Kathleen Edwards

Ottawa and Failer

Kathleen Margaret Edwards was born on July 11, 1978 in Ottawa. Her father, Leonard Edwards, was a diplomat, and she spent part of her youth in South Korea and Switzerland. She played classical violin from age five to 17, studied with Karoly Sziladi and played in the Ottawa Youth Orchestra, discovered the guitar at summer camp in Temagami, Ontario, and got her own at 15. The first record she was given was a Tom Petty album, and as a teenager she listened to her brother's Neil Young and Bob Dylan records. She made a six-song EP, Building 55, in 1999 in a run of 500 copies (the Canadian Encyclopedia says seven songs), and booked a ten-show Western Canada tour herself by phoning music stores.

At 22 she moved to a farmhouse in Wakefield, Quebec, where she wrote the songs for Failer in about two months, on acoustic guitar. It came out independently in early 2002, and then on MapleMusic in Canada on September 7, 2002 and on Zoe and Rounder internationally in January 2003. Edwards and Dave Draves produced it, with Jim Bryson on electric guitar and banjo, Fred Guignon on slide and lap steel and Tom Thompson on pedal steel. It reached 82 in Canada, and Juno nominations followed, including Songwriter of the Year in 2004 for "Six O'Clock News", "Hockey Skates" and "Mercury". Critics compared her to Lucinda Williams and grouped her with Ryan Adams and Kasey Chambers, and Rolling Stone named her a top new act of 2003.

Asking for Flowers and Voyageur

Back to Me (March 1, 2005) was followed by years of touring, after which she said she needed to stay in one place for a while. Asking for Flowers came out on March 4, 2008, produced by Edwards and Jim Scott, recorded over nine months in Santa Clarita, California, with a band Scott hand-picked that included Benmont Tench, Greg Leisz and Don Heffington. It reached 102 on the Billboard 200 and number one on the US Heatseekers chart, was shortlisted for the 2008 Polaris Music Prize, and AllMusic and Rolling Stone gave it four stars, Pitchfork 7.9. Her lyrics touch on Alicia Ross, a murder victim, and on the hockey player Marty McSorley. She also sang backing vocals on Bryan Adams's 11 and toured with him.

Voyageur (January 17, 2012) was co-produced by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and reached number two in Canada and 39 in the United States. "A Soft Place to Land", co-written with John Roderick, won the 2012 SOCAN Songwriting Prize. She played an NPR Tiny Desk Concert in April 2012.

The coffee shop years and the return

From 2014 she stepped back from music and co-founded the Quitters coffee house in Stittsville, Ontario, which closed on March 6, 2022. She co-wrote Maren Morris's "Good Woman" in 2019. Total Freedom (Dualtone, August 14, 2020) reached 24 in Canada and 183 in the United States, and an EP, Dogs and Alcohol, followed in 2022. Billionaire, released on August 22, 2025 on Dualtone, was produced by Jason Isbell and Gena Johnson with Isbell's 400 Unit as the band, and the Boston Globe reports it was recorded in under two weeks. Setlist.fm logs 514 setlists.