Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards plays the Evanston Folk Festival this coming weekend as one of the top-of-the-bill performers, in a bit of musical serendipity.
The festival, now in its third year as an annual summer-capping event, will be Sept. 12-13 in Dawes Park on the Evanston lakefront. Headliners are Trampled by Turtles on Saturday and Indigo Girls on Sunday.
Edwards is slated to play Sunday, and will also return to the area in October to play as part of a John Prine tribute at the Chicago Theatre.
“Chicago and I have had a bit of a 20-year dry spell,” she said in a recent phone interview from Florida, where she lives with her husband. But she was in Evanston last June playing a concert at SPACE in support of her 2025 album “Billionaire” and there was a poster with the lineup for that year’s Evanston Folk Festival. “And I said, ‘Wow, I want to play that.'”
Her manager Frank Riley made it happen. Her 4 p.m. Sunday set on the main stage will be followed by Josh Ritter, then Indigo Girls.
Given that festivals are a place for collaborations and spontaneous jam sessions, is there anyone on the bill she’d particularly like to share the stage with?
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Sierra Hull, but Hull plays late Saturday. “She’s an enormously talented instrumentalist,” Edwards said. Their paths have crossed recently, including at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island in July.
Edwards also knows Ritter — in his case, for many years.
Edwards’ debut album was “Failer,” released in the U.S. in 2003, followed by “Back to Me” (2005) and “Asking for Flowers” (2008), both of which made the Billboard charts.
She first met Ritter in a tiny bar in Boston soon after that debut album and signing with Rounder Records. “Rounder insisted I should meet him,” Edwards said. Not long after, Ritter recorded his hit song “Kathleen.” “And it has the line, ‘All the other girls here are stars, you are the Northern Lights.’ As a Canadian, I always assumed that’s about me.”
They have a tacit agreement never to actually speak about it.
Indigo Girls also have been a big part of her musical life. Recently, she was invited to do the scoring for a documentary about the women musician-focused festival Lilith Fair, and watched footage of Indigo Girls that “brought back so many memories,” she said. “They were heroes of mine. One of the first songs I ever learned on guitar was ‘Closer to Fine.'”
That would have been age 14. As she tells it, that was the summer she went away to canoe camp in the Canadian woods with no running water.
“I went away to that studying to be a classical musician and listening to boy bands. I came back listening to Indigo Girls and John Prine.”
Edwards is the daughter of Leonard Edwards, former Canadian deputy minister of foreign affairs, and her parents have not always understood her career path. They expected her to stay with the violin and go to university.
“And I wanted to go play in coffee shops and dirty bars,” she said. They could never believe her music would ever turn into anything. But after “Failer,” Rolling Stone called her one of the year’s most promising new acts. In his 2002 “Songbook,” the British author and New Yorker music critic Nick Hornby (“High Fidelity”) included Edwards on his short list of new music.
One day, a friend and colleague of her father’s heard her music and came to him and asked, “This Kathleen Edwards, is this your Kathleen?”
That early success was a mixed blessing, though. Edwards appeared on Letterman. Soon every song and new thing she wrote became the question of whether it would be good enough to sell records. After her album “Voyageur” in 2012, “things just came to a stop.” She was divorced from her first husband and musical collaborator Colin Cripps, followed too quickly by a relationship with singer Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. She was clinically depressed.
Edwards stepped back from music in 2014, opening a coffee shop outside of Ottawa called Quitters. She focused on that venture, and on beginning therapy and taking care of herself.
“I also got a dog and a yard and walked every day and stopped worrying about whether the show would sell enough tickets to pay for me going in the first place,” she said.
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She married her current husband, developer Sean McAdam, in 2020. She also released a couple of singles, then a new album, “Total Freedom,” that same year.
Edwards’ music has always been about working out something “festering in her,” she said. When she was younger, that could mean taking something more or less autobiographical “and hoping that one dash of exaggeration would let me off the hook.”
“National Steel” is a song from her first album, written at a time she was most relying on her parents for financial support, and it includes the line, “Could’ve made it real quick, save me the guilt trip, and just said ‘no.'”
She said she had asked her parents, who were overseas, for money to buy the titular guitar and they declined. Her mother, Edwards said, had a habit of taking notes while on the phone. The chorus is, “Are you writing this all down?”
Edwards’ set at Evanston Folk Fest will naturally borrow from “Billionaire,” but she says that there’s little more rewarding than playing a song like “National Steel” that she first recorded 25 years ago. “And I’ll look out, and I’ll see someone singing along to every word,” she said. “It’s a joyful feeling, it’s incredibly validating. Not in a pursuit of narcissism, like, ‘Tell me I’m good,’ but that the song meant something to someone else.”
If you go
Evanston Folk Festival runs 12:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Sept. 12-13 on three stages in Dawes Park, entrances at Sheridan Road and Forrest Place and Sheridan and Greenwood; tickets and more information at evanstonfolkfestival.com