For her sixth studio album, BILLIONAIRE, Kathleen Edwards headed to Tennessee to work with two of Nashville’s current-day biggest hitters, Jason Isbell and Gena Johnson. The production and recording experience with them may have drawn Edwards out of her comfort zone, working with two individuals with reputations for a fast turnover. The result was a triumph, resulting in an album that is arguably her finest to date. We spoke with a hugely enthusiastic Edwards on her record release day about the album and her joy of getting back on the road with her full band.
Firstly, happy record release day.
Oh, thank you. Yes, my phone has been lighting up today, and I feel very, very lucky about it all.
Where are you at present?
I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I have three shows here, opening for one of my favourite Canadian musicians, a guy named Matt Mays.
Do you have a band with you for the shows?
Yeah, I am playing with my five-piece band, which is lovely. I did a lot of duo and trio shows in the last two years at some of these smaller venues to sort of revisit places I hadn't been in a long time, but now I really want to do a rock and roll show, so I'm travelling with a big group these days.
You are spitting fire on a number of the songs on the new album, BILLIONNAIRE. Are the songs directed at specific individuals?
I was saying to somebody earlier today because they asked me something similar. You know, it's like when you're walking down the street and someone says something rude to you and you don't think of a good comeback until twenty minutes later, and they'll never hear it. And with songs, I have time to ruminate and to carve out my thoughts, and sometimes you use metaphors and storylines to soothe yourself from an experience or a conversation or a person.
Your writing has always been deeply personal.
My songs are always pieces of me, even when I think I'm writing about somebody else, for sure. I think a lot of people have found the last five years to be very challenging in that it really tested people's idea of what they thought their world looked like. For me, I’ve always been an independent, self-sustaining, entrepreneurial person. I had a career in music very early on, and that was because I wrote songs and toured, and if I didn't show up, no one wrote a cheque. And you know, as small as that cheque might be, that's just the reality. The same was true about opening a coffee shop. No one opened it for me and handed me the keys. I did it and I paid for it, and I'm the one who chose the flooring and the equipment. I'm the one who had to pay for it when it broke down. This record started out from that place. That's one of the big things that I confronted early on when I was writing this record. I'm in my mid to late 40s now, and I think that you confront some hard truths about your willingness to accept certain things even from friends or family, or even from yourself, and drawing lines in the sand become easier to do when you get older. You're prepared to give less of a fuck when someone has a problem with you, because you know yourself better. So, it's all those things mixed up together when my little teeth come out.
Is the title of the album an effort to highlight the contradiction that the term BILLIONAIRE can suggest?
Yeah, absolutely. Everyone says, you know, billionaires shouldn't exist. Well, you know, everyone sure loved ordering something to their door in the last five years. People sure did want to save the world and drive electric cars. Another billionaire successfully made that possible. The truth is, many wealthy people in this world also give a lot of their wealth back. No issue is black and white, and in my life, I've decided that what right do I have to judge another person about the choices they make that are best for them or their families?
You worked with two big hitters on the production this time, Jason Isbell and Gena Johnson.
Well, Jason, so generously and incredibly offered to produce my record, and when we listed the broad strokes of how that might happen, he proposed that he bring the people that he works with to the project. And of course, I was thrilled and very willing to let him take me wherever he wanted to go. Gena comes with Jason because she's such an accomplished and exquisite recording engineer and mixer and ended up co-producing the record. Her contribution continued to be more than just a recording engineer. She came into Jason's life through Dave Cobb, who produced some extraordinary records, including many of Jason's early ones. She was part of Dave Cobb's team, went out on her own, and is now considered one of the top people in her field, particularly in Nashville. She's amazing to work with. This will be my sixth record, and it was the first time I worked with a woman engineer, a woman mixer and a woman co-producer, and my God, was it a revelation. It was wonderful. It was a lovely, lovely thing to do.
They both have a reputation for working quickly.
They do, and that was really hard for me. I think the biggest challenge was accepting that we wouldn't spend months tweaking and working on things. I had previously made a lot of records in that way, and Jason has a very busy calendar. And I learned that even though there were times where it really pushed me outside of my comfort zone, I learned a tremendous amount about how you can waste a lot of time worrying about details that don't matter. Jason and Gena really did teach me that, and I'm incredibly thankful for that, because it was not always easy for me; to be honest, it was hard. It was like, What do you mean? We're going to make a record in a week? That's insane. So, kudos to him for that approach, and I may or may not enlist that approach going forward, but I learned that despite being very uncomfortable when it was happening, it was truly a great approach.
I love the lyrics' you can get blisters from your favourite shoes' on the track Say Goodbye, Tell No One. It says so much in so few words.
I think it's true that just because your favourite shoes give you a blister doesn't mean you still shouldn't put them on. I think it's often true in friendships, you know, your closest friends are the ones that can also hurt you because they know you so well. It doesn't mean that you're not still going to have them there in your corner. I think that's one of the things that's hard about friendships, family and relationships, people who love us the most are the ones who are also the ones capable of hurting us the most, and I think that's what I was trying to say.
I particularly love the track Need A Ride. Its tempo and emotionally charged lyrics remind me of another favourite of mine, Goodnight California from the ASKING FOR FLOWERS album.
