My name is Edie Carey, and I’ve been writing, performing and creating for as long as I can remember. I first began my solo career as a musician while in college. Postcrypt Coffeehouse in the basement of St. Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University in New York is where I watched performers like Jeff Buckley, Ani DiFranco, Ellis Paul and Lisa Loeb perform unplugged to rapt, candlelit audiences and was floored by the power of their songwriting. Inspired, I picked up a guitar and started busking while studying abroad in Bologna, Italy. Shortly, thereafter, I released my debut album The Falling Places.
Fast forward twenty years, ten albums and many cities later, I’m still writing, performing and creating from my current home of Colorado Springs. My eleventh solo album The Veil will be released on June 3rd.
“Smart tales of love, life and longing…” – Chicago Sun-Times
Tell us about the inspiration behind your new music.
I wrote the album’s title track “The Veil” in January of 2020, a week after my kids and I were in a serious car accident and about two months before COVID closed down the world. In one verse of that song, the veil refers to the thin shroud of security we want to believe we have between us and danger, and how disturbing it is when that shroud is suddenly torn away. I soon noticed other forms the veil theme took in songs I had already written and ones I wrote as the pandemic carried on: the wedding veil and the intricacies of a marriage, the painfully thin barrier between life and death, the blind spots which keep us from seeing ourselves and others clearly, and the opaque space between who we are now and who we’ve been. The veil “thread” runs through every song on the record.
What was the songwriting and recording process?
I wrote a few of these songs back in 2015, but the rest were written just before and during the pandemic. I was home for a long stretch for the first time in a very long time and I suddenly had much more space in which to write. Once the songs were ready, I headed to Provo, UT in November of 2021 to record them over two weeks with my producer Scott Wiley and his incredible crew of musicians at his studio June Audio. Not a lot of folks know (I had no idea) how much phenomenal music comes out of UT, and specifically Provo. Imagine Dragons, Neon Trees and The Killers are just a few bands that have emerged from that scene. I benefitted directly from being in the midst of such brilliant musicians. There is nothing like the magic of seeing your “line-drawing” songs get flooded with so much color and feeling.
What do you hope your fans/listeners take away with them when they listen to your music?
I want listeners to see themselves in the songs, to feel understood and be reminded we are not alone in this amazing/terrible/beautiful/exhausting experience of being human.
When did you first pick up the guitar, and what drew you to that instrument?
I was a nanny for a newborn for the summer when I was 18 and she slept a whole lot. I thought it would be a good time to finally learn how to play an instrument. I think I was drawn to guitar simply because that’s what the folks whose music I loved were playing. It was portable and seemed like the right tool for finally being able to marry the lyrics I was writing and my singing voice. I taught myself with chord songbooks for the Indigo Girls, Bonnie Raitt and Shawn Colvin and practiced by playing along with their albums.
Speaking of instruments, what brand(s) do you play and why?
I’ve been playing my Martin 000-16 since I bought it in 1997. It’s a smaller body guitar and yet it has this huge resonance and volume for its size. I tend to like darker-sounding guitars and this one is warm and vibey. It got cracked open on a United flight a few years ago (12 inches long / ¾ of an inch wide gash) and luthier Michael Miller here in Colorado Springs somehow made it sound better than it did before the accident. I’m probably too emotionally attached to this guitar, but it’s been everywhere with me over the last 25 years.
Who are some of your musical influences?
I listened to (and made up a LOT of embarrassing dances to) a whole lot of ’80s pop growing up, but my dad listened to a ton of singer-songwriters: James Taylor, Carole King, Karla Bonoff, and early Bruce Springsteen. I was getting steeped in that music just by virtue of his playing them regularly in the house. But it wasn’t until I heard Shawn Colvin when I was 15 that I became totally obsessed with folk-singer-songwriters. I lived abroad in Italy my junior year of college and went to see the Crash Test Dummies play in a tiny little village and they had this then-totally-unknown opener named Sarah McLachlan. I listened to her non-stop after that and started writing my own songs that year. I think of Bonnie Raitt, Aretha Franklin, Ani DiFranco, The Indigo Girls, Jonatha Brooke and her duo The Story (with Jennifer Kimball) as my unwitting voice and songwriting teachers.
Will you be touring in support of your new music?
Yes, I start my album release shows on June 2nd here in my hometown of Colorado Springs and release shows will continue through the spring of 2023. My tour schedule can be found at http://www.ediecarey.com/tour. Many shows still TBA soon!
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