Time Out New York article

Chill factor: Windy City singer-songwriter Edith Frost nips at our ears and hearts with two new albums

Her voice overflows with an earthy sweetness one typically encounters on dusty country records, yet singer-songwriter Edith Frost ignores distinctions between old and new, city and country, art and kitsch. Her Chicago apartment is loaded with Hello Kitty tchotchkes and cowgirl memorabilia; 15 feet of vinyl eat away at her living room while her hard drive swells with MP3 files. She bought her first modem in 1982, launched her first website in 1994 (it was devoted to cowgirls) and currently maintains a site about her music so thorough that it lists crummy reviews alongside raves and even highlights the portions of her interviews that she deems most embarrassing.

There’s no reason for Frost to blush about her warm-blooded urban folk, an adult-contemporary take on indie-rock that’s equally fit for NPR and college radio. Still, one can sense the musician mentally uncapping a digital highlighter as she talks about her music, particularly while paraphrasing the press reception to her first album, 1997’s Calling over Time: "Dreamy, sleepy, country-folk songs for jacking off in the bathtub," she says. "That was the overriding feeling I got, though it’s not what I had in mind. I wasn’t aiming for any particular style. If I tried to do one specific thing, there’d always be somebody better at it than me."

Frost’s subsequent course has strayed not only from the bathtub but also from country and folk. For her second record, 1998’s Telescopic, the singer placed her seemingly fragile soul at the mercy of Royal Trux’s Neil Hagerty, whose rocked-up production accentuated the eccentricity that always lurked in the shadows of her voice. The singer now broadens her horizons on two new albums: Wonder Wonder, her third solo LP (like her others, on Drag City), and Tramps, Traitors and Little Devils, the inaugural slab from a self-proclaimed Drag City Supersession, which stars Frost, Hagerty and Smog’s Bill Callahan.

Rich with melancholy, Wonder Wonder falls somewhere between its full-bodied predecessor and the singer’s spare debut. "I love the freakiness of Telescopic," says Frost, "but I wanted more variety. This one’s got more flavors popping in and out." Indeed, her double Wonder pops and crackles, with serene folk tunes like "True" and "Easy to Love" brushing up against busier bits like the country-pop of the title track and "Cars and Parties," which is reminiscent of Liz Phair. This last song is perhaps the most telling, in its contrast of the singer’s blunt nostalgia for her Texas homeland”both in her lyrics and vocal tics”with a pop backdrop that smacks of the Chicago music scene where she now hangs her hat. Rather than summon storybook imagery, Frost finds that "every strip mall on the highway reminds me of my home"; even as her voice conjures timelessness, the Internet aficionado subtly addresses the contemporary notion that home is nowhere. "Edith comes over as low-key, but she’s really bold and unconventional," says Jon Langford, who has recruited Frost’s pipes for the Mekons as well as his solo work. "There’s no artifice or technical tricks that get between her and the tune."

This intimacy with the song is put to the test on Frost’s Supersession recordings. The album features contributions from each of the singers’ pens, but the puppet strings are handled by Hagerty, who produced the album and even assigned cover songs to the singers. This provided Frost with two of her most stunning recorded moments to date: Lou Reed’s "Charley’s Girl" and Randy Newman’s "Old Man." While the first song finds the singer’s sinless croon hobnobbing with a fierce wall of guitars, the Newman selection digs deeper, as Frost lays into the weeper with a ghostly calm.

"I figured Edith’s voice would heighten the song’s understatement and almost seem like a misreading," Hagerty says of "Old Man," in which the narrator addresses his deathbed-ridden father. "Whatever she felt about it is locked in those notes." What Hagerty didn’t know was that Frost — who had never heard the song before she recorded it — was preoccupied with thoughts of her own father, who was scheduled for surgery the following day. "’Old Man’ was a little too intense," she says. "The lyrics hit the exact feeling of loving a person and being so scared that you’re going to lose him. Right after his surgery, everything you could imagine went wrong with my dad. We thought he was going to die, and I couldn’t help thinking that the song was evil."

"Thankfully, he pulled through," she continues. "But when I hear the recording, it still brings me utter pain." She pauses, then puts down her digital highlighter. "I guess that’s what makes music great — when it’s too much for the singer to bear."

Edith Frost’s Wonder Wonder and Drag City Supersession’s Tramps, Traitors and Little Devils are out now on Drag City.