Keepin' It Real

You’d think (John Lennon certainly did) that people would have had enough of silly love songs. The general public is offered the bulk of its music in four-minute televised blips of celebrated alienation courtesy of Pro Tools and some guy who can’t come to grips with his (pick one) stardomfamilyfans friendsgroupies.

We live in a wired world, and yet paradoxically connection has been lost. Who are these songs speaking to? What are they about? What is their purpose? In this day and age where what was once your favorite song winds up in a Chevy ad campaign, or who was once your favorite artist sees fit to charge you $100 to bask in his reflected glory, is any of this hype really speaking to actual people?

In the case of former Austinite, now-Chicagoan singer-songwriter Edith Frost (appearing on a bill with like-minded bands the Greenhornes and the White Stripes; see sidebar), the connection is human and real, and it evokes authentic emotion. Frost is not about the gloss; she is concerned with the quality of the song and the nature of her feelings. For Frost, it’s not just about love and relationships; it is about the things that make love and relationships. Frost’s songs have no victims, no losers or victors, just the emotions and thoughts that go into the formation or the dissolution of the connections between people.

“I wanna write good songs. The music that I like the best has really good songwriting,” says Frost in a phone interview. “I want it to be able to hold up without all those other people, that it would be good enough to stand on its own with just me and a guitar. That’s the goal. Everything else after that is just cake.”

It is in Frost’s delivery that much of her music’s poignancy is birthed. Her songs seem to rely as much on pace and time as they do on melody. After all, revelations in life are seldom immediate, so why should they be so in song? Thus, Frost creates effects through thought fragments and seemingly unrelated events, allowing the listener and performer to simultaneously arrive at conclusions. Her soul-baring songs also create a sense of emotional voyeurism, and maybe it’s this vulnerability that gives her tunes their edge. Their significance doesn’t lie in the answers they provide but rather in the questions they raise.

“It’s very rare that I’m trying to start off with an idea that I want to express. It usually happens after I write the song that I can see, ‘Oh, it’s about such and such.’ It’s real fragmented a lot of times,” explains Frost. “I might have a verse that I’ve been working on, and then stick it with something [to try] to flesh out the rest of the song. And then I might stick it with something else, and then it becomes, ‘What is this about now?’ But then you hear it at the end, and it seems to make sense about something, and it does speak, [even though] it’s never what I start out to express, if I had anything to begin with.”

Such admissions help to explain the truths about Edith Frost. She exemplifies the higher beauty of character-packed imperfection (as compared to bland perfection), and the idea that the sum, once arrived at, is greater than its parts. In other words, it is not what the relationship was in its imperfect present but rather what you took from it to better the future. Perhaps in that there lies more of an answer than some gift-wrapped conclusion.

Frost’ s latest album, Wonder Wonder (Drag City), continues in this fine tradition. This project is the next logical step from her last record, Telescopic. With help from producer Rian Murphy, engineer Steve Albini and musicians like Archer Prewitt (Sea and Cake), Rick Rizzo (Eleventh Dream Day), Glen Kotche (now a member of Wilco) and others, Frost gathered players from each of her two previous records to flesh out an album that is perhaps her most accomplished statement.

“On the demos, it’s a good song, hopefully, and I’ve got the vocals and I can kind of play guitarBut I can’t take it beyond that by myself,” Frost offers. “[But] when somebody else hears it, there’s just no way I would’ve imagined all the ideas. Rian Murphy hears the song and says, ‘Well, obviously this needs such and such, pedal steel,’ and I’m like, ‘Um, okay. That seems cool. Let’s try it.’ But I never would have thought of that myself, but as soon as I hear it, it makes sense, but I kind of need a second opinion.”

Music has been and will always be about connection. The idea of being fulfilled by your favorite song will always outweigh marketing strategies and all the other crap that is set against music’s sanctity. Edith Frost embodies that eternal ideal.