The Met interview

No Love Lost: Misfortune doesn’t hinder Edith Frost

Lately, wherever Edith Frost needs to be, she’s had to contend with inconvenient situations.  In the days prior to this interview, the native Texan and Chicago transplant has been bypassed by overstuffed trains, missed plane flights, caught the flu, and slept in the airport.  It’s the "can’t win for losing" fate that makes potential fodder for a country song.

Parting glances: Frost looks off into the preceding page

But Frost wasn’t escaping a love gone wrong or the sudden death of a dog she’d had since she was six.  "I was trying to get to Boston to see these friends of mine in the Willard Grant Conspiracy and sing backup vocals on their record," Frost says from her boyfriend’s home in Chicago.  "When I left Chicago there was this huge storm where we got 22 inches of snow, and I missed my plane because I couldn’t get to the airport on time because everyone and his dog was trying to ride the trains, so I kept getting passed by.  It was a pain in the ass getting to Boston, then they predicted a storm there the night I was leaving.  But I had to fly to Washington because Chicago was having a storm.  I love living in Chicago, I just don’t like the weather.  I can’t figure out how to keep my toes warm, and I’ve tried everything."

Storms are the sort of thing Frost has weathered well and drawn on in her songs’ heartbreaking storytelling coupled with haunting melodies.  Her latest, Telescopic (Drag City), produced by "Adam and Eve" (aka Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux), is a departure from the folk sounds of her first LP, Calling Over Time (Drag City).

Frost left Austin in the late ’80s¹ for Brooklyn.  A music director at the ad agency where Frost worked encouraged her to pursue her songwriting, convincing her that being a musician wasn’t only an option for other people.  "I don’t know if I’d be doing music if I was still in Texas," Frost says.  "Moving to New York really made me bust out and want to do it.  When I was younger I was more self-conscious, but the older I got, the less embarrassed I am about my songs."

While she summoned the nerve to perform her own material, she performed at open-mike nights while committing to playing in three different bands: a country swing band, a rockabilly band called Edith Frost and Her Roadhouse Romeos, and the Holler Sisters, a duo in which she played guitar and her partner played accordion and ukelele.

But it was her affection for Will Oldham’s Palace that inspired Frost to send an unsolicited demo tape and "love letter" to Palace’s label, indie stalwart Drag City.  It took almost a year before Frost heard from the label, but she was happy when she did.  The deal was sealed with a handshake, and Frost’s demo became her first self-titled EP.  Around the same time, she moved to Chicago, Drag City’s home, and divorced her husband Ryan Hembrey², who plays bass on Telescopic.

Frost often draws offhanded comparisons to a revved-up cowgirl in fringe and boots, even though her Betty Page bangs and biting, fuzzed songs from Telescopic rival Julee Cruise’s soundtrack work for David Lynch’s films in eerie beauty.  Her lyrics disclose chilling detachments of her life’s "through the ringer" experiences of love and loss that establish a comforting connection with her audience.  Her honeyed vocal arrangements counteract with her lyrical bias, giving Telescopic the perfect balance of warmth and constraint.  The opening track, "Walk on the Fire," is a ghostly confection as much as it is a feeling of the lonely West.  Its looped melody is accented by cello and bowed upright bass, along with synthesizers, guitars with soft feedback, and shadowy drums.

For Frost, her former hardships — in travel and in love — might have been the source for songs, but lately her troubles haven’t been so troubling.  A mere few hours after she returned to Chicago, she’s already at her new boyfriend’s home.  "I’m in love!" Frost says with a giggle.  "It’s a crazy, wonderful development."  But could this newfound love impede her traditionally melancholic songwriting subject matter?  "We’ve been going out about a month and a half, and I haven’t written a song," Frost says.  "I’m pulling songs together and I have chords and words, but they’re really lovely stuff.  It’s been hard because to me, it’s like [love songs] can’t be it.  I gotta make it more interesting than that."