Like another great musician, Kathleen Edwards contains multitudes: Foul-mouthed at times, she also promised to have the sold-out audience at The Birchmere home early, as she likes “to be in bed at the hotel by 11 watching Hallmark.” She has boatloads of attitude, evident in songs like “One More Song the Radio Won’t Like,” but she also has a soft side that came out in “Hard on Everyone.”
My father also likes to watch the Hallmark Channel. And, like Kathleen, he also lives on the central Gulf Coast of Florida. In 2023, Edwards, who is Canadian, but who grew up all over the world as the daughter of a diplomat, moved to St. Petersburg. I lived in Tampa for several years, and its appeal is lost on me, but as “FLA,” a track on her recently released album, Billionaire, makes clear, she fell in love with the state, which was also the birthplace and early home of her musical hero, Tom Petty, “a boy from Gainesville running down a dream.” Kathleen played tribute to him in her encore with “Crawling Back to You” during her show at The Birchmere on Sept. 21.
Billionaire is Edwards’s first record in five years. It was produced by Jason Isbell, and Jason and several members of his band played on it. Her previous album, Total Freedom, followed a near-decade hiatus from the music industry, during which she ran a cafe, Quitters, in her hometown of Ottawa and worked on her mental health, in particular her struggles with depression. I found myself thinking about this and relating to Kathleen, as I’ve my own battles with my mental health, and I can similarly be both sweet and salty — and the few days leading up to this show had been kind of rough.
Watching the documentary on Petty’s second solo album, Wildflowers, Edwards also fell in love with the Martin acoustic guitar he played. While that instrument had a sticker price of $12,000, placing it out of her reach, she was able to find another Martin acoustic, and she ended up writing the whole album on it. The title track “Billionaire,” she explained, is about a good friend who died very young. The friend, who was like a younger sister, was only recently married, making this even sadder and more tragic.
Watch the official lyric video for “Billionaire” by Kathleen Edwards on YouTube:
Before playing “Hockey Skates,” Edwards reflected on her debut album, Failer, released 22 years ago. The first time she played The Birchmere, she was in “the other room,” which is a standing room space. In nearly a decade of attending shows at the historic venue, I’ve never been to one like that, and I’m not even sure if they have them anymore.
Kicking off promptly at 7:30pm with “Glenfern,” Edwards and her band played for two hours. After “Need a Ride,” she told the audience she does, in fact, drive a truck. Prefacing “Little Red Ranger,” she mentioned how, the night before, she’d gotten into some hot water when she wore a Mets cap on stage in Philadelphia. I just can’t get emotional about baseball. When I was a kid, my dad to me a Cleveland game. “See that?” he said. “What, Dad?” “Grass growing.”
I was glad she didn’t play one song, “Who Rescued Who,” about a golden retriever she had. She called it her “grown man cry song,” adding “Grown men won’t cry about a lot of things, but they’ll cry about their dogs.” I am perhaps unusual in my lability, having cried when Ron Sexsmith played a Cat Stevens tune in the earlier week, but I am extremely emotional about dogs: Had she played this one, I would’ve completely fallen apart. Some days I have to stay off social media completely because I can’t deal with the risk of running into a sad animal story.
The expansive setlist also included “Save Your Soul,” “Say Goodbye, Tell No One,” “Mint,” “Options Open,” “Asking for Flowers,” “In State,” “Change the Sheets,” “When the Truth Comes Out,” and ended with “Six O’ Clock News.” After the Petty cover, she finished the evening with the heavy rocker “Back to You,” promising to “send you home with a headache.”
Having to get up at 6am to be in the office, I appreciate an artist playing to a reasonable hour. I don’t understand why some insist on playing at a ridiculously late hour. I’ve had to bail on shows in order to catch the train home, and Metro runs fairly late. I don’t understand who benefits from this: the audience doesn’t, and it often means the band has to get on the road on absurdly late hour. And it’s not like we were shortchanged at all on the music here: as I noted above, this was a solid two-hour set, and not much of that was eaten up with banter.
I mentioned I’d been having a few rough days leading up to this show. Kathleen’s music helped lift me out of my funk and made me feel a little more centered and read to dive back into the working week.
