CMJ interview

If Patsy Cline had lived longer, it wouldn’t be difficult to imagine her today, trading nights of sumptuous standards with Bobby Short at New York’s elegant Carlyle Hotel.  As recently released live recordings of Cline have revealed, despite her hard life and hard living, she was less a hardcore honkytonk gal than a wondrous pop stylist.

Chicago chanteuse Edith Frost gets colored with the country brush as well, and the sad songs and influx of steel guitar on her gorgeous new album Telescopic (Drag City) probably won’t help dispel such typecasting.

"I like it when people compare me to freaks like Syd Barrett," says Frost, sipping coffee at New York’s hipster haven Limbo.  "There’s a lot of elements I want to put into my music that can’t be summed up by saying ‘country.’  I love it, but I’m not trying to make a straight-up country record, or any kind of record at all.  I don’t want to be able to peg it to any one genre.  I mean, the first band I ever flipped out over was the Carpenters.  I kind of dig those cheesy layered vocals."

Where Frost single-tracked her vocals on her sparse, sorrowful debut, Calling Over Time, Telescopic dresses up her dew-eyed, downbeat songs, and luxuriates with harmonies and beautifully simple vocal melodies.

"We spent the same amount of time making it — six days — but we just had a different approach this time," she says.  "We couldn’t make another record that was more stark.  I wanted to do something full-on.  Also, we were recording it with a different combination of people, and we weren’t in Chicago."

Instead, Frost and her band sequestered themselves in Warrenton, Virginia, about an hour outside Washington, DC, home to elusive producers Adam and Eve — actually Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux — and really concentrated on the songs.  The solitude was necessary after the last album.  Frost had just moved from Brooklyn to Chicago then, to start over after a difficult divorce.  Time has eased her pain somewhat, judging by her new songs.  There are more tunes about moving on and forgiveness here, even playful tunes like "Bluish Bells" and the warily hopeful "Falling." Still, it’s the saddest songs that seem closest to Frost’s heart, the beautifully chilling ones pulled from real pain.

"I want to pick at the scabs, and most people don’t like to do that," she says.  "But writing is hard.  I just try to get it as best I can.  A lot of them seem transparently simple to me.  I read other people’s lyrics that are so out there, and take you to a whole other dimension.  They can take themselves out of their own experience and write these crazy, cool things.  I’d love to do that — if I could just do some exercises to channel some more writerly writer than myself."