Before Kathleen Edwards met co-producer Justin Vernon, she knew she wanted to take a different approach for her fourth album.
“I wanted to do something with a far less ‘Canadian singer/songwriter’ angle,” says the Toronto-based musician over the phone from her parents’ farm in Perth, Ontario. “I wanted it to reflect more of the records I really like.”
Recently, those include ones by the Long Winters, David Bazan’s Curse Your Branches and the National’s High Violet – all much closer to indie rock than the alt-country Edwards is known for. Ever fearless, she contacted the Long Winters’ John Roderick and embarked on songwriting sessions with him in Seattle.
“I wanted to collaborate in a way I’d never done before and just try new things. Eventually, that led me to Justin.”
Vernon had openly cited her music as an influence on his own, and the two hit it off so well that they began dating during the recording sessions. Describing his sound as “a cloudy orchestra,” Edwards says you can definitely hear his influence on her record, which he also played on.
So what did she learn from her time in his newly built Wisconsin studio, April Base?
“That I’m in love with him!” she says, with a laugh.
“But also just… I’ve had the luxury of recording with exceptional gear and exceptional sound engineers who can get the purist sound out of a guitar amp. Working with Justin was different. His approach is much more about the actual sound that’s happening rather than the process of capturing it. And then he gets inside that sound and fucks with it, and it starts to become whatever he probably had in mind from the start.
“Mostly, though, nothing was precious. Nothing was like, ‘It has to be this way.’ Recording with him was revelatory and the most amazing experience of my life.”
The as-yet-untitled album comes out on Maple/Universal in January 2012. A 7-inch featuring one album song plus Wapusk, which she wrote for the film/soundtrack National Parks Project and was the first song she and Vernon ever recorded together, comes out in early September.
