“Everything you said/Was half true at best,” Kathleen Edwards sings on “Fool’s Ride,” the latest song from her forthcoming album Total Freedom. A knowing reflection on a relationship that turned sour, the breezy, mid-tempo rocker is a telling moment on Total Freedom, which was written while Edwards was in the midst of a decaying relationship.
“Life’s imperfections,” is the way Edwards described the album to Rolling Stone earlier this year, “and how they all add up to a pretty perfect picture.”
“Fool’s Ride” is one of those moments, offering perspective on the relationship’s dissolution while still capturing its initial burst of excitement.
“The song took on so many different variations until we just stripped everything out of it and rebuilt it,” says Total Freedom co-producer Jim Bryson. “That’s the song we did the most work on. It’s nice when you can put a lot of work into something but it doesn’t sound like you painstakingly pumped through it trying to find its heart.”
“It was very hard to resume the record when I felt so destabilized and unsafe,” Edwards says of the period when she was going through her breakup. “Jim was really such an instrumental part of saying, “You could just come over to my house, and I’ll play on a few things and we’ll write a few little things. He had such a huge part in my going, ‘Okay, I’ll dip my toes in the water there. And then it was like, ‘Oh, the water’s actually pretty comfy.’ Before I knew it, I was swimming across the lake and we were finishing the record.”
Total Freedom is out August 14th.
