April 12: Edith Frost w/ Central Falls
Café Montmartre, 9 p.m., $8
Much like Canadian singer Julie Doiron, Edith Frost coaxes beauty from sadness and longing. Although Frost’s music is often pegged as alt-country, her songs rarely muster up enough energy or twang to warrant the tag. She played with bar bands in her native Texas for years,* but didn’t find her true voice until she discovered Chicago’s underground-rock scene. Last year’s Wonder Wonder benefits greatly from those around her: Archer Prewitt and members of Wilco and Eleventh Dream Day help lay the foundation for Frost’s lovely, world-weary songs. Adam Vida, leader of opening act Central Falls, moonlights as the drummer for the insanely spastic No Wave band U.S. Maple. But Central Falls is everything Vida’s other gig isn’t: languid, pretty, tuneful, dreamy, and so on. Its new album is Latitude.

In A Van Down By The Lake

After about 20 years of pursuing her career singer songwriter Edith Frost has only recently enjoyed some national attention. Her new album, Wonder Wonder, is a curious exploration of music that has no real definition. Her careful insight and poetic lyrical approach are certainly unique. The Leader recently had a short chat with Edith Frost — in her own tour van.

Leader: Your second album was Telescopic. What have you been doing in the two years since?

Edith Frost: Not much. After Telescopic came out I toured a lot. That came out in ’98, I spent two years touring on that record, both here and in Europe. I guess it was a year and a half, a year now that I’ve been sort of slackin’ off.

L: When did you begin to write for Wonder Wonder?

EF: Well, the songs are actually pretty broad from when I first started writing songs until now. Which… every record is like that. We’re pulling from whole catalogues. A couple of the songs are brand new, like when we first started to record, a couple of the songs are from within the past year, and then there are some really old ones too. It’s a mix, so I can’t really say when I started, all I ever do is like keep writing, then we just choose the best songs.

L: Do you have any rituals when you write?

EF: Yeah, I think about words for a while, I’ll jam on my guitar a bit. It comes together in pieces. Sometimes the words make an apparent melody that seems to want to go with it. Maybe sometimes you might come up with a guitar riff. Sometimes the song writes itself almost, but not usually.

L: How does it make you feel to have critics trying to put you into a genre?

EF: Well, I don’t think I belong, I don’t feel comfortable in any genre. I don’t think I do any genre the justice it needs to be done. So, I don’t know. If they called me country, people that are really into country are going to hear it and think I am a fraud. So, like, when I am writing, I do write straight country songs, or blues, and they are pretty standard. I try not to lean on that too much. I don’t want to peg myself down. I don’t have to, they’re already doing it to me. I just stay away from predictability.

L: Having started writing music in the early ’80s and not having a major release until 1996, you have to be pretty patient. What was that like?

EF: The first EP, I was in shock, I had already made the recordings, you know, they were home recordings. It took like a year for the damn thing to come out. I was like yelling at them. Like, you guys I would have gone to another label! And I was all just freakin’ out and they were like, Edith, it just takes that long to get artwork and that’s what you have to do. And the next record, it was equally long, and I did get more involved in the details, and now I realize why it takes that long. The artwork alone is like six months, right there.

L: You toured Europe, how was that?

EF: It was OK, I don’t have any records out over there so not that many people knew who I was or anything. They were really nice. If you don’t have a record out there, it’s really hard. It was really good, considering.

Edith Frost is currently on tour in support of Wonder Wonder.