Kathleen Edwards: Asking for Flowers : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

America outsources everything else — why not country music? Like Neil Young, Robbie Robertson and Shania Twain, Kathleen Edwards is a Canadian who crafts music that's often more "American"-tasting than domestic brands. But she's not fronting. On her strongest album yet, she sets a poignant road tale between New York and Ontario ("Buffalo") and pens a fierce, Crazy Horse-ish squall about crack, murder and racism in her own back yard ("O Canada"). The hottest border-crossing tune, though, is "Oil Man's War," a cascading-piano story-song about two kids, Bobby and Annabel, that conflates Vietnam-era draft-dodging with modern geopolitics. Obviously, it isn't likely to woo Nashville radio. Neither is "The Cheapest Key," a harmonica-charged heartland rocker whose alphabetized first verse declares, "B is for bullshit." Too bad for Edwards, who surely knows that the image of Annabel's hand on Bobby's thigh while they break north deserves to outlive all the pap on the current country countdown.