Getting High With Edwin

By Marieve MacGREGOR

Edwin and the Pressure will be knocking down the Myron's Cabaret stage come November 20th. They have a new album out and they are promot- ing it with a cross-Canada tour. After a few glitches, I finally got a call from Edwin, and we had a lovely chat about his new band, his lyrics, and I Mother Earth.

Mariéve: You say that you're more of a "band man" than a soloist. What's the difference between being a soloist who has a band backing him up and having a band?

Edwin: Well, I think the biggest differ- ences really are internally. On stage you're going to see a singer and a band, whether I'm solo or "a band." But the biggest differences are behind the scenes where people have to take different responsibilities upon them- selves. Everybody has to make sure that the show and the band are up to par. It has to be something we all feel proud about, feel good about. It's basi- cally distributing the responsibilities

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within the band. Everybody putting more of an effort into it as opposed to just showing up, getting paid to rehearse, and running out the door. Although these guys (the band mem- bers) do play in other bands to make money when we're not doing anything, we feel like a band when we're on tour, and to me that's the most important thing. We write together (which is) another band activity, and we criticise each other, you know, all constructive criticism. And that also is a band activ- ity. Those are the main differences to me.

M: You always seem to be very in con- trol of your career. You wrote a lot of things for I Mother Earth.

E: With I Mother Earth.

M: With, ok, yeah. Then your solo career and now you've got your hand- picked band. Has it always been like this? Who or what led you to be such an independent artist?”

E: For me, the thing that has been the one constant has been that I have a huge passion for music, for singing, for writing songs. I love it. It's the one thing that keeps me sane. As far as for being in control, I don't know how in control I am. There's too many people involved for me to have total control in anything. A lot of times the record company, the managers, the agents, the promoters, the radio stations the video stations, they have a lot of power as to what gets played, what gets pushed, what gets buried. All I really have con- trol over, to some degree, is the music

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I relea s I put on. And if the crowd and the fans get off on that and if they get excited by it and if they tell their friends about it and they want to come to the next show, that's what gives me the power in the whole scheme of things to deal with every- body else as far as the corporate end of the business. So, I've been lucky and I've been focussed in many areas, but I still think that my best record is still to come.

M: I've listened to your new album Edwin and the Pressure and it's a very interesting mix.

E: Uh-huh.

M: I really, really love the band, your choice was incredible. They really © catch your attention. Every song catch- es your attention. I find they have a very blue-grass, jazzy groove, while your voice is more a pop-rock sound. Is this the sound that you were going for? A sort of a pop-rock and a blues- jazz kind of sound? Is this how you saw your band?

E: Well, blues-jazz, we were just talk- ing about this the other day actually. I would have never said blues-jazz, but now that you mention it, I guess it def- initely has those flavourings in there. We were going for a rock record, something that has its catchiness, and its hooks I guess you might say. I was just trying to make a record that I felt would be fun to play live and would have energy live and that had really cool grooves, because grooves live are

the bomb. Something that I could do

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some sort of interesting vocal things on. I feel really good about singing it. I was just trying to write a really good record that was a step further than the last record. I wasn't putting too much thought into it as to, “Ok this is the- vision I have, we have to create this big storytelling record.’ It was just a matter of trying to write the best songs we could at the time. Like some of them were written in a day and some took weeks. So at the end of it all when we had a whole bunch of songs, we picked out the ones that we felt kinda stood up, or stood out, and that's how the record was formed. The band themselves can play anything whether it's blues, jazz, rock, they're really tal- ented. I'm very fortunate in that depart- ment.

M: I really like a lot of the lyrics, I find them very interesting. There's a lot of clichés, if you don't mind me say- ing, like, "Somehow you think that someone died and make you king." But then it's followed by this very deep kind of, very impressive metaphor, like, "Oh you know boys, they like to tear off butterfly wings." I found that very consistent in a lot of the lyrics. How there are very basic lines and then there are very deep metaphors. Was this a conscious act in your writ- ing?

E: Well, heh, lyric writing is a funny thing. Sometimes the words just fall onto the paper and you don't have to give any effort and people are amazed at what you come up with. And you really just sit there and go, "I really

don't know how the hell I came up

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