Los Angeles, June 05: Roots rocker Kathleen Edwards recorded her first album, "Failer," on her own and filled it with songs about desperation, alienation, death and drinking. The catchiest single is called "One More Song the Radio Won't Like." Is this any way to start a career?
Apparently so, because the 24-year-old Canadian has quickly built a small but dedicated following and warmed the hearts of critics as she crisscrosses America in a bus to spin out her alternative-country tales of woe.
And Edwards, who made "Failer" at a friend's home studio in Ottawa and intended it as a demo tape, told Reuters there's a good reason why the album -- which features a broken-down truck on the cover -- bears such an authentic feel.

"Everything about the record captures who I am and what my life was like at the time I wrote it," she said by telephone from Boulder, Colorado, before a concert there.
"The truck on the cover was my truck and it really did break down all the time," Edwards said. "The songs are all very personal and real to who I am. That's the one thing I consistently hear from people. They like that it's genuine and not a pop production. When they listen to my record, they feel like it's real."
They may also feel depressed, given a cast of characters as bleak as any to haunt an album since Bruce Springsteen's "Darkness on the Edge of Town" -- and more drunk. On "Failer," the drinking never stops, the sex is meaningless and the hearts are broken.

Edwards is not the first to mine this vein, of course. It seems that every music critic in North America has compared her to fellow country rocker Lucinda Williams. But this time it comes from the daughter of a Canadian diplomat who is fluent in French, studied classical violin for 12 years and spent parts of her youth in Korea and Switzerland.

Bureau Report