Kathleen Edwards turns her breakup into a breakthrough with her Bon Iver–produced album, Voyageur.
Everyone loves a good breakup record. The massive success of Adele’s heart-wrenching 21 is a testament to the appeal of sharing in someone’s artfully rendered misery. Nick Cave transformed his split with P.J. Harvey into his accomplished and introspective album The Boatman’s Call—and even Taylor Swift evolved as a songwriter by exploring such depths. But when a singer taps into this particular subject, the flood of emotions comes with an equal amount of baggage, from the probing questions lobbed by headline-hungry journalists to the fact that he or she will probably have to play these songs night after night for months on end.
Toronto’s Kathleen Edwards is on the verge of having her biggest success yet with just such an album. Written and recorded over three years, Voyageur (out this week) is largely about the breakup of her marriage to producer/bandmate/collaborator Colin Cripps. But even if you didn’t know the context, it would be hard not to get that sense from Voyageur. And the situation is further complicated by the fact that the album was co-produced by Kanye-approved, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Justin Vernon (of Bon Iver), who’s now also Edwards’ main squeeze. So with the prospect of having to talk about that context for the foreseeable future, Edwards is steeling herself for the deluge.
“Of course, [in a recent interview] when I said, ‘I guess people are going to say that this is my divorce record,’ it got cut to: “This is my divorce record,” she explains over tea during her first day of rehearsals for her upcoming tour. But Edwards isn’t shying away from the heavy stuff. Her no-bullshit persona—she’s a cussin’, drinkin’, hockey playin’ kinda gal whose lyrics often dissect the ways relationships don’t work—has endeared her to a growing contingent of fans over the past decade.
Decked out in red-and-black flannel, she cracks jokes throughout our conversation and professes her love of stoner-metal stalwarts Mastodon (“I want to start an all-girl tribute band called Master Dong”). And though she’s completely upfront about her underlying vulnerability, she does admit she may have succumbed to a slight case of TMI.
“I’m still battling with the fact that I wrote a record that’s basically fucking pages torn out of my diary, for lack of a better word,” she says. “I’m still realizing: Holy fuck, all my shit is in there to see. I didn’t know I was doing that when I was working on the songs. I didn’t realize I was going to put the most excruciating experiences of my life as somebody’s partner into a record that people were going to listen to and see me very clearly. Part of me is going, ‘Oh, shit, I didn’t really leave anything out.’”
The “divorce album” aspect only seems awkward for Edwards when her relationship with Kanye’s go-to indie-folkster becomes the big media angle. “It’s weird when the interviewer is like, ‘So, this is your divorce record. Now tell me about your relationship with Justin Vernon,’” she says. “I feel like I’m an asshole, I’m a bad person.”
Still, that’s Vernon singing and playing alongside her as she laments, “I want you to kiss me / like the way that I wish you would” on Voyageur’s “House Full of Empty Rooms.” Thankfully, Vernon didn’t let things get awkward. “I think Justin was so open to the music that I don’t feel like I or the work was being judged on the content. And that made it easy to talk about it when we weren’t recording,” she says. “Justin was always easygoing about it. He was like, ‘Let’s just make a record.’”
This openness and ease allowed Edwards to tap into a whole new sonic palette to colour Voyageur’s songs: With its feedback drones and occasionally distorted vocals, it’s far more in line with the indie-rock of The National and Bon Iver than her alt-country past. If this evolution is the thing that earns Edwards an even larger audience, playing her breakup album for an increasing number of people might not be so hard after all. “I’ve not been in a good place these last few months. So, even today, just getting to play music with my band, it’s like the weight of the world has lifted,” she says. “I got here this morning and 10 minutes in I was like, ‘Oh, there you are. I found you. I think it’s going to be okay.’”
