KATHLEEN EDWARDS

10/28/2012

McGlohon Theater (ALL AGES SHOW)
345 North College Street
Charlotte, NC 28202

Doors Open: 6:30

Tickets: $22.00 (Advance) / $22.00 (Day of Show)

WITH JIM BRYSON & GORD TOUGH

 Ottawa native Kathleen Edwards spent 2010/2011 cooped up recording a new record with co-producer Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver). The first fruits of their labour can be heard on the just released 7" entitled Wapusk. The full-length album, Voyageur, is scheduled for release in January 2012. Since the release of her debut LP, Failer (2003), Kathleen has toured across Canada, USA and Europe several times over, sharing the stages with the likes of My Morning Jacket, John Doe and Willie Nelson. Along the way Kathleen has garnered critical acclaim for her live shows as well as multiple Juno Award nominations for Back To Me (2005) and Asking For Flowers (2008), which also earned her a spot on the Polaris Prize short list.

Voyageur is less of a departure than it is a journey, and like any transforming trip, it demands that we let go of any preconceptions about the destination. These songs are the perfect travel companions to their own haunted landscape. Edwards guides us through house full of empty rooms, revealing the sadness behind a public smile and the numbness that follows broken expectations and the casual cruelties of love, until we find ourselves softly drifting down to hell with her. And yet, this isn’t a bummer ride at all—it’s elevating. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth said that poetry is born in “emotion recollected in tranquility,” and Voyageur evokes a spectrum of overwhelming feelings within the atmosphere of a lucid dream. Edward’s characters speak to the grief, loneliness, shock, and confusion that come with endings as well as the hope and irrepressible joy that accompany new beginnings, but the stories are told with a seductively quiet strength. The album celebrates the many pleasures of survival and reinvention, suggesting that an acceptance of life’s changeability is what will allow us to face the hardest of hard times—as well as the exhilarating longing and dislocation of the unknown—head on, with grace.

www.blumenthalarts.org/default.asp?blumenthal=59&objId=3478

Presented in conjunction with Blumenthal Performing Arts and Maxx Music.