When we recorded Goodnight California, it was just a moment in time, and when you record a song, you never know which ones will endure, and the songs that take on a new life as you play them live and get to know them. And Goodnight California, we play almost every night. I've had many people tell me, either online or in person, that it was the first song of mine they heard, and they were entrapped. It was just a little bit of a coincidence that Need A Ride sounds like that, but it ended up being like that, and it just felt like the right way to present the lyrics that I wrote originally. I had written the song as a very John Prine sort of folk, sort of a humorous takeaway. But I really wanted to feel the weight of the Les Paul Jr, and the drums and the bass, because it's a song that I was angry when I wrote it, and so it felt like the right instrumentation for it.
I do recall you restarting Goodnight California in Dublin some years ago because someone in the audience was talking. You told him to 'shut the fuck up' if I remember correctly.
Well, I did fly all the way to Ireland to play music. So maybe that's not too unfair.
As well as Gena Johnson, you also engaged two other powerful-willed women on the album, sisters Allison Moorer and Shelby Lynne. Had you known them previously?
Yes, Allison and I became acquainted when she was still married to Steve Earle, and she has always just been so generous and complimentary about how much she liked my work. And Allison is very profoundly interesting, and she has a lot of gravitas from her life, and I respect her tremendously. She became somebody I remained close to in different times of our lives. We had some really similar things happen to us, we were both married to musicians who were a lot older than us, and we just had a lot of friends in common. I really wanted someone to sing on the record, and needed some vocals, and asked her, and she made herself available, which was so generous of her. She's a very generous friend. I admire her tremendously, and she enlisted her sister, whom I obviously hold in such high esteem. There is no one like Shelby Lynne, and her voice is unique. The work that she's done is unique. Their story as sisters is so unique and beautiful and also heartbreaking. They are survivors who have persevered, and the fact that they're on my record blows me away.
You didn't have the opportunity to tour the last album, TOTAL FREEDOM, due to COVID. Are you excited about getting on the road with BILLIONNAIRE now?
You have no idea, yes, tremendously. Everyone had things they had planned to do that they had to put on a shelf somewhere. You work for several years, and you spend a lot of money to make a new record. When TOTAL FREEDOM came out, it was hard to realise that it would be years before we would be out playing again. I said to a friend years ago that it was kind of like you had to grieve this thing that you put two years of work into, that you just knew you weren't going to see it through in a way that you had spent many hours preparing yourself for. So, I am very hungry to be on tour and to be playing these songs with my band. I feel like I've arrived at the best version of myself musically, and my capacity to sing. I've taken voice lessons, I have a world-class band, and it's so lovely to get on stage with people you love playing with and that you know you're putting on your best show with. It's fun.
You seem to come alive on stage. Is that hard work, or does that just become natural to you?
I think it must just come naturally. I don't tell myself that I'm going to become somebody different when I go on stage. There is that feeling of adrenaline that you're excited to show people what you can do. Even when I was little, my mom had me in violin lessons, and until I finished high school, I performed classical violin. I was in orchestras; I did music competitions. You do your grades, so you perform at the end of every year to get a score on your grades, and in music, and I was always very, in some ways, very comfortable being on stage. But the difference with playing your own songs is that you wonder if they will land, and you may have to have that armour when you go on stage for being vulnerable in front of others.
How has success and stardom sat with you over the years? Are you comfortable with it?
I don't see myself in that way, but one of the things that was incredibly healthy, not just for my ego, but for my soul in general, was to run a cafe for eight years. I was the person behind the counter, the person who cleaned the toilets, and the person who made the sandwiches, not in that order. It really allowed me not to always be the person who was engaging with a stranger because they knew my music, and I really enjoyed that tremendously. I built relationships with people based on me just being there every day and making coffee and running a business, instead of being the person who was put up on some pedestal because they bought a ticket to my show.
Is this your career going forward, or might you take a left turn again and do something else other than music?
No, I don't think so. I have enough songs to do another two records. I was not a prolific writer before, but in 2023 and the last year, I've written more than I ever did for the sake of just writing songs. And I'm excited to do another record or two like tomorrow, but I'm thrilled about this record, and I'm excited to play it, and so I don't really have any other things I want to do. And the truth is, I moved to Florida a couple of years ago, and so I feel a little bit like when I'm home, I'm on vacation, because that's what my surroundings look like. So, I feel like I've got a better life balance. I want to play music, and then when I'm home, I really have time to recover from it, and it's a better balance overall.
Do you recall your first shows in Ireland at The Kilkenny Roots Festival in 2003?
Yes. Do you know who I met that day? I'll never forget it. I met Laura Cantrell and her husband, Jeremy Tepper, who was on tour with her. It was the first time I met them. Jeremy went on to become the executive producer of Sirius XM outlaw country, which became a huge part of my world, the people that I loved, and I was welcomed into the outlaw country family, which was incredible, and played the outlaw country cruise. I just saw Laura recently at the opening of Lucinda Williams' new bar in New York City. She performed that day, and we both reminisced about the day we met in Ireland, and how I've thought about that day many times since.
Interview by Declan Culliton