{"id":99368,"date":"2025-08-27T09:53:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-27T09:53:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/99368\/"},"modified":"2025-08-27T09:53:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-27T09:53:07","slug":"kathleen-edwards-billionaire-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/99368\/","title":{"rendered":"Kathleen Edwards: Billionaire Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Somewhere on the tour supporting her 2012 album Voyageur<\/a>, Kathleen Edwards<\/a> sang herself ragged. Her natural vocal talent, all airy defiance, grew strained under the relentless performance pace. \u201cI sang like shit every night and ended up canceling shows,\u201d she told the New Yorker<\/a> in 2020. \u201cIt was a horrible episode.\u201d Edwards needed to reevaluate how she worked with her primary instrument, a doctor advised, so she wasn\u2019t \u201cgripping so hard every night.\u201d What she relinquished was her grip on music, putting it down for nearly a decade before returning with the poised Total Freedom<\/a> in 2020. On the follow-up, Billionaire, the relationship she\u2019s been developing with her voice cracks wide open.<\/p>\n

Across the album, a polished update of the rough-edged alt-country and folk rock that informed her first three LPs, Edwards\u2019 voice elevates the storytelling, revealing characters, colors, and context with the slightest inflection. That narrative quality lies in her rose-colored vocal resonance on the chorus of \u201cLittle Red Ranger,\u201d where she reunites with an Ontarian childhood friend who moved to Los Angeles, and in the way her natural vibrato curves toward nostalgia on \u201cFLA,\u201d a lively paean to the Sunshine State in which a trip south transports her to younger days, when music was still a dream. What a delight to hear Edwards age into the power of her voice, taking on a magnetism reminiscent of k.d. lang<\/a> or Mary Chapin Carpenter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That growth is most evident on the atmospheric title track, an almost hymnal reflection on the magnitude of loss, and the idea that the immense love you carry after someone passes is a kind of legacy in absentia. Edwards\u2019 voice climbs the chorus like a creeping vine seeking the memory of sunlight: \u201cIf this feeling\/Were a currency\/I would be\/A billionaire,\u201d she sings, tiptoeing over the initial phrasing before releasing herself into the declaration. On the bridge, electric guitar (from Jason Isbell<\/a>, who co-produced the album with Gena Johnson), violin, and viola rush alongside the cascading current of her voice, nudging her closer to the type of emotional cliff Brandi Carlile<\/a> regularly dives off. This kind of arrangement, thick with sentiment, could easily derail into schmaltzy abandon, but the ache of her voice ushers everything closer to catharsis.<\/p>\n

Unlike the composed Total Freedom, Billionaire feels more lived in. Isbell\u2019s electric guitar widens each song\u2019s trajectory\u2014his ponderous solos push \u201cSay Goodbye, Tell No One\u201d and \u201cNeed a Ride\u201d past the six-minute mark\u2014and proves a formidable foil for Edwards\u2019 voice. (Previously, the two collaborated on a fragile rendition of his Southeastern<\/a> song \u201cTraveling Alone\u201d for the covers album<\/a> Edwards released earlier in 2025.) Even in quieter moments like \u201cLittle Pink Door,\u201d recorded live in one take, Isbell knows how to sashay close without stealing her light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Somewhere on the tour supporting her 2012 album Voyageur, Kathleen Edwards sang herself ragged. Her natural vocal talent,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99369,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[12327,64,63,134,136,1672],"class_list":["post-99368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-albums","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99368\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}