Back To Me

One of the great mysteries of our time, up there with the grassy knoll gunman and whatever happened to those dusty white dog turds you used to see on the footpath as a kid, is why some North American country-tinged rock records taste like wallpaper paste and others like steak.
Well, okay, it’s no mystery at all; it’s down to core tenets such as songwriting and personality. But it is a very fine line between the true thing (The Jayhawks) and that which merely sounds like it (Ryan Adams).
Kathleen Edwards, bless her Canuck heart, belongs squarely in the former category. What she does is nothing original – pretty much any of the tunes on Back To Me, her second album, could be filed under Lucinda & The Heartbreakers (Tom’s not Johnny’s) – but it really doesn’t matter. She has a way with melody, a turn of phrase and a way of phrasing those turns of phrase that anaesthetises the listener to stylistic concerns.
The opener ‘In State’ provides the blueprint for a lot of what follows, a song of exasperated love for a hood addicted to the lure of One Last Job, wounded and compassionate and spiced with lines like “I know where the cops hang out/…Maybe 20 years in state’ll change your mind.”
Her band are a surefooted and muscular lot (even if guitarist Colin Cripps sometimes sounds more like Mike Campbell than Mike Campbell, especially on the laconic wallop of ‘Independent Thief’) but Edwards holds the focus. The way the camera loves some actors, the microphone loves her voice, and when that voice is deployed on something as delicately weathered as ‘Old Time Sake’ (“Of all the things that you could choose to say/‘Baby come home with me for old time’s sake’”), it’s hard not to cave. She excels at love songs stitched with drawn-from-life details: copied keys, unanswered phones, the detritus that litters the no man’s land between men and women. Back To Me groans with sweet-but-embittered songs like ‘Summerlong’ and ‘What Are You Waiting For’, populated by characters that could be mutually distrustful but fatally attracted grifters, drifters, shysters and heisters.
But always in Kathleen Edwards book, the shortest distance between perfor