And now for something new! Well, from 2019 but still fresh. It is also a perhaps refreshing dissent from the
relentless cheerfulness and sentimentality of so many Christmas songs. A lot of us have felt something like
this but have stifled ourselves so as not to be a buzz kill. It’s
Christmastime (Let’s Just Survive) by Canadian singer/songwriter Kathleen Edwards tells it like it sometimes really is.
Edwards wrote about her song:
It’s that time of the year where you click the radio, and there’s the
standard Christmas fare. I was like, none of these are actually what Christmas
is like. Christmas is a fucking zoo. It’s nuts and it’s not really that fun.
It’s just chaos from start to finish. You spend too much. You fucking expect
too much. Your parents, there’s always the drama of your dysfunctional fucking
family. I was like, “How come there are no songs about that?”
Edwards was born in 1978 in Ottawa, Canada, the daughter
of diplomat Leonard Edwards, who later
served as Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs. She began taking violin lessons by the age of
five. Later as a teenager she lived in Korea and Switzerland. It was a lonely
life for a young girl
and she spent most of her time listening intently to
her brother’s record collection, especially Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Returning to Canada after
completing her secondary
education she refused to go on to college, surely a source of disappointment for her high achieving
parents. Instead,
she began performing on the coffee house
circuit scratching out the meager
living of a young artist.
In 1999, Edwards recorded a six-song EP, Building 55 and pressed 500 copies. By the fall of 2000, she was on tour across Canada managing her own gigs. In 2001, she wrote seven of the
ten songs for her 2002 debut release Failer.
In 2002 after playing at the SBSW festival in Texas she was signed
to Rounder Records in the U.S. and MapleMusic in Canada. Failer was released in Canada in the fall of 2002 and
in America and internationally by Rounder the
following January. Rolling Stone declared her one of year’s most promising
new acts and Blender said that the Failer songs possessed “an indefinable pull that
makes you love the characters they describe, no matter how fucked up they are.”
The
New York Times praised Edwards as a writer whose songs can “pare
situations down to a few dozen words while they push country-rock towards its
primal impulses of thump and twang.” She made her network
television debut on the Late Show with David
Letterman where she performed Six
O’Clock News, a break-through song from the album
She followed up with Back
to Me in 2005 with
In 2005, Edwards released Back to Me, which also
garnered considerable critical acclaim, and led to the release of the singles Back to Me and In State. The track
Summerlong was also featured on the soundtrack of the movie Elizabethtown starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst.
In 2008, Edwards released her third studio album, Asking for Flowers. Which was a shortlisted nominee for the 2008. In 2010, Edwards began working on a new album in Wisconsin. Voyageur was released in January 2012. It
included the single Change the Sheets.
Edwards stepped back
from the music scene in 2014, launching a coffee house
in the Ottawa suburb of Stittsville called Quitters. She insisted that she is not leaving music but just taking a break, and that the
name Quitters was “kind of tongue-in-cheek”.
Edwards continued to perform sporadically, including a
number of new songs. In August 2019,
following the suicide of American singer-songwriter Neal
Casal, Edwards opened
up on Twitter about the struggle with depression that led her to take time away from her music career.
In November 2019, Edwards released It’s
Christmastime (Let’s Just Survive), her first new single since Voyageur,
on the Dualtone Records compilation album A Dualtone
Christmas. She followed
up in May 2020, with the single Options Open and announced Total Freedom, her first new album in eight years. Which was released on August 14,
2020.
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