I saw Kathleen Edwards at Webster Hall back in 2012 and I wrote this (here): “The Canadian singer-songwriter, in town to push the product, her excellent album # 3 Voyageur, performed a thrilling and intimate 90 minute set which seemed like a drunken driver smashing into anything that got in its way, or maybe a Lifetime movie for socially dysfunctional chicks in their 30s. As Kathleen shouted out to her best friend, tried and failed to be a good sport over the Rangers beating Ottowa in the playoffs rushing off stage mid-set for a pee or telling us revealingly stories about herself, she was an easy artist to daydream about.”
But what I didn’t daydream about was Kathleen quitting music and running a coffee shop. But that’s exactly what she did in September 2013, as she explained to the Toronto Star (here), During the Voyageur tour she claims: “The questions would go like this. ‘So, you’re divorced now and you just made a record with your new boyfriend about your ex-husband?’. I’d just sit there thinking, ‘How the fuckk did I do this to myself? I’m such an asshole.’ I just felt vulnerable all the time.”
So she opened the coffee shop Quitters and became a barista!!! “I’m an excellent barista. I had to realize: Fame is not acceptance, it doesn’t validate you as a person. It means nothing. You know what means something? Having people from the neighborhood come in, getting to know them, seeing their families, and hearing them say ‘thank you for giving us a place to go.’ That’s . . . awesome.”
“I have people who come in and say, ‘Hey, I hear you used to be a singer. I’m still a singer. But the priority is somewhere else for now. I’m working my ass off, and I’m exhausted. But I’m happy. I’m really happy. I was emotionally exhausted for years. This is different, and good.”
Kathleen is a really good songwriter, when you’re that good…
