Billionaire

For someone who dropped out of music-making for close to a decade to open a coffee shop, Kathleen Edwards sounds decisive and certain when she writes a song and takes it into the studio. Edwards decided shed had enough of the music business after a few grueling rounds of touring in support of her breakthrough album, 2012s Voyageur, and her 2020 comeback set, Total Freedom, showed she still had her gifts but often celebrated the life of a determined homebody. Getting back into the world appears to have sharpened her outlook, and 2025s Billionaire often sounds less like indie rock than full-on rock & roll, with Edwards examining her life with clarity and tight focus, and writing about others with an artful candor and no hesitance about twisting the knife when need be. (Along with a keenly observed litany of an exs acquired personality traits, she reminds him his favorite hockey team usually stinks in "Little Red Ranger.") As far as the music goes, Edwards found a valuable ally in Jason Isbell, who co-produced the set (with Gena Johnson) and brought several members of his band the 400 Unit in to back her up. The brash eloquence of Isbells guitar work is an ideal match for Edwards harder-edged songs, such as "Say Goodbye, Tell No One" and "Other Peoples Bands," but the arrangements also serve the quieter numbers, like the rootsy shuffle of "Little Red Ranger," the ghostly backdrops of "Little Pink Door," and the keening steel guitar at the heart of "Pine." As a fellow tunesmith, Isbell knows how to serve a song well, and the production and accompaniment meshes perfectly with Edwards sweetly smoky voice and razor-sharp rhymes. If welcome isolation was a recurring theme on Total Freedom, Edwards has a lot to say about people on Billionaire -- watching former friends engage in casual betrayal, fighting her yearning for someone she once loved, shaking her head at the folks stoking a culture of toxic judgement, decisively closing the door on a romance gone bad, and even explaining how she came to love Florida. And "If this feeling were currency, Id be a billionaire" is a brilliant bit of phrasemaking that can work in any number of ways. If Kathleen Edwards had to take some time off and readjust her creative outlook after the success of Voyageur, Billionaire shows her instincts were perfect -- this sounds like it could be her best album to date, and a strong candidate for "Best of 2025" lists. ~ Mark Deming