On tour last night in Ventura, the increasingly popular Kathleen Edwards concluded with her near-hit Change the Sheets, which opens:
My love took a ride on a red-eye plane
Going home
And we're never gonna feel the same
Change this feeling under my feet
Change the sheets and then change me
This central idea reminds me of what a true rock and roller, Craig Goris of Ojai's much-loved Char-Man band, said to me a while back, a year or so before he passed away, far too young. I had expressed the idea that rock was fundamentally opposed to the idea of "the same" and Craig said:
That's what rock and roll is always about. That moment when everything changes.
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but that's what I believe he said, and I think it's true.
Edwards knows it. She can be gritty:
Asking for flowers
Is like asking you to be nice
Don't tell me you're too tired
10 years I've been working nights
She can be classic, in Neil Young's From Hank to Hendrix:
Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley-Davidson
Her long blonde hair is riding in the wind
She's been running half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Colliding with the very air she breathes
The air she breathes
And she can be tough, in her crowd favorite Back to Me:
I've got lights you've never seen
I've got moves I've never used
I've got ways to make you come
Back to me
Whether or not she becomes a big star, Kathleen Edwards rocks:
Kit Stolz 