hug. I cried during my shows sometimes.”
“Now I’m in a good place. I’m really strong. I feel incredibly optimistic. We’re using this challenging time to look within ourselves and the world around us to say, ‘Let’s cut the crap.’ ”
“The last thing we should be doing is holding back on anything that might fucking give somebody some good vibes!”
Andy Friedman is an artist, illustrator, musician, and cartoonist. He has contributed art to this magazine since 1999 and is currently working on a book of essays and drawings.