Paper Magazine interview

Country ‘N’ Midwestern: Rodeo sweetheart Edith Frost

Before country-folk singer Edith Frost summoned the courage to sing her own songs, she played in several country outfits, often at the same time. There was a country-rock-and-rockabilly band called Edith and Her Roadhouse Romeos. There was the Holler Sisters, who played covers of obscure 30’s country acts like the Coon Creek Girls, and a country swing band called, for reasons too complicated to explain, the Marfa Lights. The 31-year-old Frost, who is shy and pretty, with hair so long she can sit on it, would wear fringed outfits and cowboy boots and dance around onstage like a rodeo sweetheart. It took a long time before she felt confident enough to make demos of her own music (in her living room), and even longer to give them to friends. "I liked them," Frost says of her early songs. "But I never thought anyone else would care."

photo by Dale Stewart

Prompted by her fondness for Will Oldham’s Palace, Frost sent an unsolicited demo tape to his label, the extravagantly hip Drag City. After a bit of wooing by the Austin-based folkie label Dejadisc, Frost signed to Drag City on a handshake deal. It released Frost’s demos as a four-song, self-titled EP last summer, and this spring issued her full-length debut, Calling Over Time, a spare, wistful country-folk record that sounds like the result of a union between Nanci Griffith and Freakwater. Calling is a gorgeous anachronism on which Frost’s love of 30’s-era country folk is writ large.

Before the album came out, Frost divorced her husband and moved from Brooklyn to Chicago because it was home to Drag City, which seemed as good a reason as any. "When I broke up with my husband, it was all weirdness. He lived a block away from me, our circle of friends was the same, and it was just bad on my heart," she says. "Every place I went, I’d either see him or hear about him. I felt like I couldn’t move on."

Frost took a day job designing Web pages (her own site can be found at www.enteract.com/~cowgal) because she doubts that her music will ever be profitable enough to pay the bills. "I don’t have a career I can depend on. I’ve never made any money to speak of playing music, just what I could pick up from a gig here or there, but it’s just that I have to do this, you know?"

Rian Murphy, Frost’s producer, hooked her up with Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs, the Gastr Del Sol/Tortoise frontmen who form the epicenter of Chicago rock royalty in the post-Pumpkins/Phair era. Famed for their free-form, vaguely jazzy stylings, Frost worried about whether Grubbs and O’Rourke could "still play things that are, you know, normal." As it turns out, they lend an increased sense of sophistication to a lovely and otherwise simple record. Frost has long bemoaned her own lack of technical finesse. "I can strum, and I have this certain way I can play bar chords, but that’s about it," she says. "I take lessons, but they never seem to stick. I guess it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, you know?"