Good Music: Kathleen Edwards
Posted on Aug 16, 2012 by Trevor in Music
I went with my wife and her sisters to Salt Lake City’s annual Twilight Concert Series this week. The artist I was most interested in was Kathleen Edwards, a Canadian alternative folk-rock musician whose work I’m pretty familiar with. She reminds me somewhat of a favorite artist of mine, Mindy Smith.
Her clear, vulnerable voice sounds unadorned and fragile on her studio recordings, so I was a little surprised to hear her live and get a sense of just how strong and controlled her vocals were. She sounded just as good on that stage as she does in her albums.
Her sunny disposition betrayed the melancholy nature of many of her songs. Perhaps there’s a paradox at play—a hidden sense of optimism even in songs about deteriorating relationships and misplaced trust. Her songs tend to be very autobiographical, and she mentioned briefly before she played one of them that it was hard to revisit the moment in her life that prompted her to write the song in the first place.
Anyway, her latest album, Voyageur, is pretty good. I think she’s definitely an artist worth checking out.