The prompt for this Instrumental series is, essentially: “What’s the most significant creative tool in your artistic practice? Let’s talk about it.” Over the years, that prompt has been interpreted many different ways, leading to plenty of conversations about obvious instruments like Kim Harris’ butterscotch Jazzmaster, Nick Schofield’s Prophet-600, or JayWood’s Roland SP404. But Jennifer Castle talked about breathwork, Kelly McMichael about demo-making, and Begonia shared her journaling habit.
Despite this diverse smattering of creative devices, it was a surprise to see Kathleen Edwards’ answer. “My tool is: life outside music. I think,” she wrote, via her publicist. On the other hand, this was really no surprise at all. The roots musician from Ottawa also famously said goodbye to the music industry to open the Stittsville, Ontario coffee shop Quitters in 2014, shortly after releasing Voyageur, her biggest record to date. She later returned to releasing music with 2020’s Total Freedom. If anyone in the music industry takes life outside music seriously, it’s probably the songwriter who put their career on pause to reconnect with it.
“I put out my first record, and suddenly the phone is ringing like mad, and there’s no time to go home and live life and then work on a new record,” Edwards says over the phone from her parents’ farm in Perth, Ontario. “Then I had songs that ended up becoming my second record. So basically, from 2002 until 2006, four years of my mid-20s, I was on stage, in a plane, in a van, having my picture taken with my band, doing all sorts of incredible things. I would say 23 to 27 is an incredibly formative time in somebody’s life. And even though I had all these experiences, none of them were particularly… I wouldn’t say ‘normal,’ but they weren’t part of everyday life. They were of a certain type of bubbled life.”
She turned to narrative songwriting for 2008’s Asking for Flowers, which took the attention away from herself, but sometime after Voyageur — and a divorce, a relationship that fell apart, and a period of clinical depression — songwriting as a creative outlet just presented her with “a sort of rudderless version” of herself. Not wanting to “ruminate on a sadness,” she put down any ambitions or aspirations regarding her creative life and decided to do something completely different.
“It was a huge gift, because not only did it completely remove me from the bubble that I had been in for a long time, it also allowed me to build a community around myself and to then participate in a day-to-day life in which all of these people came in through the front door,” Edwards says. “Over the course of eight, nine years, I lived life again through being a coffee shop owner, through being somebody’s boss, and becoming part of a community and in a whole variety of different ways. And it really changed me profoundly, because it changed my perception of others essentially.
“Before, my relationship with strangers was very much rooted in my existence as a performer — I was on stage, and the people I engaged with were there to see me perform. And now my relationship with strangers was when they walked in the door, and they were there to get a coffee and have five minutes to sit down and collect themselves, or have a cookie with their kid, or take an elderly relative for an outing.”
For Edwards, the diversion from the diversion proved invaluable. She admits she had a limited and coarse perception of what people were like, and made assumptions about taste, likes, dislikes, challenges, and how others were politically aligned. In writing, these kinds of uninvestigated assumptions lead quickly to cliché, but cultivating openness can help reveal the ambiguity and complexity of people one might be quick to judge.
“What was interesting to me was all of those stereotypes or assumptions or preconceived ideas of what I thought I knew about people was, in fact, shattered and wonderfully so,” Edwards says. “It allowed me to be much more curious about the world, in a way where I didn’t feel threatened about anyone who didn’t necessarily see things the same way I did, and I really enjoyed that new gift. I wouldn’t have received it if I hadn’t been engaged in life, I guess, outside of music.”
Real life is all over Edwards’ latest record, Billionaire. The title of the dusky “Say Goodbye, Tell No One” is as pithy a summary of the advice one could glean from her years off releasing music as could be. That song, “Need a Ride,” “Other People’s Bands,” and “Little Red Ranger” all offer complex portraits and acknowledge that people can’t be summed up in a soundbite. The title track captures the huge-ness of grieving a departed friend, in this case a 26-year-old woman who died in her sleep from a brain aneurysm: “If this feeling were currency, I would be a billionaire,” Edwards sings.
“Confronting the possibility that tomorrow that might be me, I don’t feel obligated to climb Mount Everest,” she says. “I don’t feel obligated to be acknowledged and win an award for the work that I do. None of that feels meaningful. Living my life and pursuing the things that bring purpose and meaning to me are going to be the things that I prioritize.”
Easier said than done, of course — it often takes the kind of critical mass of pressure and exhaustion that plagued Edwards after Voyageur to inspire a radical reset. But perhaps it’s even tougher to return in a thoughtful way that allows for some sort of balance.
“I think I do a much better job at compartmentalizing windows of time, and so right now I’m not feeling guilty that I didn’t spend the week I had at home [before tour] working on new music,” Edwards says. “I didn’t spend it in any super productive way, except to do a few things that were on my to-do list and get myself ready to be on the road, because that’s a huge commitment where you kind of have no life except the tour, and that’s your priority. Before, I think I thought I had to do everything all the time.”
It’s clear to Edwards that music, like most creative endeavours, can become a rigid part of one’s identity, and that it’s easy to make the assumption that for the past and present versions of oneself to be real, this music part of the self equation must continue taking up space into eternity — that to walk away or do something else with one’s life is a failure. But a shift in perspective can be liberating.
“We have chapters in our life, and sometimes something is everything, and then we move on to other things,” Edwards says. “It doesn’t mean you forget how to ride the bike or sing a song. It just means that maybe the feelings you get doing it change. Maybe we don’t talk about that enough — the evolution of purpose. It doesn’t diminish the meaning of how significant something is. It just doesn’t have to be forever.”
