My Dad Is Dead
Edwards’s 1986 debut, My Dad Is Dead . . . and He’s Not Gonna Take It Anymore, established a template for his early records, combining the chilly, hypnotic rhythms of Joy Division and the churning riffs of Killing Joke with the chiming arpeggios of the Smiths. His guitar sounded desperate, haunted, even guilty, and his lyrics, sung to simple, plaintive melodies in an almost conversational voice, were punishingly gloomy. “Talk to the Weatherman,” the opening track, paints a monochromatic picture of Cleveland in the dead of winter: “Can you tell me why / In this city skies are always gray / Can you tell me why / The sun won’t shine on my house today.”
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If that had been the last turn Edwards’s fortunes had taken, maybe he’d still be writing misanthropic stuff like “Anti-Socialist” (“He said what’s the matter? / You don’t like new people / Well, they put me on edge / And I could go either way”). Speaking strictly selfishly, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing–I still identify with those bleak old songs, the way you can feel connected to pieces of your past even when they no longer define you. But Edwards has remarried (“It’s the real thing,” he says) and forsaken bitter northern winters for the temperate climes of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where his wife works. He’s happy to treat music as a side project now, not a potential route to the big time–he’s fallen back on his training in accounting and flies back to Cleveland about once a month on business for a medical billing firm, and his life’s much more happy and stable than it was in the early 90s. “I took out an $8,000 loan to finance Family Tree,” he says. “By the time I was in my mid-30s, I had no savings and no assets, except for my musical gear. I realized that there was just no way I could start a family going on like this.” His new perspective on his career has affected his feelings about his old material too: “I would never write a song like ‘Anti-Socialist’ now,” he says.
Who never had to work to maintain a friend
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Marty Perez.
